Which is the true heir of Karl Marx, Communism, Social Democracy, Bolshevism, or Menshevism? This is a much vexed question. The answer to it depends on the angle from which Marxism is viewed. If we stress the sociological determinism of Marx, then the Social Democrats must be recognized as more consistent Marxists than the Communists; but if we stress fidelity to the revolutionary spirit, then the Communists show more sign of it than do the Social Democrats who have lost it. The Communists alone, imbued with the messianic idea of the proletariat, are really consumed with a crusading ardour for the destruction of the old world and the building up of a new. And it is because Communism, as distinct from Social Democracy, thus assumes a religious character that it is hostile to and persecutes all other forms of belief.

But what are we to think of sociological determinism, which gives Marxism the character of a scientific socialism and distinguishes it from utopian socialism?

Just as a particular life, though largely conditioned by material needs, is on occasion given a new direction by unpredictable forces of religion, culture, election and whim, so general history is determined by the stresses set up by forces that economics cannot measure, by the opposition of spiritual ideas, the incalculable action of personalities, the tendencies of the acquired prejudices, conventions and enthusiasms of a period. The econoinic interpretation of history, indispensable as it is, must appear singularly partial when applied to the sixteenth century. It is the merit of a recent book of Reformation studies — The Reformation and the Contemplative Life—to relate a wide and learned selection of facts to a significant aspect of the time, and to watch them in the medium of biographical religious psychology.

In the uncertain associations it evokes, Revolution is hardly a word with one meaning. We may deplore the revolutionary economics of Karl Marx and applaud the revolutionary pedagogics of Don Bosco. The Revolte des Anges, Lucifer's assertion of self-subsistence and equality with God, the insolence of our first parents, were (it may be urged), no less revolution than the subversive mission of Jesus Christ who came to overthrow the powers of Evil, the false privilege and the unreal values they had inspired.

Or do we prefer to call Christianity counter-revolution —perceiving in it the re-establishment of human-divine intercourse, ultimate incorporation with God, through submission and service? Perceiving in Catholicism the subordination of self in contradistinction to the Satanic assertion of the Ego; service among men as opposed to the primeval assimilation of the meta-human, the snatching at the high-hanging fruit in the garden? Must we accept counterrevolution as the more accurate Christian nomenclature? For Joseph de Maistre, you will remember, insists that ‘Contre-révolution ne doit pas être une révolution contraire mais le contraire d’une révolution.’

Indeed, thus considered, the mission of Our Lord, consisting, as it did, in the reinstatement of humility, as opposed to revolt against the Divine Mind, was essentially counter-revolution. Revolution, de Maistre goes on to tell us, is essentially Satanic in that it is destructive and not creative (‘car détruire n’est pas faire’). Yet, while de Maistre and his fellows to-day insist that the nature of counter-revolution is non-revolutionary and purely reinstative, it is yet insisted in the same breath that its constructiveness does not derive ‘from hope of restoring the past.’

Shorn of wearisome details the recent dispute between Sir James Marchant and the British Film Institute — which acts as liason between the teachers and the Cinema Trade— reveals the disquieting fact that a complete mechanical education is to be part of our conditioned life of tomorrow. The teacher already challenged by robot Radio is to be superseded by the Talkie Educator; and even a Peoples’ Cinema University.

The Cinema Trade offers itself as an instrument in the cause of education; it would say:

‘You teachers know little of film technique, and for our part we know little about teaching; let us collaborate: we will turn out the films you need.'

Could anything be fairer than that? Make friends of the Mammon of Iniquity, of a giant organization involving some five hundred million pounds of capital, and chiefly controlled by an international ring of Jews!

A remarkable article appeared in La Revue Catholique des Idees et des Fails, Feb. 1929, under the title Les Juifs et le Cinema in which we are told that the production and distribution of the film in England, America and most other countries is directed by Jews with the intention of undermining, the Christian Religion. This may or may not be true; but when we recall the Jewish origins of Louis Meyer, Samuel Goldwin, Szarwassy, C. F. Bernhard, Louis Bernstein, Eisenstein, Eward Stoll, J. W. Rosenthal, Ludwig Plattner, Lupu Pick, Harry Day Levy, Denman, Hyams, Woolfe. to name but a few, there seems little doubt that the power behind the film trade is largely Jewish.

