Those of us with a taste for idle speculation may be tempted to wonder how Goethe would have turned out if he had been born in Munich or Vienna instead of in Protestant Frankfurt and gone to school with the Jesuits. Voltaire, we may recall, was a pupil of theirs; and a certain respect for his old masters never left him. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that in the absence of any direct Catholic contacts in Goethe’s early years it was from Voltaire and the Encyclopedists that he acquired his first notions about the Church. For although the young poet reacted against the French classical tradition in verse which Voltaire represented, he was like the whole age in which he lived deeply influenced by French writings. How far the Voltairean attitude towards the Church in the eighteenth century was justified it is difficult for us to realise in an age happily free from gross ecclesiastical abuses. As we know, Voltaire did not limit himself to attacking abuses. That the period in which Goethe grew up was one in which the Church had largely lost the allegiance of the intellectual world must regrettably be admitted. As for the Protestantism in which the poet was educated, it was a dull and formal affair from which the genuine enthusiasm of the Reformation had long since evaporated, and it was rent by internal dissensions. It could not but be wholly unsatisfying to Goethe's genius; and since the ‘paganism’ of his temperament and the prejudices of his youth prevented him from ever considering Catholicism seriously, he evolved a religion of his own out of the various elements he collected in the course of his reading and experience. In this he was typically modern.

When the Cistercians decided to establish themselves in the wilds of Yorkshire and set about cultivating the waste land at ‘Fountains’, building their cells, offices and Abbey Church, the outward sign of their faith was in Labour, and hard at that. The uncultured country men of the neighbourhood were soon drawn into this great activity; not only stonemasons and tillers of the soil but tradesmen of all kinds gravitated to the site, caught up in the exuberance of those who were setting up a home they purposed to share with Almighty God. It followed that in the course of two or three generations the buildings were finished, the pictures of adornment painted, the images of veneration carved and on their pedestals, the vestments woven—and an understanding of Peace born in the midst of this now large community so that even the young men, whose great grandfathers and great great uncles had begun the work in a previous century, began to realise why God had rested on the seventh day in the Creation of the world. The stones continued to cry out, the statues and capitals to shine their benediction, the choir to echo with the prayer and praise of the Religious, but the sense of urgency and achievement was no longer reflected in the lives of the people as when the great stones were being quarried and carted, shaped and lifted into their appointed places for him who was to be their daily bread for ever and ever. Amen.

Father MacLaren in his Aquinas Paper, Private Property and the Natural Law, builds his thesis around the question of the interpretation of such statements from the papal encyclicals on the social question as: ‘The right to own private property has been given to man by Nature, or rather by the Creator himself’. What do such statements mean? he asks. ‘Do they mean that the right to private property belongs to the nature of man in the same way, let us say, as the right to life itself? Do they mean that private property is the only legitimate way in which a man can own material possessions? In other words, is private property an absolute right completely excluding any other way of possessing material things?’ I should agree with Father MacLaren in answering the first two questions in the negative but I should hesitate about the third, because it seems to contain a certain confusion of thought that flaws the whole argument in his paper and which makes a yes or no answer impossible. In other words, the question implies that unless a right is ‘exclusive’ it is not ‘absolute’.

Primary Natural rights, of course, are both absolute and exclusive. They flow from the very nature of man. Each is essential if man is to exist as man. Each covers its own field entirely. Thus, for example, the right to life itself. Secondary Natural rights are drawn from primary natural rights as conclusion from premiss.

Our Lord thought fit to send Christians into the world without a detailed code of moral theology. He had told them to love God and their neighbour, and left them under the guidance of his Holy Spirit to apply these principles to the very complicated details of the Jewish and pagan world around them. It was obvious they could not admit sorcerers and astrologers and the like, unless they renounced their manner of living. It was universally accepted at the beginning that the Roman stage was no life for a Christian. But what about Roman civil and military service? They did not have to decide at once since the members of this service were not thought likely to become Christians immediately. They were merely officers whom Christians were pledged to respect as holding their authority from God. It was to be for long almost unknown for Christians to have any part in an insurrection. Before any decision had been made about these professions soldiers were asking for baptism. At the beginning the only worry of the Church appears to have been as to whether or how long Christians could avoid taking part in the pagan religious rites or other questionable duties associated with the army and civil service. If Christians could avoid compromising themselves in such matters, it seemed that it would be good enough merely to demand of them a pledge to follow the warnings of St John the Baptist: ‘Do not use men roughly, do not lay false information against them; be .content with your pay’. (Lk. 3, 14.) Jesus Christ had praised the centurion without asking him to change his life.

