Nobody wants to live in a world that is blind and insane; and if that is what we are heading for, then we had better try to do something about it. Aldous Huxley makes this very plain in his latest book, Grey Eminence. One of the main points he makes there is this : that a world totally without prayer would be a world ‘totally blind and insane.’ His actual phrase is a ‘totally unmystical world ‘; but I am going to keep to the simpler and less misunderstood word ‘prayer,’ because people sometimes think that mysticism means either a tendency to swoon away at odd moments, or else a sort of permanent woolly-headedness. I am going to use the word ‘prayer,’ but I don’t mean just ‘asking for things,’ and as I am going to define it, it wili agree with what Huxley has in mind. A world totally without prayer would be a world totally blind and insane. ‘Where there is no vision the people perish ‘; and Huxley’s judgment of our own world is tjhat we are dangerously far advanced into the darkness.

Now, the first thing to notice about this is that it is not an odd or uncommon view. It is not only Huxley’s view; it is the Christian view. It is also the view of all the great religious teachers of the world ; and more than that, learned men of all kinds are telling us that this society of ours, the modern Western world, is the only civilisation in the whole of the “world's history which has not held that view and based its life upon it.

I regard it as a great privilege to be allowed to speak to you about Byzantine music and to introduce a performance of some melodies, chosen from MSS of the flourishing period of Byzantine ecclesiastical music.

Members of the Hellenic Society will be aware how much we owe to the indefatigable work of my friendi and collaborator, Professor H. J. W. Tillyard, whose contributions in the Journal of Hellenic Studies and in the Annual of the British School at Athens during the last twenty-five years have gradually aroused interest in this particular field of studies, not only here, but in'all countries in which scholars are dealing with Byzantine studies. Our mutual interest in Byzantine music and ,our aim to decipher its musical signs have made us collaborators for a long time, and I am glad to say that this co-operation has proved felicitous.

Our method of investigation may be compared with that of an archaeologist, who is obliged first to clear the foundations of a more recent place before he is able to unearth the traces of an old city. We, however—if I may continue the comparison—have had the good luck to discover a whole town, completely intact, in all its splendour. Our rather hard and often discouraging task to find the-clue to the riddle of Byzantine notation was finally rewarded. We discovered that the Byzantine neumes not only helped to read the melodic line, but also contained dynamic and rhythmical signs, providing the most subtle nuances of expression. This discovery enables us to revive Byzantine melodies as they were sung in the time of the Byzantine Empire.

[The following pages were written in response to a request from a group of Anglican Papalists for some account of the ‘official Roman doctrine’ regarding the practical consequences of separation from visible unity with the Catholic Church. They are here offered in the hope of providing a complement to the writer’s article on ‘Membership of the Church’ (Blackfriars, September, 1941).

As membership of the Church is an analogical concept which admits of many manners and degrees, so correspondingly is privation of that membership. In this essay we abstract altogether from such diversities and degrees of privation, and confine ourselves to the consideration of the results of factual loss of external communion with the Catholica. The question is not, therefore, ‘Who is in schism?’, but ‘What is the practical outcome of being in schism?’]

And the Lord God had planted a paradise of pleasure from the beginning: wherein He placed man whom He had formed ... to, dress it and keep it.

God the Lover and Creator made us in his own image and likeness, to be lovers and creators in our turn.

He made us to know him and love him and serve him; and since we are made in his image it is by knowing and loving and making that we serve. Knowing and loving are not means to making; making is the effect, expression and fulfilment of knowing and loving. Knowing is not the means to loving; knowledge of the right kind begets love and love begets knowledge. These three together form the footprint of the Trinity in the soul : without knowledge and love there is no life, without making there is no fullness of life.

Faced with the great human crisis of our times, it is only natural that the scientist should fee! that he has his contribution to make towards a solution of our one great problem—to secure the survival of the things that are good. The scientist has, moreover, a certain confidence that his contribution is important, perhaps even decisive, and certainly indispensable. He is confirmed in this view by the reflection that a large proportion of the world’s troubles may be traced to a desertion of scientific ideals, a neglect of scientific principles and the substitution of comfortable and muddle-headed illusions for the facts which are the scientist’s stock-in-trade.

