In our present state of spiritual emergency must some form of economic reconstruction precede spiritual revival? This issue is dividing Catholic opinion. On the one hand Mr. Eric Gill writes: ‘Instead of doing anything about economics the moralists fulminate against the unborn child .... As someone said: “The drains are smelling—let's have a day of intercession!”’ And again: ‘The clergy are barking up the wrong tree when from the altar steps they talk about sin to people who have been deprived of the possibility of living according to common natural morals.’ Then Father Drinkwater: ‘The economic problem fills the whole sky, nothing, nothing, nothing, can be done until that problem has been dealt with.’

On the other hand, M. Maritain supports Péguy, and holds that if the social revolution is to come at all it must also be moral. He would go even further: ‘One is condemned to a work primarily destructive, if one wished to change the face of the earth without first changing one’s own heart, and this no man can do by himself. It may well be that if an almighty love really changed our hearts, the external task would already be half accomplished.’

In supporting the latter opinion, I submit, therefore, that it is just as bad an error to over-emphasize the importance of economics as to under-rate it. Prevailing conditions of life can help or hinder, as both the moralist and psychiatrist never tire of reminding us—but how far?

The life of St. Francis de Sales—1567-1622, still within the afterglow (or the penumbra) of the Renaissance—covered a very remarkable period in the Church’s history. Luther had been dead twenty-one years and the Counter-Reformation had gathered great strength in the interval, to which St. Francis himself later contributed in no small measure by his amazingly successful missionary excursions into the Savoyan province of Le Chablais. The Council of Trent, which embodied the true principles of reform within the Church, had held its final session four years before he was born, and these principles had been, and were still being, practically exhibited and illustrated by the astonishing galaxy of saints that adorned this new era of her history. The lifetime of St. Francis de Sales was contemporaneous with, or at least overlapped at one end or the other, that of nearly a score of the most illustrious figures in the annals of sanctity. St. Pius V, the Dominican Pope, from whose white habit the now established dress of the Supreme Pontiff derives, reigned over the Church for the first five years of St. Francis’s life. St. Charles Borromeo, St. Philip Neri, St. Teresa, St. John of the Cross, St. Francis Borgia were still living during his early youth, as also were the boy saints, Stanislas, Aloysius, and (a little later) John Berchman. Other contemporaries were St. Vincent de Paul, the three Saints Peter (aptly symbolic name for the day!), Canisius, Claver, and Fourier, St. Jane Frances de Chantal, St. John Francis Regis, and St. Mary Magdalen de Pazzi.

I write, first, as one of the ‘young people ‘ to whom the advocates of Catholic Action seem especially to appeal and, secondly, as a provincial.

What exactly is happening in this Catholic Action campaign?

Now and then, at the invitation of devoted men, a lecturer from London or Liverpool descends to harangue us on Catholic Action or to show us some phase of its workings. Who are ‘us’? A group of people representing 1 in 1,000 of the available Catholic population, rising half-a-dozen times a year under the stimulus of a dinner or a dance to 25 in 1,000 and once each year, at a Sunday evening cinema-hall Rally, to 100 in 1,000. And of this weekly or fortnightly band, Apostolic in its diminutiveness at least, who are the regular components? A few married women, a few teachers, a few working-girls; to four of these add one man —a clerk, a plumber, a custom-officer or an out-of-work.

Now, when the lecturer has departed, what in the main is the idea left uppermost in the minds of the hearers of the word? During the lecture they have been galvanized and uplifted by the nobility of the appeal; inspired with generosity, they have been impelled towards the brink. But, as the words which pass betwen them show, when they endeavour to plunge from that brink of noble principles into the complexities of direct action in their own private lives and spheres of existence, they are partly perplexed and partly dispirited.

Herman Bahr's death in Munich on the 14th of January awakened many literary memories. A patriarch in the world of letters, Bahr's name had been identified with many of the thought-phases that had passed over Europe in the last fifty years. Though an unbeliever for the greater part of his life, Herman Bahr astonished his friends and associates by returning in later life to the faith of his lathers, as he had astonished them by accepting wholeheartedly the old Austrian regime after being a political innovator, even a socialist. His mind was a prism which had reflected the colours of many men's minds, a sort of kaleidoscope which recorded the passing pictures of his time, but with a certain and very marked stamp of his own. This is his special claim to interest.