The story of the recognition and treatment of those peculiarities of the personality known as neuroses, or psychoneuroses, is one in which a good deal of charlatanism has acconipanied much genuine investigation. Differing from actual insanity, these states of mind are so varied in their expression and causes, that it was a long time before any very clear conception of their nature and origin was reached. That they are now generally recognized as having to a great extent a psychological rather than a physical basis is due to the labours of the Viennese psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, who by his special technique of psychoanalysis gave a different complexion to this branch of psychological medicine.

The interest in this study begins with the rise of mesmerism and hypnotism. Soniewhere about the year 1760, Mesmer, a young Austrian student of medicine, happened to see some cures obtained by the use of magnetised plates, and being attracted by this new mode of treatment, discovered that the human hand could be just as effective a means of magnetising as a metal plate. The human body was then thought to possess a magnetic influence, which came to be known as animal magnetism. Mesmer eventually settled in Paris, where he became famous! whilst ‘mesmerism,’ as it was called, spread rapidly throughout Europe. This aroused at the same time much opposition, commissions being appointed to investigate the alleged cures, the upshot of which was the denial of magnetism of any kind as a cause of the cures, which, though admitted to be real, were thought to proceed, like the illness itself, from imagination.

Let us be clear. The vehemence of Conservative reaction to-day is evoked not by this particular -ism or that; nor has it anything to do with objective examination of the remedial theories proposed. Its critical faculties are limited strictly to the apprehension of a radical programme only in so far as it is sufficiently practical, or not, to be feared.

Capitalism reacts, then, to nothing more specific than effective Revolutionary impulse evoked by the exploitation of the masses. And to the effectiveness or probable effectiveness of the impulse, the vigour of Conservative reaction is strictly relative. For the powers of this world deal not in absolute value but effect. Let us suffer no illusion. We do not doubt that were Catholics sufficiently keen and sincere, sufficiently devoted to the leadership of the Pope to be feared in the world politic, the Social encyclicals of Pius XI would be in no time apprehended as heralding a revolution so complete (because so absolute and profoundly moral) that it would in effect surpass the wildest dreams of an oppressed proletariat (and the most fearful nightmares of the pocket-conscious). Once again, as before when it suited the mood and the expedients of the time, the Pope would be dubbed Anti-Christ. The World is ever wont to perceive heresy in its opponents.

We have spoken of dissent among the Elect. Of the alacrity with which the Bien-pensant perceive a heresy. By a diabolical ill-chance—and something more than chance—revolution in nine cases out of ten allies itself to a heresy. But it is our present business to urge that that heresy is not necessarily identifiable with the revolutionary impulse itself.

The importance of private property as one of the fundamental institutions of a Christian State is the central idea of all Catholic thought on social reconstruction, and the widest possible extension of property among the community is regarded as an essential requirement of social justice. It is, however, too readily assumed by many that a diffusion of private ownership of productive property, whether it be in the form of land or the possession of any craft or business, would of itself provide a solution to most of the problems that now afflict us. But a more detailed survey of the economy of modern civilized society will reveal the fact that few, if any, of its members can be entirely self-supporting, and that an interchange of goods and services is a daily requirement. However widespread individual ownership may become, this necessity for a constant series of exchanges on the part of the owners is the dominating feature of any civilized community. This aspect of the question of the reconstruction of our social order has not so far received the consideration that it deserves, but the importance of its bearing on social justice can be gauged by a brief examination of the peculiar nature of property in our economic system.

Whenever Catholics speak of private property as being natural to man, and, having regard to his condition of susceptibility to the effects of original sin, as the arrangement most conducive to social harmony, and argue from this that ownership implies the right of the possessor to the unlimited return or profit accruing from its use, it is seldom remembered that property as possessed in the majority of cases to-day depends €or its value on the functioning of a highly complex and interdependent series of economic operations.

