Our Western civilization can legitimately reflect that it has bestowed on the rest of mankind one or two valuable treasures in the domain of the things of the spirit. One such treasure is the unspoiled instinct for speculative truth. Greek philosophy, and Aristotle, first enabled us to realize the absolute value of wholehearted detachment from affective inclinations, and of chaste, severe, pure science, whose only function and purpose is the discernment of that which is—vision. Later the West was to know that the Word of God came into the world to the end that He might bear witness to the truth, to know too that eternal life is eternal vision; further, it came to be moulded by scholastic discipline and the stern claims of intellect: hence it is quite natural that it should have so long retained, in its concept of knowledge, an appreciation of the dignity of speculative truth.

Now the modern world is fast losing such an appreciation in every domain of knowledge save in the one wherein it really excelled—I mean in the science of phenomena. At the age of the Renascence a very general propensity of heart towards earthly goods conditioned the widespread success of the new scientific methods, and, with it, the preference given to Science rather than Wisdom. Note too that science, though capable of provoking many a cupidity in man, itself remained immune from the tarnish of appetitive elements. Science has been for the modern world the last stronghold of the sacredness of truth and of spiritual values—inefficacious spiritual values, because the spirituality concerned is not wisdom spirituality and because in the practical order it can be turned to evil as well as to good uses; and that is why present-day rationalism knows so much of melancholia.

The keyword of our generation is “Life.” The pathos of this will to live occasionally electrifies cafes and dance halls in the hysteria of an adolescent or middle-aged woman. By typography and photography the Press galvanizes its dead news to an artificial life. The educator no longer sells the corpse of knowledge with copy-book slogans like “Knowledge is power,” but alike for adult and child baits the powder with the jam of “vital interest.” A radio or a dance band resurrects from the dead our animal appetite for food. That our will to life is the drowning hope of a bankrupt age in despair, that is the diagnosis of our critics, and I for one do not deny its truth. But the bankruptcy of life is a bankruptcy of love. The Waste Land is our legacy from the nineteenth century humanists and humanitarians, who taught us to love our neighbour because we can only be certain of ourselves. How repulsive is that ingrown love with all the neuroses it breeds in us! And so, certain workers and certain bourgeois find that hate at least is healthy and primitive and radical in human nature. The nineteenth century did not, however understand the nature of love. Love desires something else; it wishes to explore and penetrate other things for their own sake. No man can lead a human life who rejects this interpretation: life is destitution itself if love has no way out to other things and other people. The human unit of grace and nature is disorganized and the heart indulges in orgies of self-pity to the detriment of the mind. The only exit from self is in sentimentality—love directed to the unreal.

In these days greatly troubled by War, we may well speak of Peace. The word itself almost brings refreshment to our minds when the sky above us has been troubled by the sounds of our country’s preparation for war. I feel we are in one of the most critical periods of the world. For the moment, I presume that God alone, and those in the secrets of God, can see the end.

The kingdoms of the world must go forth to war if they want to spread; if they wish to be world-wide, they prepare quite consistently for world-war; and it might succeed. The great Pax Romana was essentially a peace based on war— the peace that came from the Strong Man Armed.

Peace has so many consoling qualities that it is constantly taken for an end. Peace should never be sought as an end. Disorder always results if we seek as an end what is only an effect.

When Our Blessed Lord sent out His apostles, He was commissioning a thing that was world-wide; not Religion, but the Religion; not just for a race, but for mankind as such; world-wide because it is to be One and Holy. Therefore this Kingdom of Christ offers, at once, Peace, and never the sword. Sometimes the sword has been used in defence of the Church. I do not know whether it was ever a very effective defence of the Church. In the Garden of Olives, Peter very naturally used the sword. It was quite a natural defence.

“Love not the world, nor the things which are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world is the concupiscence of the flesh and the concupiscence of the eyes and the pride of life, which is not of the Father but is of the world. And the world passeth away, and the concupiscence thereof: but he that doth the will of God abideth for ever. . . ” (I John ii, 15-17).

Bossuet recalls these words at the beginning of his Traité de la Concupiscence, and he adds this brief but profound commentary: “The last words of the Apostle show that the ‘World’ of which he speaks consists of all those who choose things visible and passing in preference to things invisible and eternal.” I would add in my turn that once we have grasped this definition of “the World,” we have as good as solved the vast problem we are going to discuss.

