There can be no lasting peace in international affairs until the nations of the world learn to worship God. Worship is the chief act of religion, which is not confined to church or reserved for certain occasions, but is a life-long task and a whole-time endeavour characterized by swift readiness to obey. The universe cannot escape from the laws which hold it fast to God’s throne. Governments cannot hope for order and peace unless they follow nature’s rules. For obedience to law is the pledge of justice, the foundation of peace. There is no medium between law as a dictate of reason and lawlessness with violence for its sanction. When violence is the rule in national life anarchy is its fruit, and when this is carried beyond the borders of the nation the world is plunged in war. Man was not made for servitude, since he is freeborn, and when his freedom is placed in jeopardy by the lawless domination of force, the primary law of his nature urges him to fight for his existence as a free man. As it is with men and families, so it is with nations. The law of men and of states, unless it is to be a pure tyranny, is one of liberty making for full co-operation and a protection against the bondage of servitude. The dignity of human destiny requires the liberty to serve in obedience to authority under the reign of law. The law of nature is by origin divine, since God is the author of nature.

There must be many to-day whose minds are troubled because they find it impossible to accept without reservation the opinions and the policy which have been generally adopted with regard to the war, and because, in consequence, their patriotism—their love of their patria and desire to serve it—cannot find, at least without much self-searching, the outlet which the majority have accepted. Are they to resign themselves to the idea that this mental tension is inevitable; to the idea that they must seem, and be, less patriotic than those who can accept the situation without any misgivings or detachment of mind?

The question, if it is considered adequately, reveals itself as a very large and very deep one; for it involves far more than the particular problem of war, and leads back to the ultimate principles of human society. Before attempting such a general consideration, however, we may note two particular preliminary points, since they seem to show that the presence even of the complete non-participant is not without its value to a nation in days such as these.

Divine praise and adoration form the heart of religion. As the plot gives life and meaning to the varied characters and actions in the novel, so adoration co-ordinates the many and varied elements of religion and gives them life. And by religion we mean something more than looking pious on Sundays or giving half-a-crown to a beggarman. Religion is not a vestment put over the individuality of the man, nor is it a particular type of action; it is not even the special preserve of man. He may like to think that he alone of all creation can praise God and that the rest of nature is irreligious, but if he does so he will delude himself. For religion pierces to the very depths of being, not merely of man's being, but of all created being. According to St. Thomas, to reverence the one God for one specific reason is the proper action of religion, and that one specific reason is that God is the first principle of creation and of the government of all things. God the creator and director of the universe is the object of religion, so that the whole universe, according to the most fundamental principles of its being, takes some part in religion. God created the universe for his glory, and the universe as a whole, not man alone, glorifies him as its Creator and Governor.

M. Masseron finds a very effective way of concluding his book on Dante by recalling the centenary celebrations that took place at Ravenna in 1921. It was only in the course of the preceding century that the body of the poet had been recovered from an ignominious hiding-place and restored to its rightful tomb. The homage which he now received was like the setting of a seal on his fame and status, like the raising of a definitive monument. Or it was like an act of canonisation, performed in the name of the whole civilised community of Europe. The ‘Empire’ and the Church acted for the occasion in such perfect harmony as to make a sort of pageant representing what had been the highest earthly vision of the poet. Not that he could be deceived by any pageant. It was accordingly left to the Church to preside and to pronounce the solemn benediction. Pope Benedict XV despatched a cardinal legate and composed an Encyclical Letter. And M. Masseron is surely right in suggesting that this document deserves to be treated as still important: deserves at least to be read, Papal Encyclicals are not lightly composed, for the momentary purpose of mere long-distance speech making. To return on the metaphor used above, one may say that the ‘In Praeclara Summorum’ has something of the character of a brief of canonisation. (Among the papal documents for that year it is to be found placed precisely between two other Encyclicals composed in honour of St. Francis and St. Dominic.)

Whatever his political bias, the reader will not be left unmoved by a true tale of human struggle and suffering and of a tragic failure of society for a hundred years. In the present struggle of civilization we must disengage that which we have set out to defend from our share in the guilt of the common disaster. Miss Wilkinson’s book must impress us anew with the evils of a capitalist society, which she traces back through one example to their beginnings in the Industrial Revolution. These evils, for which she advocates a mainly political remedy, come from as brazenfaced a rejection of Christian and human values as any that have been made. Habit and some faith in human progress and in the professions of governments have partly blinded us. But now comes the day of reckoning, when past crimes and their consequences must be paid for, even to the possible collapse of civilization and the merciless persecution of our Christianity which we have allowed to be so denied.

The history of ‘the town that was murdered’ suggests more than the interplay of economic and political forces. It raises the issue of human responsibility in the face of poverty and riches, the destiny of the individual caught in the stranglehold of the ‘World.’ The figure of the political, commercial and financial magnate haunting the pages of the book and the streets of Jarrow is not so much that of the individual capitalist; it is that of Dives, the victim not of system and fate, but of freedom and sin, and, finally, of God’s avenging mercy to the poor.

The deeper implications of evacuation are the subject of thoughtful articles by Denis Gwynn in The Clergy Review and by the Rev. Gilbert Shaw- (of Poplar) in Christendom. Mr. Gwynn sees in the event a challenge and an opportunity for English Catholicism of as great moment as the Irish Immigration; Mr. Shaw sees in it the preliminary stage to a social revolution of the first magnitude which holds immense possibilities both for good and for evil. Both articles should serve to offset the facile idea current in some quarters that evacuation is a ‘leftist plot to divide families and debauch children’—as The Cross and the Plough ironically describes it. ‘ Failed ‘as evacuation is alleged to have done in its immediate purpose, it is still true, as Mr. Shaw concludes, that ‘there can be no return to 1938 . . . The future is pregnant with possibilities. The one thing that is certain is that if the situation is allowed to drift, however good the intentions of those who would muddle through, the end can only be the hastening of the break-up of society.’

The Editorial in Christendom opens with an obvious but pertinent and qualified repudiation of the ‘united nation’ protestations, whose very frequency are perhaps their own repudiation. The point is illustrated by a lengthy critique of one of the Editor’s own more emphatically ‘non-comformist’ contributors. The debate is interesting and, we hope, will continue. Mr. Mackinnon, in drawing attention to the importance of Drucker’s ‘End of Economic Man,’ insists that there is ‘no way back from Hitler.’