In the course of a tour of the Industrial North and Midlands extending over three months and meeting, in the main, working men, their wives and families, several facts have presented themselves that concern Catholics.

The first: that there is now at work in industry a generation more alive to the inequalities of the Capitalist system than there was ever before. This is undoubtedly the fruit of education. It is arguable how far this education (elementary and secondary) has been of real worth to the Nation as a whole, and it is quite certain that a great deal of the dissatisfaction with things as they are is not, as many magistrates and social workers would have us believe, entirely due to the influence of the Cinema. The Cinema certainly does harm in so far as it is largely amoral, but not in showing pictures of a standard of living that so many of the audience believe, quite sincerely, to be theirs by right; it is only exacerbating an already running sore.

The second: the great increase of Left propaganda and ideas. In the majority of factories visited there was either the group or an individual which had taken on itself the dissemination of ideas, sometimes literature, and always with extreme fervour. They are on the spot wherever an argument starts and, once having made their “contact,” they do all they can to pin their man (or woman) down.

There is something fine in the way St. Paul proclaims the great importance and value before God, though not the independence, of the human conscience. He says that whatever does not proceed from conscience, whatever is not in conformity with it, is sin. This statement contains something of a psychological mystery; for conscience may be misinformed, yet we are obliged to follow it. Now although St. Paul admits, especially in practical matters and in doubtful cases, the decisive power of conscience, and although he is ready to grant that a man may be in good faith, yet, at the same time, in error, still he does not teach that everything which proceeds from conscience is really the voice of God, but only that which proceeds from conscience duly and properly instructed. At one and the same time, St. Paul recognizes in conscience a certain autonomy and yet he also realizes the obligation upon conscience of watching over its motives. Now without pretending that the Dominican conscience differs from that of other men, I maintain that there is a special note, a Dominican accent, so to speak, in its dictates.

The first reactions of a convert are either to shout (forgetting the time it took to unstop his own ears) or to hide in a remote spot (unmindful of the fact that very few people will be aware of his transfiguration). The tone of the Catholic Press and our more prominent Societies suggest that the shouters are in the majority. As one who was vociferous, anxious to proclaim the new experience, may I at once express penitence? I am now silent. Every outward sign of the faith is abolished in places where my non-Catholic friends and acquaintances are likely to penetrate. If they find me in Church or between the honourable covers of this magazine that is another matter, such places are proper to the faith. The dentist's waiting-room, the grocery store, the lawyer's office are not proper to the faith but to their functions; it is in such place that an aspidistra is preferred before a crucifix!

The absence of Catholic tokens does not mean that the Catholic dentist, grocer or lawyer is ashamed of his faith and lukewarm as to its propaganda. It means that his time is so fully occupied in being a Catholic privately and attending to his business publicly that he refrains from advertizing a fact which he might easily fail adequately to prove or practically to achieve.

In this country the Catholic is allowed out on sufferance, our churches are not stoned and our priests are tolerated only because the general public thinks them harmless. The Holy Father appears in the news as a distinguished foreigner with a sufficient number of friends in this country to justify half a column in the Press.

The business of preparation is complete. The men know what work lies in front of them, if life is spared, before the sun, now setting behind the steep roofs and towers of Bailleul, rises again above the fortified ridge of Messines, still held by the enemy. As the column leaves its high resting place on Mount Ravetsburg and winds on towards the darkening East, a ground mist veils the sordid straggle of wreckage in the valley, where heaped debris of earth, metal and smouldering timber had once been trains of linked trucks loaded with explosives. A chance bomb dropped from the air yesterday had blown wagons, wheels, rails, sheds and men skywards in blasts of flame.

The thick dust stirred by the movement of many men fills eyes, mouth and nose, for the grass underfoot that once carpeted the country lane has been crushed out of life, and the earth that fed it has been powdered by the tread of innumerable feet. Yet the June evening is still redolent with hawthorn; and the scent of the hedgerows softens the acrid impact of sweat. Shellfire has not yet violated the virginity of trees in full leaf; and the eye lingers on their shapeliness as if to stamp their form on the mind. Within an hour the memory of them will seem as fantastic as the prospect of the trees further ahead which stand with stark limbless trunks pared of life-giving foliage by the engines of war.

It is now a year since the Wigan House of Hospitality started its work. In that time we have made many mistakes, and have learnt much. In this report we are attempting to give some idea of the work, the difficulties, the needs, and the spirit.

Houses of Hospitality, though bearing much resemblance to other expressions of the Church’s care to apply the Corporal Works of Mercy, are something peculiar to our times, and work in a way which, though modern, is nevertheless the essential Christian way.

The first House of Hospitality was opened in New York, and there are now several in various towns of the United States. In Canada there are several more under the name of Friendship Houses. This Wigan House is the first in England, and is inspired by the New York one.