We are in the world. That is a fact, whether we like it or not. We cannot alter that fact. And yet we are told that we must not be of the world. How be in it and yet not of it? That is the great problem that has haunted the Christian conscience from the beginning. It is true that the Church, offers one radical solution: to flee from the world, to renounce it utterly and take refuge in the religious life. But that solution cannot be everybody’s.

May I confess at the beginning of my paper that I have no particular qualification for speaking about the social problem; but for a long time I have been interested in the problem of how Christendom can be reunited again, how all the separated religious bodies or organisations can be brought to a realization of the truth that the unity and authority of the Catholic Church were appointed by Our Lord, and that all Christians must some day return to them. I believe that the two problems are very closely connected, and that the ultimate solution of the social problem depends upon the extent to which a solution is found for the problem of the Reunion of Christendom.

I suppose we should all agree that the social problem is primarily an economic one. The modern industrial system has brought an enormous increase in production, but it has also brought about a dislocation between production and distribution. The primary economic problem is how to get rid of this paralyzing dislocation. But this primary economic problem brings in its train a whole host of moral problems, because many of the attempts to solve the economic problem involve actions and policies which in one way or another come into contact with the moral law. Thus we get the tremendous problem of the gradual dehumanization of human beings by the conditions of life and work which seem inseparable from much of our industrial civilization, and with it the attendant problems of birth-control, sterilization, euthanasia, and so on.

To ask such a question, when we consider the publicity and importance which is accorded nowadays to psychology, may appear rather startling, if not absurd. Yet, as the late Professor Miinsterberg observes, “to reach a clear understanding as to the true meaning of psychology is a more difficult task than the solution of any special psychological problem.” Of late years there has arisen a great deal of criticism not only concerning the foundations on which this science rests, but also in regard to its very aims and scope. The student of psychology is at the outset confronted by a perplexing variety of “schools,” each claiming right of way to the general exclusion of all others. Quite recently this discordance was voiced in no measured terms by Professor Spearman. “It is generally agreed,” he writes, “that nowadays psychology has arrived at a very undesirable degree of disunitedness. Each school, if not each individual, seeks to establish the science independently both of his predecessors and even of his colleagues. The result is that all alike have come into general discredit. Psychology is a byword of reproach among other sciences.” Even Professor McDougall, whose writings on Psychology are so widely known, seems infected with this feeling of discontent; for in a recent publication he remarks: “Even now after some forty-five years of sustained effort I am not sure that I have made any progress, have learned anything of human nature.” He further adds that he inclines to the view current among the Oxford philosophers of his day that such a knowledge is impossible.

“To propose to man no more than what is human, Aristotle remarked, is to betray man, to will his unhappiness, for by the principal part of himself, the spirit, he is called to something greater than a merely human life. On this principle, if not on the manner of its application, Ramanuja and Epictetus, Nietzsche and St. John of the Cross are all agreed” (p. 10). Is the remark humanist or anti-humanist? Humanism, like so many other good things, is sometimes looked at askance by pious people because of the associations or the expressions it has wrongly or at least accidentally acquired. The Renaissance humanism, anthropocentric as M. Maritain here calls it, was or became an enemy of humanism as Aristotle, as the Christian, understand it, because it in fact reduced the potentialities and in consequence the possible fulfilment of man to the narrowly human. It was a partial humanism, a half-truth. Against this the Christian sets up the ideal of a humanism which is integral and theocentric, and integral because theocentric, the boundary of the perfection at which it aims being nothing less than the sharing in the life of God, including within this the human life of body and spirit in the world of men. “Let us say that humanism . . . tends essentially to make man more truly human, to manifest his original grandeur by making him a sharer in whatever may enrich the personality in Nature and in history. ...