Scientists are now beginning to feel that they have something to give beyond their material contribution, something in the realm of values, of ideals, of human harmony and ordered social progress. This contribution has reference both to the war effort and to reconstruction—to the armed struggle in which we are now engaged, and to the prolonged and fateful struggle to which we are committed when the clash of arms has ceased.

How has it come about that the somewhat aloof soul of science has awakened to this new warmth of spiritual and social apostolicity? Much may no doubt be explained by a realisation of the social implications of recent advances in the so-called biological sciences. Ecology, biochemistry, nutritional science, economics, sociology, anthropology, psychology, educational science have all presented us with discoveries which clamour to be integrated into the social fabric as speedily as possible. Or again, it may be the contrast which the modern scientist finds between his work and his environment.

In August and October, 1926, the Anglican Quarterly, Theology, published two remarkable articles written by the Ireland Professor of Exegesis at Oxford (C. H. Turner) and entitled ‘St. Peter in the New Testament.’ Their writer was a scholar of such competence in Biblical and Patristic studies that his advocacy of the Petrine claims made his articles the most important work on Anglo-Roman controversy since Newman’s Development.

One point especially was almost a startling innovation which might have identified an anonymous writer not with England but with Rome. Let the writer make the point in his own words :

I was in 1937 that one of the Gestapo-men who were then questioning me asked whether the Protestant Church was not in full collaboration with the Catholic Church. When I denied this, he insisted that one of our ministers had made that statement at a certain meeting. As I had attended that meeting myself, I pointed out that he had only spoken about the unprecedented friendliness that existed between the Churches, but not about collaboration. ‘And what is the reason for these extraordinary good relations?’ I could not help asking. ‘It is that both Churches to-day have to defend the same thing, v'z. the world beyond.’

I remember another, very different experience. In the winter of 1928-29 I was the only non-Catholic to address a Catholic conference at Boppard, on the Rhine, one of the other speakers being Dr. Briining, shortly to be Chancellor of the Reich.

For two reasons the struggle of the Church of Christ against Nazism has been different from any other. In the first place the Church no longer suffers passively as during the times of persecution even down to that of Bolshevism, but has passed from the defensive to the attack. Secondly, the enemy in so far as he makes his appearance within the Protestant Church itself—the ‘German Christians’—does not represent a new heresy but the old rationalistic ones, though joined to the political power. Thus the Church in Germany is fighting neither against sects nor against the State, but against a combination of both, which we call the ‘heretical State.’

One arrives best, perhaps, at the concept of political obligation by considering what is society and what is that particular form of society which is the political society. All men belong to societies, have some community with others—i.e. are compacted with them into a solidarity of one kind or another. Though this may arise in various ways, two main divisions are distinguishable, namely that coming from the division of labour and that coming from similitude. The former expresses our dependence on the planter of Brazil, the rancher of the Argentine, the fellah of Egypt. We all acknowledge our dependence on them, but would scarcely say that we formed a society with them. To admit this would be a manifest absurdity, but to deny it would be to deny the existence, or the possibility of the existence, of an international society of men. All that can be allowed is that there exists a certain inter-dependence which yet does not constitute a society.

But men are linked together by resemblances of which they may be ignorant, which are innate and which affect them physically and morally; resemblances coming from race, culture, language, customs, or an historical accident. The formation of ethnical and national groups provides a good example of this solidarity by similitude. Because these people are united by blood, because they are begotten by the same cultural and historical milieu, they are in harmony and have a common patriotic feeling. Yet even here it must be conceded that neither the ethnical group nor the nation is a society. The only way in which they can become this is by taking on themselves the political form of a State, a man-made construction.

The third requirement for peace laid down by His Holiness Pius XI is “ some juridical institution which shall guarantee the loyal and faithful fulfilment of conditions agreed upon and which shall in case of recognized need revise and correct them.” There can be no guarantee of loyal fulfilment of treaties and contracts without a recognition of the universal laws of right and wrong ; and these laws proceed from Christ the ‘‘Lord of all.” Peace and order therefore demand the rule of Christ the King. The influence of the Incarnate ‘Word must extend over the whole of society.