The spirit is that of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew, Chapters v, vi, and vii). It is an attempt to accept the face meaning of the words of Christ and to have Faith in His promises.

The presence or lack of certain philosophical or religious preoccupations at any period has a great deal to do with the prevailing attitude towards children and their education.

In primitive or spontaneous forms of human society the child is not a special subject of study. Children are naturally and roundly brought up in the large circle of the home, with its traditional wisdom and salutary rough and tumble.

In many of the Greek states, where political life was allpervasive, it was inevitable that educational theories should emphasize the primary importance of education for citizenship—a phase reproduced for us in modern states such as Italy and Germany.

A Jansenistic theology once darkened men’s outlook on human nature and, in consequence, on its budding period. This gloom and the severity which harmonized with it persisted throughout the Victorian age. It was a time when children were habitually treated as criminals latae sententiae, an evil and perverse generation, to be repressed and chastized without mercy and without truce. For men of this epoch the child was, before all, a nuisance. It had no proper place in an adult world. A child (as Maria Montessori points out) was not to sit on the grown-ups’ chairs. Nor was it to sit on the stairs. Hence, having no chair of its own, it could sit down only when some big person condescended to offer it the hospitality of a pair of knees.

“Nec enim arbitror levioris esse operae Morum effingere quam Alexandrum magnum aut Achillem, nec illi quam hie noster immortalitate digniores erant.”

“For I do not think it a lighter task to paint More’s likeness than those of Alexander the Great or Achilles, nor were they more worthy of immortality than this man of ours.”

These words of Erasmus reveal the opinion that the greatest of his contemporaries had of Thomas More. On the friendship of More and Erasmus much history has turned and much history is beginning to turn even in our time. It is of surpassing interest to observe that Erasmus, the friend of More, was also friend of Franciscus de Vittoria, and that in his recent volume on The Spanish Origin of International Law Professor James Brown Scott introduces the work of Vittoria by reference to the Utopia of More and the Institutes of a Christian Prince of Erasmus.

Those who find a congenial atmosphere in movements to preserve our countryside, to alleviate the lot of the working-class or to make marriage easier, will meet in Mr. Gill's writings a different level of criticism. He belongs to the small class of critics who have penetrated the merely symptomatic maladjustments of industrialism to conduct an arduous enquiry into the nature of its revolutionary achievements. He is the critic of the Leisure State. It is customary to refer to the Leisure State as the end towards which we are tending. But industrialism began four centuries ago and in that time has succeeded to such an extent in its revolutionary programme that it is reasonable to maintain that we are already living in a society which, if it has any positive form at all, is a Leisure State. That it is also a Servile State, that its leisure is more commonly unemployment or a highly lucrative opportunity for those in the entertainment trade, is explained away both by capitalists and communists; the former pleading for time to realise a more dignified Leisure State, the latter demanding the power to clean up rapidly the messy beginnings of others.

Comparing his own book with M. Maritain's Art and Scholasticism, Mr. Adler says of the latter that it is “for me the best analysis of fine art.” He continues: “The scope of that is more general than this. I am concerned primarily with one problem and, moreover, with that problem as it occurs in the special case made by the cinema as a fine art. The attempt to apply everything that is relevant in the intellectual tradition to this contemporary problem necessarily requires some interpretation and extension of the basic texts I have relied upon. To this extent, and only to this extent, my work has been constructive.” These words of the author fully outline the scope and nature of his work, but not I feel, with the right emphasis.

The book, with its seven hundred pages of texts and notes, may be only “an interpretation and extension of basic texts,” but the result is almost of a different order to the sources of his texts. Without wishing in the least to underestimate the importance of his sources, it would be more accurate to see in this a work of a different kind, and something of equal importance.

“There is no reason in the world” wrote Augustus Welby Pugin, “why noble cities, combining all possible convenience of drainage, water-courses, and conveyance of gas, may not be erected in the most consistent and yet Christian character.” There is, in this engaging statement, an implication which Pugin, alas, did not see. “Our domestic architecture,” he had said very truly, “should have a peculiar expression illustrative of our manners and habits”; but these latter he chose unfortunately to regard as identical with those of earlier ages, despite the fact that the earlier ages were in no position to convey gas. “We are such men as our fathers were, and therefore should build as they built”; so his argument is summarized. Hence his campaign to revive an architectural form which centuries earlier was already played out; a campaign whose success resulted in that torrential and continuous downpour of brussels sprouts from which we are only now beginning to emerge. “The point,” Mr. Trappes-Lomax tells us, “was not whether St. Peter’s might be tolerable in Rome, and Notre Dame in Paris; it was whether the Church in England was to be English or Italianate.” The first tragedy was that Pugin identified Gothic with English; the second, that in the general struggle between English and Italianate parties, while in architecture Italy came out, in the event, defeated, in the sphere of worship she so largely carried the day.