When Liturgical Prayer is spoken of as an excellent and perfect prayer, as an exercise in meditation and even as a source of contemplation, two common objections are raised:

(1) that it is purely vocal and too much a matter of words;

(2) that it is too impersonal and not easily adaptable to individual needs. Let it be said at once that these objections are not serious. We may readily admit a certain incompatibility between private vocal prayer and meditation; but it is quite a different matter when Liturgical Prayer is in question. The Divine Office, even when celebrated with the joyous briskness of Dominican custom, leaves ample scope and full play for mental activity, in whatever direction that activity may tend. Besides, the divine praise—through the consideration of created things—goes straight to God: it fixes the attention firmly on the Supreme Object of all prayer. It is GOD we are concerned with, not the words, which are but the vehicle of our prayer. Thus, the Liturgy makes it easier to transcend the facts and circumstances of our earthly condition; it enlarges the field of vision; it leads per ea quae facta sunt to the invisibilia Dei.

The Liturgical Movement, maintains Guardini, was born, not made. It came apparently into existence from a universally expressed desire for a life more fully and symbolically Catholic.

From whatever sources this movement sprang it is certain that in Romano Guardini it found its most able interpreter. In France, Germany and elsewhere this liturgical revival coincided exactly with the publication and translation of Guardini’s Sinn der Kirche and Geist der Liturgie.

Perhaps a certain parallel may be found between the rebirth of metaphysics and the liturgical revival. Both movements have the same foundations, both spring from the need of some absolute order, and both are heralded as an escape from individualism.

Guardini shows how the liturgy, by incorporating all revealed truth, insists on the existence of an established order. Through collective prayer it offers an escape from the individualism of the times.

The death of Gilbert Keith Chesterton—or “ G.K.,” as we called him—allows us to see his life as a complete and unique whole.

Looked at merely as a thing of art, the three score and two crowded years between birth in London and burial in Beaconsfield seem to make a full circle or indeed cycle of doings and happenings. Later on his autobiography will let us listen to the man who made the story telling the story or history he has made. But though every line of it will speak the master-craftsman of words, it will be a masterpiece in the humility of self-effacement. We have no hopes that it will deliberately help us to see his life’s pilgrimage from London to Beaconsfield—from Canterbury to Rome—almost as an Arthurian epic.

For one thing we shall be grateful to the artist’s portrait of himself. It will be a vera effigies. It will leave out nothing that would be a loss to truth. And though it cannot speak of how the artist’s life ended in death, it will leave its readers convinced that death came to Gilbert Chesterton in a certain fulness of time and fulness of intelligence.

For us who are left there is deep consolation in the way he left us. We saw no slackening of his handiwork; nor any lessening of its power. He did not set slowly like our northern sun. He was as a ploughman turning his best and last furrow when the master said, “Call the workers; and give them their wage. ‘’

Some few weeks before Archbishop Davidson died the present writer met him by his own gracious arrangement at the house of the late Lord Lovat in Bryanston Square. It was a wild rain-stormy afternoon sufficient to make younger men than the Archbishop find excuses for keeping indoors. Knowing his four score and two years, I awaited a telephone message telling me that the Archbishop dare not venture to leave home. But punctually almost to the minute of our prearranged time the old man arrived—with no complaints about the weather! His biographer was to let me into the secret of the old man’s contempt for our national weather at its worst. I was to learn that an old man’s fortitude which had instantly impressed me had been taught by a sport-loving father on the moors and hills of south-east Scotland.

I could not help feeling, and perhaps manifesting, that I was in the presence of one of the most noteworthy men of the day. Again his biographer by a sober presentation of the facts was to justify my feelings. Yet the prelate who had crowned an English king and had strengthened, as few of his predecessors had strengthened, the Church of England, became at once my fellow-wayfarer into the hill-country of the soul. Many a man of less note and position than he would have felt the need of condescending to a simple friar. Their condescending would have been of the nature of humility. But there was no condescension in the man whose words and attitude were all humility, yet whose humility was not an attitude but a quality of soul.

“The new linking up of all parts of the world inevitably affects our view of history. In a sense, world history has just begun. Before, it was the history of more or less isolated groups: now, we must think in wider terms, we must emerge from our nation-caves into the wider world of to-day and to-morrow.'’ In these admirable sentences the authors of the most recent World History sum up their survey of human history from palæolithic beginnings to the Manchurian question, with which they bring it to a close: most fittingly, as they say, “since of all the problems of world history that of the relations of East and West, of European and Asiatic peoples, is perhaps the most important for the future of mankind.”