The Reformation in Wales has until recently proved something of an enigma to historians. It was common knowledge that the new doctrines were at first detested by the Welsh, that there was no nucleus of Calvinism, as in England, to give momentum and drive to the Reform movement, nor could there be a sense of antagonism between national prestige and the political expression of continental Catholicism. The English government, no less than the Catholic powers abroad, were fully aware of the possibility of an armed rising in defence of the old religion, though the extent of the danger was a matter of debate. It has been said of the Celts that ‘they went forth to the battle but they always fell.’ In this instance, however, it was precisely in so far as they did not go forth to battle that they fell. Catholicism withered, and the nineteenth century found Wales the home of a type of Protestantism of whose spiritual and literary qualities the poetry of William Williams of Pantycelyn and Ann Griffiths is sufficient evidence.

The historical causes of this religious and cultural revolution remained for a variety of reasons almost unexplored, so far as the general reader is concerned, until the appearance last year of Fr. David Mathew’s book The Celtic Peoples and Renaissance Europe.’ Not only is this a book of considerable penetration and brilliance, but it also supplies a need which is at once new and pressing.

Giacomo Tommaso Del Vio named Caietanus from his birthplace, Gaieta, died in the autumn of 1534. He had been a Cardinal for the last seventeen years, had been chosen as the Dominican Master General when he was only thirty-nine, and had been employed as Papal legate in Hungary and at the Imperial Diet. His influence upon church policy had been exercised through four pontificates; he had been the councillor of Julius II, the intimate of Leo X, had helped to achieve the election of Adrian VI and had been the minister of Clement VII in the last years of his reign. Much of his public life had been marked by the conventional felicity of that of a high curial official in Medicean Rome; a Neapolitan by birth, barely noble and quite without inherited influence he would seem to have been first marked for preferment by the favour of Duke Ludovico Sforza; he had come to the Roman court as a familiar of the Caraffa, had owed his Cardinalate to the almost personal friendship of Leo X and then slowly earning the confidence of Charles V he had gained the sometimes hesitant support of the Imperialist grouping in the sacred college.

Throughout he had possessed that recognition as a genius so valuable to a Renaissance statesman, for he had shared in precisely those qualities that the men of the Renaissance valued; a subtle sense of words, a fluent scholarship, distinction as a diplomatist due to a careful recognition of the realities of each situation, and a plastic memory, that favourite prodigy of the 16th century.

Our only English Dictator, Cromwell, has suffered from being sandwiched between a martyred and a merry monarch. And his rule of the Saints was not more acceptable to Cromwell’s contemporaries than his memory has been to us. But to-day, confronted by the prospect of everlasting government, not by Dictators, but Cunctators, we are changing front and on all sides above the click of knitting needles, the clink of port-glass or the clank of trucks, hear the cry: ‘We want a Mussolini.’

Rather more than a century ago, our attitude to the great revolutionary Corsican was to make a bogey of him: ‘Boney will get you.’ Then we opposed foreign political revolutions while inaugurating our own more fundamental Industrial one; to-day we admire the foreigners’ polity and only fight shy of it because it may involve a new economic system also. We cannot help thinking that we might like the Soviets no more than the Saints.

The Holy Father’s ideas concerning Catholic Action have not always been fully understood or exactly interpreted. This is especially true with regard to the relations between Catholic Action, as he envisages it, and the Catholic Social Movement which traces its origin to Leo XIII. It has even been asserted that there is a difference, not to say divergence, between the thought of the two Popes, and that Catholic Action is to supersede the Catholic workers’ organizations, which, it is maintained, have become infected with the materialism they set out to combat, and have, although rejecting class war, brought into the Catholic community a principle of class division inimical to unity among Catholics. On this view, Catholic Action, universal and spiritual, comes as a happy substitute for the social movement inaugurated by Leo XIII.

Others, themselves involved in the workers’ organizations, are apt to consider social action as the highest if not the only form of Catholic Action, forgetting that the term has been given by Pius XI a specific technical meaning which, if not entirely new, conveys a new significance—’ the participation of the laity in the hierarchical apostolate of the Church.'