Full of sympathy with the world in which he lived, a sympathy which never left him—for he remained a young writer in spite of his years—Bahr was always the man with his finger on the pulse of the times, who felt instinctively every change before it had declared itself; he was the literary barometer foretelling every variation in art and literature before such variations were observed by others. He called himself and was called by others the ‘man of tomorrow,’ and when he appeared as the man of yesterday it was because he saw in some distant yesterday an inevitable tomorrow.

An essayist, a novelist, a playwright, a wit, condensing into words the thought-fluids of his time, Bahr's mind changed with every passing year, until it moulded itself finally within the philosophy of the Catholic Church.

During their forty years’ exile in the desert the Israelites were supported by the expectation of the Promised Land flowing with milk and honey. The same promise has often been made in our own day to the pale-faced city clerk and all city dwellers in their desert of papers and figures. A factory-ridden people is encouraged to return to the land, for it is said to be the only life fit for man. They are in bondage; they need the freedom of the soil, out in the spacious fields. The children of the Father of heaven are free; so, we are told, are the children of mother earth—in fact, we are almost led to imagine the two sets of offspring to be identical. Satan invented the machine to lash mankind in bondage. God means his sons to be free, following the furrow of the plough.

Freedom is not, however, the only advantage attributed to this form of life, for to freedom they add all the joys of living. The delight of hard muscular toil will be followed by relaxation in a comfortable chair before a glowing hearth with one’s children gathering round quiet and content. Is not Nature the kindest of mothers, and is there anything to compare for sheer delight with daily toil in the brown earth among the gentle beasts placed at man’s service? These are the fruits taken by the spies from the promised land.

This pleasant picture, however, remains little more than an imaginative one, having little resemblance to reality. It might even be a snare for the young romantic who does not care much for rational explanations.

‘Let the Consuls see to it that no harm befall the State ; that was the mandate given to the chief magistrates by the Roman Senate constituting them supreme in times of crisis. But even in the ordinary course of events the consuls were preceded by those bundles of rods encircling an axe, which signified the power of life and death. To-day this emblem once again means power, and those who wield the Fasces possess, or mean to possess authority which is supreme and against which there is no appeal. For some years now we have been accustomed to them as the standard of the Fascist party in Italy, and already, in rather more than a decade, they have been invested by British eyes with a host of relevant and irrelevant associations, for the most part noble and joyous, but among those who equate liberalism and liberty often sad and regretful. Yet even those many Englishmen who pass secure and easy judgment of approval on the new Italy may have found it something of a shock to discover the axe and rods being carried through the length and breadth of their own country. On the bookstall and in the hands of the newsvendor, on the political platform and even in the lapel of the coat, this sign has appeared with dramatic suddenness, proclaiming the birth of a new organization whose members are determined that the people shall pass the final decree, entrusting them once for all with the task of seeing to it that no harm befall the State.

In short, what we want is Catholic Revolution—a revolution transcending the revolt of petty anarchists but not ashamed of harnessing their energy and harmonizing their discordant outcry. Anyone acquainted with conditions in the U.S.S.R. will agree with me that with one fundamental obstruction removed no state could be easier and worthier of adoption. That is why we have spoken with some eagerness on the ‘unsponsored Bolshevism’ detached from administrative protection, and scandalized by the Capitalist-Communist symbiosis favoured by Stalin and Litvinoff. That one obstruction, I need hardly add, is the purely political value placed on the human economy. Nevertheless the transition from the political to the Metapolitic required for entente with Catholicism is not impossible. Long before the publication of M. Berdyaev’s works in England, contact with Bolshevism had convinced us of the subjectively religious nature of Russian Revolution—of the mock-metapolitic set before the Russian people, and the possibility of its substitution by Catholicism.