When it comes to concrete realities, does not this seem quite impracticable? Pius XI wrote: ‘‘Not only private individuals but also rulers and princes are bound to give public honour and obedience to Christ.” But can we visualize this “ reign of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ “ in a world where Hitlers and Mussolinis sprout like mushrooms in the night? Is the gentle spirit of the King of Kings a match for the powers of this world, which have seized dominion over society and are rapidly destroying it? How can Christ nde in the twentieth century? He does not enforce his laws with armaments and sanctions. No police force takes its orders from him and patrols the nations to see that they observe the eternal injunctions of their King. It is difficult enough to visualize its working even in a society that was wholly Christian in name, for the downward tendency of fallen nature always plays its part. Indeed many of the worst blackguards are Christian in name—Hitler and Mussolini are Christians, yet there seems to be no superior Christian power to stop their destructive arrogance Since in actual fact all men do not give their allegiance to Christ, and since there are vast tracts of modern society that definitely reject him, his ruling over the hearts of men seems a Utopian dream.

There is a haunting quality about the gentle irony of Arnold Lunn’s remark, ‘My father held the quaint belief that Christ meant what he said on the subject of riches.’ There is a trenchant quality about Gilbert Chesterton’s remark : ‘If there is one thing which Christ and his saints have said with a sort of savage monotony, it is that the rich are in peculiar danger of moral ruin.’ The ironic quality of the one remark and the trenchant quality of the other are both just, for there are those who seize like vultures on a carcase upon the words, ‘in spirit,’ in the First Beatitude, and have tried to eviscerate Christ’s teaching : as if forsooth the cumulative effect of so many parables, warnings and threats were not to show that it is intensely difficult to be poor in spirit, if one is rich in body. The ordinarily good rich are they who, in St. John Chrysostom’s words, bank their money in God’s bank, the bosom of the poor, getting heavenly usury thereby, and not looking upon themselves as benefactors of the poor, but as debtors to the poor. The very good rich are they who keep the trappings of riches, but discard the reality : a St. Louis of France will wear a royal robe, but next the skin will be a hair shirt; he will keep a rich table for his guests, but he will only toy with his own food.

The Catholic Church in the United States of America is a very impressive institution ; especially if one comes to it as a v'isitor from England. For then one usually lands on the eastern seaboard where Catholicism will be found to be at its strongest. Moreover such an one must bring to it the memory of the Church in England, where Catholicism is, by comparison, small, poor, and overshadowed by the much more impressive Establishment. Anyone who undertakes to give his impressions of America must ask for it to be remembered that it is a vast country, with not only many but with extreme diver, sities ; so that what is true enough of certain areas or strata could be off-set by something just as true, but very different, elsewhere. It is in the eastern States, and, with the exception of a few middle State cities such as Chicago, only again in California, that the Church is well represented, not to say dominant; whereas it is hardly visible in such States ‘as the two Carolinas and Georgia, for it. has made very small conquests among the coloured people, while in what is called ‘the Bible belt’ a still existing, though gradually disappearing, open hostility may be apparent.

Numbers have some meaning, and the latest census gives the professing Catholics as over twenty-two millions : perhaps nearly ten times as many as we can really count upon. Moreover, what tells even more, this record has within ten years beaten the number counted as Methodists, which was for long the leading denomination, and perhaps the most influential, at least politically, for it had much to do with enforcing Prohibition.

The religious development of Angelus Silesius (Johannes Scheffler is one of the most interesting chapters in the history of the religious life. Usually coupled with Meister Eckhart, he became a text-book example for the Protestant theory that the Catholic Church kills the inner life—Meister Eckhart she condemned (though, in fact, only a few of his more extreme statements), but Angelus Silesius she broke.

The time into which Johannes Scheffler was born was not unlike our own. The greater part of the continent was in a state’of material and spiritual upheaval; the Thirty Years’ War devastated Central Europe, Reformation and Counter-Reformation were fighting for the souls of men; peasants and soldiers sang that awful ballad, ‘There is a reaper called Death, Hath power from the great God’— not knowing whether they should eat and drink for to-morrow they would die, or follow the call to sackcloth and ashes of men like the great popular preacher Abraham a Santa Clara.