Generally speaking, we may say that it is the conviction of the ordinary people of Poland that no country has been more entirely Christian from the beginning than their own. Our Lord was born in Poland, they might say, in the midst of a snowy winter and in a thatched cottage such as we still see today, and resembling those found in Ireland, in some isolated place in a distant forest. Although there are caves in certain rocky and mountainous regions in Poland, nevertheless they are remote from the; daily life of the majority of the people, and so scattered as to pass unnoticed. Moreover these caves have horrible stories attached to them. Either they are the more or less magical property of the devil who hides in them treasures of uncertain origin, or else they were used by the notorious brigands of the Tatras Mountains who have such a romantic history.

So then the infant Christ came into the world in the heart of the Polish winter and in a thatched cottage or perhaps under the tumbledown roof of a barn or in the stable of some poor peasant Szopka, a classical word meaning ‘Christmas Crib’ or a marionet theatre proper to the Christmas season, comes from szopa, a stall. The word seems to be connected with the French échoppe—like the word ‘shop’ in English for the pronunciation is the same, ‘sz’ being pronounced like ‘sh’. At any rate, in the Quo Vadis of Sienkiewicz, the giant Ursus in speaking of Christ ejaculated: ‘Oh, if only our people had been at Golgotha, they would have soon rescued the Son of God!’ Now we know that Ursus and Lydia, although unmistakeably borrowed from English tradition, represent the people of Poland.

In the introduction which he wrote to the proceedings of the Malvern Conference the late Dr Temple compared the works of Maritain and Niebuhr upon political subjects, and suggested that despite the skill and rigorous reasoning of the former his scholasticism prevented him from attacking the real, everyday difficulties of our present situation in the way which Niebuhr does. A similar complaint was made by Mr Lewis in a recent number of Philosophy where he spoke of the new scholasticism as having ‘missed the vital creative forces of our age’. If this deficiency is characteristic of the new scholasticism, if it be true that our modern schoolmen are really spinning webs of ratiocination in order to deceive, then the accusation is indeed a serious one; we hope to be able to show by a consideration of a somewhat, neglected aspect of St Thomas that the accusation, if proved, would convict modern schoolmen of treason towards their master.

Professor d’Entreves was expressing the conventional view, and the views which Dr Temple and Mr Lewis put into the dock, when he spoke of St Thomas’s theory of law as ‘the highest expression of an “intellectualist” as against a “voluntaristic” theory of law. It is the key to a proper understanding of that “rationalistic” bent which is one of the distinctive features of Thomistic philosophy’.

While it is generally realised that the vast majority of the ancient churches of England, built by Catholics for Catholic worship, are now in Protestant possession, it is less universally known that there yet remain up and down the country a few old chapels and other buildings which are a legacy from the ages of Faith and still used for the purposes for which they were erected; these include several instances of part possession of a medieval church, as at Arundel (Sussex), Broughton in Craven (Yorkshire) and Mapledurham (Oxfordshire). Others like Buckfast Abbey, Minster, Padley, Salmestone and Shorne (Kent) have been recovered by their rightful owners after centuries of alienation, and it is to be hoped that this process of recovery will continue and be intensified in the years to come.

The possession of these precious memorials of our Catholic past lays upon us the obligation of watching over them with unceasing care and sparing no pains to assure that they are handed on intact to future generations. The more we regain the greater will be our responsibility. Then there are the hidden chapels of penal times, often in the attic of a country house, or masquerading as a stable or warehouse, where the faithful met for worship at the risk of their lives, or at any rate of their freedom. Finally we should not overlook the fact that many churches of historic interest and sometimes of high artistic merit have been erected since the first Catholic Relief Act of 1778.

The gradual evolution of the imagery of abstract art and the corresponding growth in familiarity with its language have failed entirely to dispel criticism. The general acceptance that usually follows an established artistic convention has not been accorded this form of art and the critics of modern painting remain intractable in their attitude. We need only to mention briefly the already well known objections. They fall mainly into two categories which are diametrically opposed to one another. We are told in the first place that abstract art is based upon a series of symbols conceived in a dispassionately intellectual manner and placed upon the canvas with scientific severity. But then conversely others say that it receives its impetus from an unfettered outburst of emotionalism.