Are we warned by Austria? Less than a year ago we heard an Austrian Catholic declare that the prosperity of his country depended on an entente between moderate Radicalism and Catholicism in the temporal order, and co-operation in the national economy. For the Linz programme of the Socialists has much in common with the encyclicals of Pope Pius; both advocate a discreet State interference with unprincipled capitalism, both condemn huge profits. And Pfliegler, a left-wing Catholic, in condemning the incontinent greed and anarchical competition of modern Capitalism, in deploring the class war that these have made inevitable, does no more than endorse the Pastoral Letter of the Austrian Hierarchy.

The story of St. Teresa of Lisicux must be almost unique in the history of the saints. She was not quite twenty-five years old when she died, on September 30th, 1897, having been a nun for just over nine years, and many who, when she was born, were already older than she was to be when she died, lived to see her name enrolled among the saints. Indeed, her whole history from her birth to her canonization lies well within the lifetime of countless persons now living who would by no means willingly consider themselves old. This, remembering the traditional slowness of the Church in according her official recognition to the heroic sanctity of any individual, would have been remarkable enough had the stage of Teresa's life been set in public view : had she been a path-breaker in some region of active spiritual or social work: or had she been a martyr, an apostle, or a foundress. But her life, as to three fifths of it, was spent entirely within the narrow shelter of a provincial home of the petite bourgeoisie: and as to the remainder, in the virtual obliteration of a Carmelite cloister. Still more remarkable in these circumstances is the fact that canonization may verily be said to have been conferred upon her by publican Lunation even before the Church had set her seal to it. This inversion of the accustomed order of things has happened before, but then the subject of it has always (as one should expect) been one who in lifetime had already taken the public eye—one need go no further back for an example than to the Cure d'Ars or to St. Benedict Joseph Labre.

Dante belongs to two epochs—to what, chronology apart, we call the Middle Ages, and to the tendency known as Humanism. The De Monarchia belongs to the Middle Ages that are passing away, the Divine Comedy to the Middle Ages that live on, to dawning Humanism, and to the legacy of the Middle Ages to Humanism.

It is one of the commonest distortions in our historical outlook, and one of the hardest to correct, to consider Humanism as a negation of the Middle Ages. Such an attitude supposes the two epochs in utter antithesis, the second a revolt against the first, a total opposition of values, implying sheer discontinuity between the Middle Ages and Humanism. There are certain historians who go so far as to cut the whole of the Middle Ages out of the process of thought, joining up Humanism to Greco-Roman thought, art and culture, and taking primitive Christianity into account only in so far as showing the influence of Alexandrian philosophy. On the other hand, not a few Catholic apologists not only extol the Middle Ages beyond the warrant of realities, but minimise the negative aspects of that civilization, which they see as entirely and solely Christian. They too admit a discontinuity between the two epochs, with this difference, that they do not believe the thread has ever been joined up, in spite of the tentative of the Counter Reformation, or that, less effectual, of Catholic Romanticism.

Apart from their various controversial aspects, hinc et inde, this conception rules out any sociologico-historical interpretation of human process.

Many recognize in Mr. Hilaire Belloc not only gicat achievement of literary genius, with sincerity and courage, but also a realistic judgment of practical allairs which has over and over again been proved right by the logic of events. His considered verdict, on the claims of Social Credit is therefore an event of sonic importance. It is given in an article published over Mr. Belloc's name in G.K.’s Weekly for June 14th.

Few men of Mr. Belloc's generation seem to be still capable of the mental application, the few houi-s of serious reading and critical thought, necessary to form an opinion of their own about monetary reform. Some distinguished contemporaries of his are still unable to take in (for instance) the ordinary quite undeniable facts of credit-creation; or again, they cannot hold steadily in their mind (even when the); have perceived and admitted it) the fact that abundance of production has now abolished all excuse for poverty.

None of these failings can be imputed to Mr. Belloc. He realizes fully that we have entered upon a new’ epoch in the world's history; the long ages 01 scarcity, of man’s desperate struggle to gain a living, are over; for good or for evil, the age of plenty has come.

Science and invention, he says, have ‘made a vast increase of production possible. We have conic to an era of potential ahundance . . . This is even true, in a large measure, of organic raw materials . . .

