Even in war-time men cannot think only of what they are doing here and now. Their desire goes beyond the immediate job; and when their outer world falls to bits they turn to God, if they believe in Him and seek Him, or to the Future that is always going to be so much better than the past, or to their own souls. Belief that the human soul is somehow, vaguely, ‘divine’ is intensified by the horrors that surround it and to which it seems a stranger even while it directs them. The sense of the strangeness of man’s soul in this world, of its unconformity to the outer madness, causes wonder; and wonder has traditionally found expression, in England, in the individual voice of poets. Yet as a citizen and in public the poet is expected not merely to draw poetry from the situation, but to relate it back to the situation. He must be practical, he must provide propaganda or, in the -widest sense of the word, amusement. If Shakespeare is ever played nowadays, he is expected, officially at least, either to help people to forget the War completely or to make them remember it all the more intensely. Teach us to forget ourselves for a night. Teach us to remember ourselves to-night so that to-morrow we may fight like Englishmen.

Not long ago those interested in the forward movement in Catholic social teaching and practice were interested to read From Union Square to Rome, which was Miss Dorothy Day’s account of her conversion to the Church. The story ended with her safely within the fold, and all who read the story and who knew of the work that she had undertaken; were anxious to hear more of it. The American Catholic Worker was always interesting and enlightening, and recently have been published Peter Maurin’s Easy Essays. But until now there was no full-length story of the work being done in New York nor of the dynamic spirit which keeps it going. Last month, however, the gap was admirably filled by House of Hospitality/ again by Dorothy Day; and I have no hesitation in saying that this is one of the most important books not only of this year, but since the publication of the encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891. A bold claim indeed, but one which I hope to substantiate in the course of the article.

What immediately puts this book in a class apart is that it is written by someone who has lived and is still living it. It is about the poorest of the poor, the destitute, about the workers and their struggles, not for prosperity, but for the right to be recognised as something more than chattels. It is written from the inside, not by a fur-coated investigator, not by a commission of statistically-minded civil servants, not by a bien pensant slumrner, but by a woman who is one with the poor, the destitute and the outcast.

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.)

‘Men may be evil in many ways, but good in one alone.’ So wrote wisely the unknown poet whom Aristotle quotes in the Ethics, and he wrote with deeper significance than he could have known. To be ‘good’ is, properly understood, to be on the way to the attainment of that essential perfecting which human nature of itself craves and must seek, and even mere reason can show that this perfection is to be found only in the attainment of the Universal Good, which can be none other than God, for God Who is the First Cause must needs be therefore the Final End. This much may be known by reason; but from a source of knowledge infinitely surpassing reason in profundity and certainty comes the revelation of a human destiny which a finite mind could not otherwise know nor finite power hope to attain to. The First Cause and Universal Good has revealed Himself as the Father and Friend of man. He has revealed man’s elevation from the natural order to the supernatural wherein it is possible for him to become the friend of God and to attain to a perfection such as ‘eye hath not seen nor ear heard.’ Once raised to this supernatural possibility, man can find no peace, no happiness until he attains to that perfection. ‘Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our heart rests not until it rests in Thee.’

How shall we approach him, this unique figure in English literature, and what are we to name him—Englishman and Frenchman, poet and politician, reactionary and revolutionary, essayist, historian, satirist, soldier and seaman, thinker and man of action, sceptic and Christian? In mood merry and sad and bitter, in style exuberant and austere—what common factor, if any, is to be found in him?

The key to this many-sided man is at once complex and simple. He is concerned, in a word, with all the activities of man, political, social, artistic and religious, as seen in the light of the living Christian tradition of Catholic Europe; a tradition which has caught up into itself and made its own the civilisations of Greece and Rome and the long searching and finding of the Jews, and which claims to interpret for all time God to man and man to himself. It is, for better or worse, our tradition. It is in the atmosphere we breathe, it is the soil from which we spring, it is so familiar that at times we do not notice it, it is so complex that we all know little of it directly, so simple that we find it hard to accept, so exacting that we snatch at the excuse of fashion and distaste to abandon it, yet so penetrating that we are coloured by it against our will, and bear its marks even in revolt. It is a tradition that has again and again grown weak from within and been assailed from without, it has never been unchallenged and never utterly overthrown, and its fortunes were nevermore vital or more uncertain than at the present day.