If we seek for the origins of the term ‘Catholic Action,’ it cannot be denied that there is continuity between the thought of the last five Popes. Pius IX on various occasions called for action from Catholics; Leo XIII exhorted at once to Christian social democratic action and to Catholic action;

During the Middle Ages no two works were more popular than the City of God and Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. To the former Charlemagne listened at meals : ‘Inter caenandum aut aliquod acroama aut lectorum audiebat .... Delectabatur et libris Sancti Augustini praecipueque his qui De Civitate Dei praetitulati sunt.’ A generation later Alfred in England translated the Consolation, ranking it together with the Regula Pastoralis and Bede’s Ecclesiastical History as a fitting instrument for the education of his people. Already Boethius had coloured the great Anglo-Saxon secular epic Beowulf with the influence of his thought, just as in later years Chaucer interpreted Boccaccio with the insight of the Consolation, tinting the Italian’s realism with the compassion that springs from that bond uniting God and man, alternus amor. To Boethius, introducing Aristotle to Western Europe, scholasticism is as much indebted as to the Arab commentators. For if Averroes and Avicenna led Albert the Great and Aquinas to Aristotelian nietaphysics it was Boethius who had provided the basis of scientific thought in translating into Latin the Organon and annotating in the style of Themistius the Isagoge of Porphyry. Through Cassiodorus again he established the ratio studiorum, the trivium and quadrivium, which remained substantially unchanged until the seventeenth century. To Dante he is the eighth light, of the company of St. Thomas and Richard of St. Victor, ‘si trovan molte gioie care e belle tanto che non si posson trar del regno!’ Boethius has fallen into an obscurity that on all counts is undeserved.

In his recent booklet on The Catholic Conscience, Fr. Joseph Keating, S.J., states that ‘the chief obstacle to the conversion of the world to the Catholic Faith is not the opposition of its enemies, but the unworthiness of those who already possess it,’ and lie goes on to ask. ‘Why are Catholics not conspicuously better than those less bountifully endowed?’ May not the answer lie in part in a relative lack of emphasis on the practice of the simple Christian virtues, and a certain absence of precision in working out the practical application of these virtues to the circumstances of everyday life?

The problem is of course, the attainment of a true balance; we need a perception of the relative importance of the different factors of the Christian life. A discussion of this sort is apt to seem ungracious in the midst of so much that is excellent, yet it may be argued that, just as the activities and outlook of the individual tend to become unbalanced and call for adjustment, so also does the Catholic. body in this country need from time to time to review its position and restore its equilibrium.

External circumstances are constantly changing, and in this matter of the Christian virtues the attitude of the world differs greatly from what it was in the not distant past. As a sequel to the general lack of confidence in religious doctrine, it has become customary to doubt those things which have been commonly associated with religion; and aided by the ingenuity of the playwright, the novelist, the scientist and the philosopher, each of the Christian virtues has been examined with suspicion, and speciously undermined.

The first impression of many priests on reading A Catholic Plea for Reunion ‘ is likely to be: Why! here is a man saying a number of things which I have often said myself or heard others say; and putting them on paper with a lack of qualification that usually characterizes the convivial talk of common-rooms and recreations, but without the air of levity which makes things said in such circumstances very pardonable. There is a good deal here about the centralisation of the Church’s government, about the autocratic ways of our superiors, about the hair-splitting niceties f moral theology, about the multiplication of devotions and the frequency of the confessions of those who have nothing to confess, about the way of life and rules of nuns; all harmless enough in itself, though liable to be completely misunderstood by outsiders and when said with full seriousness generally betokening in the speaker a particular grievance or a disgruntled outlook on life.

All this forms the setting for a thesis fairly common on the Continent, but so uncommon here as to require in the writer’s eyes the protection of anonymity—the thesis of the Abbé Portal and Dom Lambert Beaudouin that corporate union between the Church of England and the Holy See is both possible and desirable, and that steps ought to be taken to facilitate the setting up of an Anglican Uniat Church in England side by side with the already existing Catholic organization.