Outside the Catholic Church the religious life had broken up inttf two main streams : the orthodox Lutheranism (or Calvinism) of the established territorial churches on the one hand, and a number of sfnall groups and sects experimenting in a pseudo-mystic religion on the other. Two provinces of the Holy Roman Empire were especially affected by this revival : Silesia, where Scheffler was born, and Holland, where he spent part of his university years. It was, therefore, almost inevitable that the passionate young man should have made contact with these circles, ‘conventicles ‘as they were usually called, in the hope of finding in them the fulfilment of the yearnings of his deeply religious nature.

Not men alone, but all human institutions, customs and habits of life partake of the effects of Christ’s Redemption, and receive after their own manner a supernatural character. Man has a purpose in this life which transcends the boundaries of this earth, he is a child of God in no metaphorical sense, and his worldly business participates in his heavenly life in so far as it is the means of his attaining his supernatural end. The commonest failing among-Christians ‘S to put on one side our divine sonship and to be content with the earth and what it alone has to offer. Materialism means recognising only matter and the power of matter, and putting aside the spirit. Christians acquiesce in materialism when they put aside the ‘higher things.’ as they are often vaguely called, and are content to live in this world for the sake of making money, living comfortable lives.

In a world which appears to recognise only money, arms, and strength as symbols of the right, we can still find men appealing for the restoration of what they call the more human or homely things, the restoration of the rights of the working man, of family life, and of Christian love. The grounds on which they base their appeal are usually that this is a more human condition of life, and men will therefore be happier when it has been reinstated. The defence of family life is most commonly set out in this way. But family life will not be restored by telling people that it will make them happy; many of them know, or think they know, that they are perfectly happy without family life, and in fact find themselves much more comfortable without the burdens of a wife and children.

Our ideas of the freedom of man and of the rights of man depend on the view we take of human nature and of the purpose for which man exists. Whether we are fully aware of this or not, it is the basis of all our notions about ourselves, about the family, about the State, and about international order.

If man has dignity, freedom, rights, it is because he has, individually and personally, a certain value as a human being. Christianity teaches that this value is given to him by God who has created man in his own image and has made him for himself. That is, man has a soul which is able to know truth and love good and which finds its eternal happiness in the vision of God. God did not make man and then leave him to his own devices. He made him for a definite purpose. The basis of man’s rights is his right to fulfil this purpose. An attack on human freedom is an attack on the human person, on the dignity of man. We shall see that whenever man’s value in the eyes of God is denied, his dignity is debased and his freedom is attacked.

We take our fellow men for granted. But in fact we have one or two deep convictions about them. We think of them as equal. This does not mean that they are the same. Look round about you. You see every size and shape, age and ability. But try to think of the man next to you, the man next door, even those against whom we are fighting, as having a quite different, inferior, nature like a dog.

It is, then, by the notion of a vocational making, as distinguished from earning one’s living by working at a job, regardless of what it may be, that the difference between the museum objects and those in the department store can be best explained. Under these conditions, which have been those of all non-industrialised societies, that is to say when each man makes one kind of thing, doing only tnat kind of work for which he is fitted by his own nature and for which he is therefore destined, Plato reminds us that ‘more will be done, and better done than in any other way.’ Under these conditions a man at work is doing what he likes best, and the pleasure that he takes in his work perfects the operation. We see the evidence of this pleasure in the Museum objects, but not in the products of chain-belt operation, which are more like those of the chain-gang than like those of men who enjoy their work. Our hankering for leisure is the proof of the fact that most of us are working at a task to which we could never have been called by anyone but a salesman, certainly not by God or by our own natures. Traditional craftsmen whom I have known in the East cannot be dragged away from their work, and will work overtime to their own pecuniary loss.

We have gone so far as to divorce work from culture, and to think of culture as something to be acquired in hours of leisure; but there can be only a hothouse and unreal culture where work itself is not its means; if culture does not show itself in all we make, we are not cultured.

When in Rerum Novarum Pope Leo XIII taught that it was the ‘great and principal duty’ of every employer to give every one of his work-people a fair wage, he was, as he himself reminded the faithful, only enunciating a principle that had its foundation in natural justice. When he again, and Pope Pius XI after him, declared that a workman’s wages must be sufficient to enable him to maintain himself, his wife, and his children in reasonable comfort, and to put by for a rainy day, they were making a declaration not only of Christian, but also of natural, rights.

