To attempt the biography, however modest, of a public man, and an ecclesiastic at that, during his lifetime, or a( least during his tenure of office, is, for obvious reasons, no easy task. Mr. Dingle, who, we are told on the wrapper, is ‘a publicist of wide experience.’ has had the courage to attempt the task on the occasion of the Golden Jubilee of the Cardinal of Westminster, and he has laid English-speaking Catholics under a debt of gratitude.

One need not be suspected of flattery for saying that the general feeling of English Catholics towards their leader in these past thirty years is one of filial veneration and genuine affection. To the younger generation he is synonymous with the history of the Church in this country as they have known it, whilst in the longer memories of their fathers he is justly appraised as the successor of three great men, and in some respects as one Lo whom it has been given to surpass their work. Multi congregaverunt divitias . . . the treasures of Catholic England, so warily and carefully brought out from their hiding holes by Wiseman and Manning and Vaughan, have been freely opened to a more universal appeal and a greater place in the nation's life under the beneficent rule of the present Archbishop of Westminster.

Providence gives to each age the pastors it needs—or deserves—and with the final close of what may be called the mentality of the Penal Times in England, and the beginning of an age of expansion and of Catholic Action, there has come to the See of Westminster and to the effective leadership of the Church one eminently fitted to that period of fuller development.

The publication of this collection of Papal pronouncements and correspondence relating to the union of Christendom could not have been better timed. The explosion of ‘Father Jerome’s’ squib has alone been sufficient to blow away whatever cobwebs may have been thought to have gathered round Satis Cognitum and Apostolicae Curae. The new Anglican endeavour towards understanding with Christians on the Continent through the pages of (Ecumenica makes the reappearance of Leo XIll’s utterances about the A.P.U.C. and Pius XI's Mortalium Animos singularly opportune.

Quite apart from the authority which belongs to these documents, an authority which establishes them permanently as the basis of every Catholic endeavour to forward the union of Christendom, they possess an intrinsic quality which puts them in a place which is unique in the literature of reunion. It is nothing less than a burning passion for the cause of Christian unity which flames up in Pope Leo's Encyclical Praeclara Gratulationis and his moving letter to the English People Amantissima Voluntatis. Despite the formal language of pontifical docunicnts, which reads so stiffly in translation, it is difficult to find a parallel in the writings of Catholic or non-Catholic reunionists to the warmth of Pope Leo’s appeals.

The reason is not far to seek. For Leo XIII the unity of Christendom was a matter not merely of expediency, however urgent, though nobody realized better than he did, as pages of Praeclara Gratulationis show, how urgent was the need for unity in the face of modern conditions.

The recent publication of ‘Fr. Jerome's’ A Catholic Plea for Reunion was unfortunate. It put forward, with great persuasiveness and candour, an unusual view of the Anglican problem, in a way calculated to rouse bristling hostility in those for whom Anglicanism is coloured by the prejudices of upbringing, and not likely to win acceptance even from those who have any real inside knowledge of the Church of England. Apart from its appearance without ecclesiastical sanction, ‘Fr. Jeroine's’ book showed considerable misapprehension of the religious situation in England, and in particular of the nature of the Church of England itself; it made at least one dangerous suggestion in regard to matters of Faith; moreover, its writer betrayed a disgruntled outlook, the result of some purely personal grievance, and this had the effect of discounting the value of much that he had to say.

So A Catholic Plea for Reunion was seized upon by the reviewers and commentators, much of it was justly, though perhaps over-violently, torn to shreds, and an unusual and even fruitful approach to the problem of Anglicanism was swamped in a flood of indignant condemnation.

The pages that follow are an attempt to restate ‘Fr. Jerome's’ main contention in a modified form and, it is hoped, without his misapprehensions of the situation. Ignorance of the nature of the Anglican problem can hardly be urged as an excuse for an explanation of the opinions of the present writer. He was born and brought up in the strictest of Anglican circles, and had passed through every phase of Anglo-Catholicism, from moderate High-Churchism to the most extreme pro-Romanism, before he saw by God's Grace that the religion he believed had only one divinely authorized Teacher on earth.

A month or two ago, happening to be in Cologne, I looked in at the Church cf the Friars Minor to say a prayer at Adolph Kolping’s grave. Not that I felt that he needed any memento of mine, but because of those words he wished to be inscribed on the plain stone that covers his tomb:

The little sanctuary was gay with the first spring blossoms, golden tulips and yellow daffodils ranged around the grave flanked by two great brown laurel wreaths with orange and black ribbons, the colours of the Catholic Journeymen’s Association, of which he was the founder. And they drifted in, by twos and threes or in little groups, as they always do, sturdy fair-haired lads with heavy rucksacks and dusty boots and knelt down before their Father’s grave to give him of their charity because he desired it so.

On this occasion, however, I noticed that they did not leave the church after they had said their prayer, but moved off to a little table near the altar rails on which lay an open book in which they all inscribed their names, I thought at first it was some sort of visitors’ book, until a notice caught my eye requesting that no candles should be lighted before the grave nor any other rite performed that might in any way anticipate the decision of the religious authorities and prejudice Father Kolping’s Cause.

The importance of private property as one of the fundamental institutions of a Christian State is the central idea of all Catholic thought on social reconstruction, and the widest possible extension of property among the community is regarded as an essential requirement of social justice. It is, however, too readily assumed by many that a diffusion of private ownership of productive property, whether it be in the form of land or the possession of any craft or business, would of itself provide a solution to most of the problems that now afflict us. But a more detailed survey of the economy of modern civilized society will reveal the fact that few, if any, of its members can be entirely self-supporting, and that an interchange of goods and services is a daily requirement. However widespread individual ownership may become, this necessity for a constant series of exchanges on the part of the owners is the dominating feature of any civilized community. This aspect of the question of the reconstruction of our social order has not so far received the consideration that it deserves, but the importance of its bearing on social justice can be gauged by a brief examination of the peculiar nature of property in our economic system.

Whenever Catholics speak of private property as being natural to man, and, having regard to his condition of susceptibility to the effects of original sin, as the arrangement most conducive to social harmony, and argue from this that ownership implies the right of the possessor to the unlimited return or profit accruing from its use, it is seldom remembered that property as possessed in the majority of cases to-day depends €or its value on the functioning of a highly complex and interdependent series of economic operations.