‘Make him a farmer,’ used to be the hopeful proposal for the difficult member of the family. It was really a compliment to the oldest of the civilized professions—that farming might do for him what other occupations could not. In general, however, it must be recognized that settling on the land requires qualities of character all too rare and that the agricultural labourer, dull though he may appear to those who do not know him, must possess a resourcefulness of varied skill and knowledge beyond comparison with wage-earners in other trades. The Catholic land movement in the different phases of its development must call for men and women of at least average human qualities. It is to be hoped, however, that in due time its enthusiasts will find themselves able to give some attention to the value of the land as giving training and livelihood for young people of the ‘problem’ type. So far as ‘Catholic Action and Unemployables’ are concerned, what follows is purely speculative—a suggestion to the Catholic body, drawn from work done on interdenominational lines by others.

Turner’s Court Farm Training Colony is just off the London road, fifteen miles short of Oxford, in the Chiltern Hills. There are some three hundred colonists, divided among five homes, on a 1,000-acre farm; among them some Catholics, varying in number from twenty to forty. The Colony is governed by the Christian Service Union and provides for lads who are ‘unemployable.’

Machinery runs according to the laws of mechanics and not according to the moral law. This is not to say that the laws of mechanics are immoral, but simply that they are non-moral. Now the main principle of mechanical invention is the elimination of waste energy. Of two machines doing the same work, that is the better which costs less to run. This is the same as saying that the better machine is better designed for its purpose; for the purpose of machinery is to reduce the costs of production. The chief cost of production is human labour. Even the cost of materials is chiefly made up of the cost of human labour. Stone would be as cheap as dirt if it could be dug as easily. Petrol would be as cheap as water if it came down as rain. It is always labour which costs money. I leave out of consideration here the question of bank interest and interest on money borrowed. If interest is not in some way payment for effort it is usury, and as such an unjust charge, something for nothing, a thing to be abolished as a thing ruinous to society. It is labour which costs money and it is to Save the cost of labour that machinery has been invented and its use spread throughout the world. Tools are not machines in the common sense of the word. A thing is a tool when it helps. A hammer helps a man to get a nail into a wall. A chisel helps a man to cut stone or wood.

It is well that he died when he did: it were too painful to picture him still living in these days of betrayal of the victory for which he gave his life so joyously. He deserved to die in battle for France and Christendom, for his death was thus of a piece with his life. As he died, so had he lived—in action; fighting, as he expresses it, on the frontiers of every province of human activity.

During life, the instrument of his action had been the pen. Yet, in a sense, he was a writer only accidentally. Essentially, he was the citizen, and later the patriot and the Christian, who recognizes a duty and claims the right to influence his contemporaries. The authority he wielded was moral rather than intellectual, less doctrinal than educational: heart predominates over head, but since it was a good heart, which had been set true from the beginning, it was able to pilot him, gropingly but safely, through those early years of his public life when his range of action was foreshortened by an overclouding of his intellectual horizon. The return from agnosticism to the Faith, and from utopian socialism to France and Christendom, is scarcely perceptible in his writings: at least, in the earlier Péguy, the later is always clearly discernible. His ‘conversion’ was rather a rediscovery of the supernatural, conditioned perhaps by the realization that true love of neighbour exists, and is possible, only as a function of love of God.

To read modern lion-catholic philosophy at the present day one would really think that the world was presented to us ‘on approval,’ to such an extent does the conception of Value seem to dominate the discussions. Mr. C. E. M. Joad in the Spectator of October 6th last, remarks that four out of the five specifically philosophical books reviewed by him since the beginning of the year were to do with some theory of ‘Value. Dean Inge notices the fact in his God and the Astronomers, and has a whole chapter on the World of Values; while Windleband says frankly that what is expected from philosophy to-day is not so much a ‘theoretical scheme of the world. . (but) . .reflection on those permanent values which have their foundation in a higher spiritual reality, above the changing interests of the times.'

One would like to know by what authority Philosophy abandons its proper function so as to substitute appreciation for apprehension, and turn Metaphysics into a mood —be it optimistic or pessimistic. We will, however, make some attempt to discover why this strange, non-rational, man-centred change has come over non-catholic thinking.