Each of these generalisations results from the limited sagacity of the critic. The former is actuated by an inability to enjoy and enter into communion with the spirit of a new iconography. The persistent dissipation of his faculties through a surfeit of descriptive painting finally deprives him of intellectual clarity, so that when confronted with the uncompromising formalities of a Braque, he is filled with an immediate desire for the emotive evocations of lesser romantic art.

But where is all this leading; what are these people trying to say? The underlying plea is for a human art, and eventually, although sadly unrecognised, a religious art, the demand is unconsciously being formulated for an idiom capable of re-integrating the complexities of life and transcribing them into a visual form.

The National Gallery has recently exhibited some of its earlier Italian paintings that have been inaccessible since the outbreak of war. Amongst these are two works, both by anonymous artists of the Florentine Quattrocento and members of the school of Angelico. One represents the ‘Adoration of the Magi’ and the other tells the story of our Lady conferring the habit of the Order of Preachers on Reginald. Although not of the highest artistic endeavour they offer a commentary on the aesthetic position of the great Dominican painter. Exhibiting a difference that is significant, they bring out very clearly the divergent aspects of the master’s style. Unquestionably the demands of the two subjects are not identical; even so the treatment accorded to the latter is more directly in conformity with the affinity that Fra Angelico showed with earlier traditions, and the painter of the ‘Adoration of the Magi’ displayed a greater sympathy with the new naturalistic trends although they were still in an experimental stage.

The composition of the legend of Reginald is notable for its simplicity and the absence of ornamentation. The picture is divided into two main groups by the device of placing a pole a little to the right of the centre of the composition, but it might be more accurately described as being subdivided into three areas. This division of the picture into several distinct masses owes a certain amount to the system employed by Fra Angelico’s master, the Camaldolese monk, Dom Lorenzo Monaco, as can be seen in the painting of ‘Legends from the Life of Saint Benedict’ which hangs in the same gallery.

Most men and women choose marriage as their road in life. They can and ought to sanctify themselves in their love and . through it, by using their rights as they would use any other holy thing and faithfully fulfilling the duties of their married state out of love. For Christians, marriage is a sacrament, a sensible and effective sign of the grace conferred for the needs of the baptised couple. Their union is sacramental.

One of the principal tasks for Christian schools and Catholic Action to do is to make the splendour and sanctity of marriage intelligible to everybody, to prepare and help people to live the married life of holiness. . . . Nevertheless, obstacles to sanctity, or at any rate hindrances to the easy and prompt exercise of the love of God, abound in this state of life. I am not speaking of the abuses and sins properly so-called to which married people succumb when they are unfaithful to the graces of their sacrament, when they despise the laws of human nature and the commandments of God. These sins turn men completely away from God and of themselves lead to eternal death, unless repentance intervenes. What I am speaking of is a married life that respects the rights of God. Husband and wife—and precisely those most in love with each other—run the risk of taking too much natural pleasure in each other, of monopolising each other and not thinking of God as much as they ought if they are to sanctify themselves and advance together in the love of God.

The realisation of the honour and devotion that are due to our Lady in Mediaeval and early Renaissance times, engendered a corresponding increase in pictorial representation of scenes from her life and the childhood of our Lord. It is not infrequent that the source of the inspiration and the materials are to be traced to the Apocryphal legends. The heretical trends they contain and the dubious authenticity of many of the accounts have long rendered them suspect in the eyes of the Church. Notwithstanding this, the mind of the mediaeval artist was particularly susceptible to the graphic and imaginative nature of some of the stories, besides they served to satisfy the desire for a greater knowledge of the small intimacies of the life of the Holy Family.

The arrival in London of the collection from the Munich Alte Pinakothek affords a unique opportunity to see the treasures for many people in this country; they will remain on view until August the 7th. The collection contains, among other things, part of a fifteenth century German altarpiece by an anonymous artist called ‘The Master of the Life of the Virgin’, this series being his greatest known work. It consists of eight panels representing ‘Joachim and Anna at the Golden Gate’, ‘The Birth of the Virgin’, ‘Her Presentation in the Temple’ and the ‘Marriage of the Virgin’ in the upper row; ‘The Annunciation’, ‘The Visitation’, ‘The Presentation in the Temple’ and ‘The Assumption of Our Lady’ in the lower row. The unity of the series is now lost because of its dispersal—part permanently remains in England.