“We went on up the narrow strait, thus anxiously. On this side lay Scylla . . . on that Charybdis.” In the Odyssey of every Christian there are times and places when the words of Homer strike home. Worship and personal prayer are essential to him as motive forces directing his journey “up the narrow strait”; and in his living experience both are beset by the two monsters that lie within bow-shot of his anxious passage, routine and pietism. The one springs from misapprehending the rôle of corporate worship, the other from over-absorption in individual devotion. As there is little steerage way there must always be sufficient impetus to keep the frail craft moving straight ahead, responsive to every touch of the helmsman. Individual temperament will give an inclination to one side or the other: the scrupulous towards self-absorption and the easy-going to mechanical routine.

The same difficulty holds good in some degree for group worship with its tendency to divagate towards high-and-dry formalism or towards an unstable revivalism. Each extreme marks the over-emphasis of one of the two essential coordinates of worship, a disciplined cultus and personal responsiveness. In the history of the Church the scales have moved successively up and down without irrevocably destroying the careful balance, though the individualist side has tended to be outweighed, since corporate devotion has a constant bias towards formalism, and the movements back have been sudden and violent in character.

The following scientific reviews have been founded by Dominicans. One of the oldest is the Revue Biblique of Jerusalem dating from 1892. Not only is it the oldest review of biblical studies published by Dominicans, but also the oldest published by any Catholics. Nevertheless it is not our oldest review, for the Divus Thomas of Fribourg, contributed to from its very beginning by the Dominicans, and confided to their sole charge in 1923, was founded by the secular clergy as far back as 1886. The Revue Thomiste, whose first director was Pére Coconnier of the Province of Toulouse and a professor at Fribourg, dates from 1893. These reviews, philosophical and theological, were the first signs of the approaching revival of Thomism in the Church, so gloriously sponsored by Leo XIII. Other reviews of a like kind have been added to the above, and have rendered yeoman service to the Church. I will name the principle ones in their order of age. The Homiletic and Pastoral Review, founded at Washington in 1901, especially intended for the use of the clergy, is a quarterly and has a great circulation. La Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Théologiques, directed by the Dominican Fathers of Le Saulchoir, was established in 1907. Owing to the value of its articles and its Bulletins it is unequalled by any other review in Catholic universities or even in the scientific world. We must associate with it the Bulletin Thomiste, founded in 1924 by Pére Mandonnet for the purpose of collating all publications which treat of Thomistic thought or the Thomist movement. La Ciencia Tomista of Salamanca, first published in 1910, has acquired particular renown owing to the valuable work done by its principal contributors.

Russian religious thought is experiencing an acute crisis. The mysticism which, in pre-revolutionary days, greatly interested certain Russian intellectual circles has now reached its full development among thinkers grouped around the Russian Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris; a “new school of theology” is even being spoken of. Occasionally this group has used the term neo-gnosis, or orthodox gnosis, to describe their particular mystical tendencies. There is no question of a rupture with the Orthodox Church, but of a broadening of her doctrinal teaching, by the introduction of conceptions purported to belong to her traditions, though discarded by the official Church. So, in the name of these traditions, Fr. Bulgakov, head of the Institute, expounds a so-called sophiological doctrine based upon the conception of a hypostatized divine Wisdom, idea (in the Platonic sense) of the creation co-etemal with the Creator.

This doctrine is taught in several important works of which The Light Undimmed was written before the author's ordination. Fr. Bulgakov has subsequently developed his thought in a number of books, mostly published in Paris: The Burning Bush, The Friend of the Bridegroom, The Ladder of Jacob, Icons and their Veneration, and especially The Lamb of God, which forms the first part of a work upon theandrism intended to epitomize the writer’s sophiological teaching. We must add an essay on Hypostasis and Hypostatisation published in Prague, also a series of articles in Putj, Russian philosophical periodical isued in Paris, some of which are noteworthy as they explain the writer’s intellectual evolution.

“It is not good for man to be alone: man is ‘alone’ when he is away from the turmoil of the world; thus monks and holy men build for themselves solitudes. It is not good, says the Lord, for such a man, a contemplative, to be alone, without a companion; it is best that he become active; let us make him a help like unto himself, that is, a people subject to him, who will minister to his temporal, as he to their spiritual needs.”

The contemplative life resembles Paradise before the creation of Eve! Or, to modernize the thought as well as its phrasing: man is meant to express himself in the art of government.

The quotation comes from notes which were taken by students from a lecture on Genesis, delivered in the Paris schools round about the year 1190. The students would apply it to themselves. For the present they were “contemplatives,” if not solitaries; their business, in theory at least, was contemplation which centred in the study of Scripture; and they were all potential bishops. Their lecturer passed dramatically to action from contemplation. From being a master of theology at Paris he was raised to the cardinalate, then to the archbishopric of Canterbury, and “expressed himself” in Magna Carta.