A month or two ago, happening to be in Cologne, I looked in at the Church cf the Friars Minor to say a prayer at Adolph Kolping’s grave. Not that I felt that he needed any memento of mine, but because of those words he wished to be inscribed on the plain stone that covers his tomb:

The little sanctuary was gay with the first spring blossoms, golden tulips and yellow daffodils ranged around the grave flanked by two great brown laurel wreaths with orange and black ribbons, the colours of the Catholic Journeymen’s Association, of which he was the founder. And they drifted in, by twos and threes or in little groups, as they always do, sturdy fair-haired lads with heavy rucksacks and dusty boots and knelt down before their Father’s grave to give him of their charity because he desired it so.

On this occasion, however, I noticed that they did not leave the church after they had said their prayer, but moved off to a little table near the altar rails on which lay an open book in which they all inscribed their names, I thought at first it was some sort of visitors’ book, until a notice caught my eye requesting that no candles should be lighted before the grave nor any other rite performed that might in any way anticipate the decision of the religious authorities and prejudice Father Kolping’s Cause.

One day near the beginning of June Mr. Shane Leslie, in a letter to The Times, compared the Irish to the English as professional politicians to amateurs. It is a pleasing conception, the Mother of Parliaments retaining her amateur status, bringing with it a vision of a leisured and stately autonomy. At the same time there is something very admirable and winning about the continuous enthusiasm for politics that certain peoples display. But the admiration we English accord them seems to me to be that which we give to a child who is clever at his play. For a whole people to be politically effective, that was possible in the city-states of Hellas, it was the ideal of Rousseau, but, so we are told, it is out of the question in the modern nation State. We mark our ballot papers, having for the most part but the vaguest ideas of the particular issues at stake, and thus is the voice of the people heard; then and only then. But can this be really all? Are those only to be reckoned politicians who sit at Westminster or nurse constituencies? I do not believe it for a moment. The more benefits are conferred on us by the legislature, the more will our interests lie with it; and the more closely we seem to be entwined in the net of economic circumstance, the more we shall look to it for help and guidance.

The propaganda of intellectual Marxism in England is the chief concern of this article. All Marxism is intellectual in the sense of being strictly doctrinal, not sentimental, though it may exploit sentiment; and not merely ‘practical’ in the sense of valuing immediate ameliorations regardless of their relation to a general scheme and a final goal. The Communist Party of Great Britain, recruited though its membership is mainly from very unintellectual unemployed, is extraordinarily doctrinaire in its attitude to the matters on which it has to frame practical policies. This is as evident from the Daily Worker written for the crowd, as from the Labour Monthly, which aims to be philosophical. These two publications officially represent the C.P.G.B. and the Third International, and their Marxian orthodoxy must be taken to be indisputable. The National Council of Labour Colleges is also professedly Marxist, its educational reach is probably wider than that of the official Communist organizations, and if we consider it, as we justly may, as a continuation of the defunct Central Labour College, founded before the War, it is older than the C.P.G.B. and the Third International. It would be absurd for an outsider to attempt to adjudicate on disputed questions of Marxian orthodoxy, yet it can be said that the National Council of Labour Colleges, related as it is to the Labour Party and the trade unions, is not so exclusively Marxist as those bodies that frankly accept the leadership of Moscow.

A case decided in the High Court in November, 1933, can be reckoned another and final stage in the gradual process of freeing bequests for the saying of masses from legal restrictions imposed on account of their purpose. In spite of the passing of the Catholic Relief Act of 1829, gifts made for a Catholic purpose have been strictly controlled by the law and it is only by several steps culminating in the case of In re Caus (Times Law Reports, 1933; Vol. 50, 80) that they are now almost entirely free of legal fetters. In the following account of the law on this topic an attempt is made to trace the various stages in its somewhat complicated develoment.

The law, thought for so long to have been settled by the ruling case of West v. Shuttleworth in 1835 (2 My. and K. 684), was based on the Chantries Act, 1547. Mass, and gifts for the purpose of having it said, were of course recognized by the common law as part of the religion of the country before the Reformation. The Chantries Act, however, contained a severe condemnation of the doctrines of purgatory and the mass, directing that property disposed of within five years before the passing of the Act, for the purpose of enabling mass to be said, should be forfeited to the Crown. But the Act did not prohibit such gifts for the future. The idea, nevertheless, that gifts in support of priests, and for having masses said for the soul of a deceased person, were made illegal by this enactment spread among lawyers.