Nearly thirty years after Rerum Novarum the Anglican Lambeth Conference recognised that a living wage should be the first charge upon industry. That was in 1920, when many industries were finding it difficult to keep alive, and others were already expiring, when many workers, far from being paid a living wage, were soon to become wageless, while the prospect of permanent employment for many others was rapidly diminishing.

During the war of 1914-1918 there had been phenomenal prosperity. The living wage seemed to have become a recognised right, and rates of pay were constantly raised to meet rising prices. But the high wages were in great part the result of a large and easy flow of money. Whereas the deposits of twenty-two British banks in 1914 amounted to £875,000,000, in 1919 they had reached the sum of £2,117,000,000. This huge increase was caused very largely by the wholesale purchase of War Loan by the banks themselves, and by their lending money, which soon came back to them as deposits, for the purchase of War Bonds.

‘It is not enough to refute errors; one must overcome them by understanding their grounds. To this venerable truth Bolshevism is no exception.’

The magnificent struggle the Russians have put up in the defence of their Fatherland has warmed millions of hearts to them. In one stroke Hitler, the self-styled scourge of Communism, has done more for the Soviet Union than years of intensive propaganda. From one end of this country to the other, money is pouring in for aid-to-Russia funds, books and pamphlets on the U.S.S.R. are in great demand, and hundreds of thousands wait for news from the Russian front as if it were the British Isles.

As might be expected, the Communist Party of Great Britain has seized the opportunity to interest the masses not so, much in the Russian peoples fighting for their own country as in the class-conscious proletariat fighting for an ideal and for a particular economic theory Anyone who keeps a watch on left-wing booksellers will have noted the flood of pamphlets and books and the rate at which they sell. In comparatively small towns the local communists have the means to hire the main halls frequently and to boost every meeting with plenty of large posters and other publicity matter.

Readers of the June number of Blackfriars, 1941, will be familiar with Mr. Addleshaw’s inspiring call for a return to dogma and worship as the source of our social activities and as a basis for reunion. In The High Church Tradition the Vice-Chancellor of St. Chad’s College, Durham, shows his thesis to be established in the best Anglican tradition as well as in the Catholic teaching of the Church from the beginning. We would recommend this book with vigour to Catholic readers not merely to foster a sympathy for the most characteristic and Catholic Anglican viewpoint, but also that they may learn a lesson in the right approach to social action as well as to reunion We would ask Catholics to banish prejudice before opening the book and to be prepared to learn from someone who has arrived at an insight into the relation between revealed Truth and action far from apparent in many Catholic ‘activists.’

Whether we deplore it, or welcome it as a deliverance, it is a fact beyond controversy that parental authority has decreased in the last fifty years, and. that this has been accompanied by a decline in family discipline. The battle is joined, but the issue is still in doubt, between those who see in this a breakdown of the family group pattern, and those who believe that the development of the psychologists’ ‘free’ child is the forerunner of a new age of enlightenment, a new family relationship of pure love—although, apparently, the obligations in this new relationship are entirely material ones and entirely onesided. It may not be inappropriate in a number of Blackfriars devoted to the Family to glance briefly at some of the implications of this phenomenon.

When seen against its historical background the first thing to strike the observer is that this decline is not an isolated fact, but that it appears to be bound up with a general decline of the concept of authority, and a growing tendency to pragmatic thought. Sovereignty is no longer looked upon as delegated by God, but as residing in the group, whether this group is defined as an individual group, or an ideal group ol humanity to which all subordinate groups owe allegiance, and with reference to which their separate authorities are limited. The parent has progressively, during the last half-century, come to doubt his ‘right’ to exercise discipline, has forgotten the real source of his authority, and has accepted more and more State interference. The rapid contemporary advance in Social Services, excellent in so many ways, has often undermined ‘the parents’ sense of responsibility, and narrowed the field of their authority, still further. Moreover, once the origin of that authority nad become obscure, the mother, and to a lesser degree the father, became an easy prey to the popular versions of current psychology.