Messrs. R. Flenley and W. N. Weech have indeed provided us with a World History in a single volume, which compares most favourably with any similar attempt made hitherto. It not only tells the whole story—which is not merely one of conquests and defeats, but of cultural development, social changes, artistic and scientific achievements—but it tells it impartially and tells it remarkably well: concise and encyclopædic though it be, it can be read with real pleasure and sustained interest from cover to cover.

The most important thing in life is to know God. It is no less necessary than food, clothing and shelter. It is no less necessary, and even more important. “Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven . . Absolutely necessary.

Necessary for us here and necessary for us hereafter. Hereafter, because “This is eternal life to know Thee the only true God and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent.” Here, if only because unless we know Him we cannot know ourselves, and if we do not know ourselves we cannot be what we were intended to be, even as men. It may be true that the proper study of man is man, but it is also true that he knows little of man who knows only man. The very nature of man, the purpose of his strange life, his conflicting desires and interests and yearnings, the meaning of his joys and his pain, the whole bewildering complexity of mystery which we call life, is unintelligible unless we know something of whence he came, whence we came, and whither we are destined. And we know that God made us, and that for some purpose of His own. We cannot know ourselves with anything resembling completeness, we cannot know what we are, let alone what we should be, unless we know Him and His ways. Without that knowledge our whole life becomes meaningless. On the other hand, the more we know of Him, the more our life, the meaning of our existence, grows in completeness, in direction, in unity.

The present cannot be understood if we do not keep in mind the past, the immediate past at least. Not that the present necessarily should be a continuation of the past, the result of a natural evolution the origin of which is to be found in the immediate past. The present can be a sort of reaction against the past. Qualis pater, talis filius does not apply to nations, it does not even apply always to father and son.

Take the present state of things in Europe. Democracy is either dead or questioned in most of the Continental nations; yet President Wilson wanted to “make the world safe for democracy.” After-war statesmen felt the acute need for an international economic organization; yet economic nationalism is rampant everywhere; Herr Hitler last month uttered a speech in which he announces his determination of making Germany an entirely self-supporting country. Article 8 of the Covenant of the League of Nations reads as follows: “The Members of the League recognize that the maintenance of peace requires the reduction of national armaments to the lowest point consistent with national safety and the enforcement by common action of international obligations”; yet competition in armaments is active throughout Europe, including Great Britain.

Has the Great War been fought in vain? Have we done away with autocrats, emperors and kings, only to throw ourselves into the arms of dictators? Have we improved in so notable a way all means of transport, making the earth smaller and smaller, in order eventually to pen up all nations within the narrow limits of a sort of economic wall of China?

The mind of man has an inborn bias towards unity. Hence the unity of ideas which even the anarchic self-realizer cannot escape. Hence, too, a critique of the history of ideas must always appear an angular if not arbitrary cross-section through the jungle of fact. If the mind of man was a machine we could take it to pieces, but because it is organic and even supratemporal, it is always more than a welter of faculties and even more than its history. So that if criticism is so specialized that it forgets that the whole mind is more than the sum of its parts it becomes geometrical and is an escape from the truth: geometry is a measure of matter and not of mind. Again, the reality the mind experiences is not a mere metaphor for something else that the mind in its otherness cannot reach, and not mind-stuff or a construction the mind has put on the real. The external world, and the whole of it, means everything to the mind: closing the mind to it is like closing the body to air; it is intellectual death. Unless we grow into the real, and the whole real too, we become unreal people: we not only stop seeing objectively, we stop being objective. The history of the ideas of unreal people is therefore a history of unrealities, and the critic who shows how they hang together in the unreal mind is proving again that there is method even in madness. If he forgets however that the mind is more than its history, he becomes a determinist who begs the question and equates mind and matter.