This well-known treatise of St. Thomas Aquinas on the principles of good government was addressed, there seems little doubt, to Hugh II, de Lusignan, king of Cyprus, who died in 1267 at the untimely age of seventeen years. On the death of the promising youth the Saint discontinued his work, when he had reached the fourth chapter of the second book; but the task was completed, not altogether unsuccessfully, by one of his pupils, Ptolemy de Lucca, a Dominican who lived to become bishop of Torcello and died in 1327. St. Thomas included fifteen chapters in his first book, and Ptolemy added twelve more to the second, and completed the whole work by adding two more books, one of twenty-two chapters, the other of twenty-eight, so that of the whole work De Regimine Principum as it appears in the collected works of St. Thomas, Ptolemy’s share is sixty-two chapters out of a total of eighty-one.

I have no intention of giving here a resume of the book whose principles are so well known to students of St. Thomas; I merely wish to indicate the broad historical background in which it was composed.

St. Thomas, we have to remember, was an Italian, and by birth a subject of his distant kinsman, the Emperor Frederic II; being born in the kingdom of Naples, then an appanage of the Imperial a-own. Under Frederic’s harsh rule the Saint lived out his youth, but after joining the Dominicans found peace under the just and therefore tranquil government of St. Lewis IX of France.

Our Blessed Lord said to His disciples: Now I call you not servants ... but I have called you friends. And to the Jews He said: You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

St. Paul wrote to the Galatians of the freedom wherewith Christ hath made us free; and told them: Stand, and be not holden in again with the yoke of servitude.

The cry of freedom is one to which men have always, throughout their history, rallied. That cry of freedom, in particular, which is in the New Testament has been sounded again and again by the Church throughout its history; so that, as Pope Leo XIII declared, whenever men ‘have attacked the liberty of man, the Church has defended it and protected this noble possession from destruction.’ ‘The powerful influence of the Church,’ he said again, ‘has ever been manifested in the custody and protection of the civil and political liberty of the people.’

Writers have more than once pointed out that the ‘Ancren Riwle’ is far from being a mere set of austere regulations for a unique and now obsolete type of contemplative life. They have shown that during the later middle ages this Rule was regarded in England as a spiritual classic for every type of Christian, for it is in fact, chiefly concerned with the principles of a good Christian life which it sets forth with great charm and ability. But it is perhaps not so often realized that this fact follows from the very definite conception of the meaning and value of any rule, which the author outlines in his Prologue. All those who are resolved to fulfil their lives as good Christians should study this concise and attractive treatment of the meaning of rule in a good life. The ‘Ancren Riwle’ was written half a century before St. Thomas wrote his Summa Theologica, but the fundamental truths of this Prologue are endorsed by him. Thus those three sisters for whom the Riwle was written, and all those of every station in life who have since read it, have been inspired by truly Thomistic principles. It may, therefore, be of value to set forth the ideas contained in the Prologue of this Rule of Anchoresses.

I stood on the river-bank near Bablockhythe and watched a snake swim straight across the water. He was quite a small snake and made little stir, so that at first I saw only his head moving. It seemed odd in a fish to swim with its head out of the water. Every now and then he stopped dead, curved in the sun quite still; then was off again on his way to the opposite bank. In that silent and remote place the little live thing held all my attention. The form and movement were lovely of course, but they were not the cause of the fascination. They were only signals. What was fascinating was the appearance of Purpose, the way the silence and the swift, steady movement gave me the sense of something being done, a secret intention being followed with the entire body and soul of the creature.

It is always so with animals. They go so entirely to their ends. They are utterly absorbed in doing something. Hence their gravity, their sincerity, their entire lack of both humour and vulgarity. They may play but they do not joke, they may strut about before their females, but they are never self-conscious. They are wonderfully at ease. And how their actions interweave! A million actions and movements converged on that snake to make him swim the river at that precise moment, and he, displacing the water, was moving the whole Thames.

History in a general sense is concerned with past human events. But it does not consider them simply as bare facts succeeding each other in the unrolling of time; it gathers them together as vital parts of a variegated and complex unity and deals not merely with the subject matter of these events, but with their cause and effect, by which they are welded into a whole. The historian, who is both scientist and artist, must gather the seemingly chaotic and accidental succession of events into a synthesis. Knowledge must always ultimately unite; and it is in this process of unification that the Catholic historian is bound to differ from any other kind of historian.