The economic causes of any political movement or system are related to certain fundamental needs or wants of man's nature and upon the measure in which that system claims to be, and is actually, able to fulfil those wants. In the purely physical sphere these requirements of our nature are easy enough to define. But nhen we come to consider the mental and spiritual requirements of man's nature we must at the outset make a distinction between what a man needs and what he wants, far there is great diversity here. It is true that in different ages different needs and wants will predominate, and that in one century the emphasis will be laid where afterwards it is bur lightly stressed. Yet because the human body has within historical memory developed far less rhan the human mind we may say thar essential wants of the human body are constant. The want of food, for instance or the want of warmth for the body. Without these wants being satisfied the body could not survive. Now it is especially to these wants—to the complex of living conditions—that I refer when I say that the economic causes of any political system are related to certain wants of man's nature.

Few, least of all the Catholic, will deny that the present social system with its manifest injustice cries out urgently for radical reforms, and it is to this task that some of the best Catholic minds in Spain are now applying themselves. The main problem is to win back the masses to the Church and to convince them that a true remedy for the social ills that afflict society is to be found in the papal encyclicals, and there alone. That the task is a difficult one will be realized from an analysis of Spain’s political panorama as it affects the proletariat. At the present time liberalism, democracy, and ‘reformist’ socialism are engaged in a life and death struggle for survival. A clear-cut alignment of social forces is taking place through the gradual elimination of all intermediary or ‘compromise’ parties. The issue daily narrows itself down to the choice between ‘integral’ Marxism and one of the brands of anti-Marxist Fascism; a Soviet workers’ republic or a strong government able to alter the whole structure of the State and introduce a measure of planned economy. Social unrest is no new feature in Spanish history of the twentieth century, but never has it reached such aggravated proportions as to-day. The introduction of lay education has provided the revolutionary parties with a rich recruiting ground, a none too surprising fact if we consider that no less a person than Léon Blum, the French Socialist leader, once declared in a moment of frankness, ‘Give me the lay school, and I guarantee to provide you with a generation of revolutionaries.’

It is not merely because these words are penned in an hotel under the shadow of the Cathedral of Ghent that I remark upon certain associations between Belgium and Wales, certain important lessons that Wales might learn from Belgium. Recent literary researches have revealed the debt of Welsh poets of the fourteenth century to the Flemish town poetry of that period. In our own day some Belgian social works have attracted attention in Wales. Belgium like Wales is a small country, much industrialized, and Belgium has also a bi-lingual problem which it has settled or is settling in a manner that Wales would do well to study. In fact, Belgium is one of the small countries of Latin Europe from which Wales might learn some important lessons.

But more than this; Belgium is one of the most devoutly Catholic countries in Europe and in the world. Now let us suppose that my fellow-Catholics in South Wales, who are mostly, one may presume, of Irish origin and very many of whose parents came there from Ireland during the industrial expansion of the nineteenth century, had emigrated not to South Wales, but to Belgium, what would have been their history? We may assume with some confidence that they would to-day be Flemish-speaking citizens of Belgium, would have adopted Belgium as their own country, and would be enriching its civic as well as its religious life; would have become one with its people. But in Wales it has been otherwise.

Transition and decadence are terms that are often applied to the literature of our time. It all depends on the sense in which we use them. Properly understood both, I think, can fairly be used to describe certain tendencies that belong to modern literature in general and to our own age in particular. There is a widespread feeling that we are in the process of changing from one age to another, that we are in fact on the threshold of a New Age. This may be true, but that the signs of the coming spiritual revival are to be found in the works of contemporary writers is an assumption that we are scarcely justified in making. On the contrary, there is abundant evidence to show that contemporary art belongs not to the beginning of a new age but to the end of an old one. That we seem to be on the verge of spiritual collapse is certainly no guarantee that immediate regeneration will follow.