“Pax Christi in regno Christi.” It is difficult to make people realize the significance of this ideal even within the Catholic Church. But if we would propose this watchword to the outside world and make it a plank in the programme of Catholic Action, we shall meet with little more encouraging than a shrug of the shoulders, if not with positive rebuff. To many Catholics it is inconceivable that the Pope had in mind political peace between the nations, as well as religious peace based on the foundation of the common faith, when he proposed this watchword. They will not agree that Catholic doctrine and moral teaching should impose Christ’s command of peace as a duty upon the States of the world or that it has any political reference. To refute this error it must suffice to quote two papal pronouncements. Benedict XV writes in his Encyclical Pacem Dei (1920): “The command of Love among individuals found in the Gospels differs in no respect from that which should reign among States and peoples.” And the present Pope Pius XI declared in his first Encyclical: “It is a holy duty for peoples and governments to follow and use as a guide the teachings of Christ in both the internal and external aspects of their political life” (Ubi arcano, 1922). Nobody will underestimate the difficulties which lie in the way of a policy which is based on the principles of the Gospel. But the teaching of the Gospel, because it is opposed to the spirit of the world, is hard to follow always.

The sin-stricken body weighs heavily on the soul which by nature yearns to behold its Maker. Perhaps it is the consciousness of this clinging burden which causes a man to regard himself as another in endeavouring to express his own personality. Yet the divine figure of the Word Incarnate gives assurance that self-realization may be only reached by the self-abasement of all that is human in the presence of the Divine. At this point are placed in close opposition self-idolatory and the God-centred attitude towards life which is the main-spring of life’s worship. But who will deliver us from the body of this death?

Divine revelation informs the erring mind that the culminating point in the Christian life is to be found in nothing less than eternal happiness which St. Thomas describes in no uncertain terms. But the life of grace, “semen gloriae,” is an eternal life since it holds within it the very roots of glory. It differs not in kind from that life at its apex where God is seen and all things in God, yet a ceaseless effort after spiritual liberty is demanded by a closer union with God in Christ.

. . . And Mr. Timothy worth a hundred and fifty thousand pound nett if he’s worth a penny. Compound interest at five per cent, doubles you in fourteen years. In fourteen years three hundred thousand—six hundred thousand in twenty-eight—twelve hundred thousand in forty-two—twenty-four hundred thousand in fifty-six—four million eight hundred thousand in seventy—nine million six hundred thousand in eighty-four—why, in a hundred years it’ll be twenty million. And we shan’t live to use it. It is a will. (From John Galsworthy’s To Let.)

The passage above comes from the concluding chapter of one of John Galsworthy’s masterpieces. Those who have read the book will recollect the scene. For those who have not I will explain. The old veteran, Timothy Forsyte, has directed his entire property to be formed into a trust which through the provisions of the will will probably remain intact for the better part of a century. The words quoted are put into the mouth of old Gradman, the solicitor’s clerk, and the glee, utterly free from envy, with which he utters them, is one of the most perfect touches in the book.

Now you can make a very interesting experiment with this passage. Give it to read to the average educated English Catholic of normal artistic sensibility and take note of his comments. He will admire what rightly deserves to be admired, the sensitive delineation of the lovable Gradman, the success with which the author brings home a sort of primitive force in old Timothy, that huge embodiment of the possessive instinct, a force that reaches beyond the grave and still continues to mould and impose itself on succeeding generations.

“Any nation,” the present Pope has said, “so mad as to contemplate war would be guilty of monstrous homicide and almost certainly of suicide.” There is, it would seem, a tendency to meet any proposal for the prevention of war and the promotion of peace with the argument that there is such a thing as a just war, and to leave it at that. There is a danger here of relapsing into the laissez aller attitude described by M. Maritain as “using the eternal truths as a pillow to go to sleep on.” To restrict discussion to the question of whether there can be a just war in the abstract is to invite unreality.

“There is such a thing as a just war.” For this position we have a formidable array of authorities, if we are to pin our faith to authorities; a formidable array of arguments, if we choose to take reason as our guide. “There is such a thing as legitimate self-defence, as legitimately helping the injured even by offensive warfare.” A proper authority, a just cause, a right intention, these are, according to St. Thomas, the three prerequisites of the just war. Can they not often and easily enough be fulfilled? In theory perhaps; in the hypothesis of two isolated States, in an isolated point of time, with clear-cut and indisputable aggression or injury on the one side and the impossibility of any defence or redress other than by war on the other. Such a state of affairs, however, in the world of to-day is, to all intents and purposes, impossible.