The past events with which the historian is dealing are human events, not the eruptions and radiations of the mineral world, not the burgeonings and seeding of the vegetable world, not the fights and amours of the animal kingdom, but the successive actions of MAN. Man is the subject of this science and so it is in man that we may find the guiding principles of historical unity. Certainly we are not here concerned immediately with the nature of man. That is the field of psychology which considers man according to his constitution with his intellect and his will. Nevertheless, the historian depends essentially upon rational psychology to describe to him the nature of man, as well as upon revelation itself to give a concrete view of that nature. The silversmith must understand the nature of the metal he proposes to work.

What may be termed the empirical bent of modern education is, in the opinion of most educationists, directly traceable to the Reformation and the ‘news-thought’ that arose from it. The teaching of natural science has, at least in primary and secondary education, almost entirely replaced the mediaeval study of philosophy.

Contrary, however, to modem popular notions on the subject, education in the Middle Ages was far in advance of that of modern times in essentials. It is true that a universal level standard cannot be claimed. For instance, in the thirteenth century, universities such as Bologna, Padua and Naples took students through a long and allembracing course, while Paris specialised in philosophy and theology. Germany was noted for its convent schools where both elementary and higher studies were catered for. In England, the founding of Oxford University in the twelfth century and Cambridge in the thirteenth guaranteed for English youths a good all-round training.

Whatever the standard and scope of mediaeval education, it had one characteristic by which it differs from general education to-day: it was inseparably bound up with religion. The customary elementary course of grammar, rhetoric and logic was often the preliminary to a higher course that embraced philosophy and theology; and girls as well as boys sometimes studied theology.

Arising out of the association of all education with philosophy and theology was the fact of its stimulus to thought. Even the elementary course aimed at making the student a thinker, while the higher course, even when not specifically theological, tended in the same direction.

Let us consider this hymn of the Church as a beautiful summary of the Holy Spirit’s mission in the New Law, according to the promise of Our Lord, by Whom He was sent. His mission is to complete not only the work of Redemption, but all creation, though concerned chiefly with the sanctification of the individual soul; and thus the Veni Creator is a petition for direction of our mind in the way of truth, and our affections in the way of charity:

. . . Mentes tuorum visita
Imple superna gratia
Quae tu creasti pectora.

Yet important as this is, we do not stop there; but are led on to still greater truth, the most sublime Mystery of faith —the very life of God. For the procession of the Third Divine Person is the necessary life of God (creation is the not-necessary life from God).

Sir Arthur Eddington in his recent book has presented a relatively non-technical account of the theory of the fundamental laws and constants of physics which he developed in his Relativity Theory of Protons and Electrons. But he has also embedded his contributions to science, which are recognised to be of the greatest importance, in a philosophical setting which carries by no means the same authority. It is unfortunate that physical advances, the brilliance of which it would be impertinent to commend, should be obscured, by reason of this embellishment, as seems to have happened in recent controversy. It seems useful, therefore, to discuss what is the real status of Eddington’s results, what points of interest arise from his reflections on the method of physics, and what is true in those parts of the book which deal with genuinely philosophical questions. We shall be mainly concerned with the philosophical setting, and scientific technicalities will be reduced to a minimum.

To supply the lack of a detailed treatise on the categories in English, Dom Augustine Osgniach has written this substantial book, supplementing his exposition of scholastic doctrine with critical studies of the historical fate of the ideas of substance, quantity, quality, relation. The method is well chosen, since the historico-critical studies bring into play the relevance to the fundamental problems of human thought of the scholastic doctrines in question; whereas a bald exposition modelled upon such Latin text-books as, e.g., Gredt (Elementa Philosophiae Aristotelico-Thomisticae), may indeed lay before readers what St. Thomas and his commentators taught, but will hardly gain access for that teaching into their minds without the support of an oral pedagogy. Not only does the method followed in this book secure the relevance of scholastic principles, but it enables the author to give them accurate development to a point which would perhaps weary’ the most hardy reader if reference to the later developments of philosophy were less constant and less close.

Perhaps the chief source of modern distrust of the categories is the fear, not by any means without foundation in the later developments of scholasticism, that the logical order is usurping the order of reality and imposing upon the real a system and framework of divisions and dependences which properly belong to the mode of our mind’s knowing and not to the mode of existence of things.

Amongst the many tasks that St. Pius V was faced with when he ascended the papal throne was the reform of the College of Cardinals decreed by the General Council of Trent. One source of abuse had been the demands made on the Holy See by secular governments for the elevation of royal children or favoured ministers to the purple, also the appointment of unworthy relatives of the Popes. Much against his will St. Pius, early in his reign, allowed himself to be persuaded by the cardinals to admit his nephew, Michael Bonelli, into their ranks; but although he had agreed to their request he insisted on the young cardinal retaining his Dominican dress, refused him permission to wear the red biretta or the silk robes of his new dignity, to use silver plate at his table, and other cardinalitial privileges. He had hopes that Bonelli would prove himself another Charles Borromeo, but if this was beyond his nephew’s powers St. Pius’s choice was nevertheless a good one, and Bonelli remained until his death thirty-two years later one of the best prelates in Rome.

Has the Catholic Church in England any message save to the individual soul? Has she a real and constructive contribution to make to .the social problem of this country? It is no doubt a dreadful thing that I should even ask such a question, but it is high time that the question were asked.

That the Church has solicitude for the material needs for her children is an article of Faith, but whether that solicitude moves the hearts of the Faithful in this country to such a degree that it will be of any practical effect is another matter. Yet if it goes no further than pious aspiration and is not likely to go further, if it does no more than proclaim ends on the majority of which all men are to-day in agreement and fails wholly to regard the problem of means, it -would be better for us to confess failure and retire into the desert to pray. To proclaim that we have a body of social teaching and then declare ourselves bankrupt when it comes to seeking ways of applying it or even of showing how it might be applied is to court ridicule. The multitude is hungry. We have no right to give them generalities instead of food. I say in all seriousness that if we cannot do better than that, it would be far better to do nothing at all.

True, we have consolidated certain defensive positions. We have asserted the priority of the family over the State, the natural authority of parents over children, the right of free association and the dignity of human personality.

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.

Here is an interesting point, that it is not the works of art, but the works of raw Nature that wonder the heart of man. However great be the thing man made, there is always the reflection that it was a man who did it, a man like myself, I might have done it; why not have a try? But Nature defies me from the first and it wins my love by winning my respect. The works of Nature produce wonder, but art elicits delight from the heart of man. This must not be taken as an absolute statement, as such it is most certainly not true. Nor is it meant as a generalisation, but rather as a description of a radical difference. There are many works of art which produce wonder, but the wonder comes rather from an affinity with Nature which these particular works possess than from the fact that they are art. There is a word which I love to use to characterise such art; it is ‘creational,’ and it is not irrelevant to notice that the Creation provided the first great occasion for its use. The first chapters of Genesis are beautiful poetry and therefore great art, but they produce wonder in the heart of man because they speak of the making of Nature.

‘It is a well-known fact that the spiritual welfare cannot be separated from the material welfare. There is a constant interaction between both. By arousing in the destitute a longing to raise and better himself economically and socially we awaken in him a desire to make the best possible use of all moral and physical forces.’ That was said many years ago by a Protestant in Germany, and though we could quote similar statements from important Catholic sources, we prefer to quote this from the works of Frederick Raiffeisen because it has a direct connection with the subject of this article.

Raiffeisen started among the German peasants people’s banks, or credit unions. To-day, throughout the world, credit unions on the Raiffesen system number well over 250,000 and have some 28,000,000 members. The line we are tracing from Raiffeisen to the natives of South Africa runs through Dr. Heim, the founder of the Bavarian Catholic Farmers’ Union, and Fr. Tom Finlay, S.J., the great Irish co-operator, who died recently, to Fr. Bernard Huss, a Marianhi'll missionary in South Africa. Though this line starts with a Protestant it can be ultimately traced back to the formation by the Franciscans in fifteenth century Italy of the Montes Pie tat is, welfare associations to alleviate the economic distress of the people. Then the great burden of the people was heavy taxation, and to meet this they had to borrow and the heavy rates of interest that they had to pay kept them permanently tied to the money lender.