We take our stand on the phrase of Pope Benedict XV in his letter to the belligerent powers on August 1st, 1917, that what is needed is ‘a simultaneous and reciprocal diminution of armaments’and it is needed precisely in order to help the nations to an era of peace. No one doubts but that these enormous armaments are themselves a cause of unrest in Europe, of themselves they suggest menace and a doom.

But again it is undoubted that armaments are themselves not so much a cause of evil as a result of evil; they testify to an evil beneath the surface of which they are the outward and visible sign. That deeper evil is the one which is in most need of cure. It would be as unwise to attempt to cure our troubles by mere disarmament as it would be to cure a fever by putting ointment on the resulting rash, for everyone knows that armaments are a symptom and are not the disease.

That disease is selfishness, unrestrained desire to possess. It runs through national as well as international politics, it is to be found not merely in nations but in persons; not just at Geneva or Shanghai but in each of us. A gathering of Christians to protest against excessive armaments is in the nature of a confession. There would be no need to-day to have this meeting if we ministers of Christ had properly done our work. We meet here therefore not first to protest against others but to confess our own failure.

Seldom has a book, so massive and so erudite, caused such a widespread commotion as did Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West. It appealed to a variety of tastes. The preacher of imminent and sensational doomsdays has not lost his attraction with the decline of the religious sanctions attributed to bygone apocalyptics. But a scientific age demands a scientific eschatology, and this Spengler supplied. Popular science had promised only a long protracted cooling of the earth’s crust, or, in moments of soaring imagination, the possibility of a collision with a comet or an invasion from Mars. It was too remote to be really scaring. The morbid eschatological appetite wants the world to go out, not with a fizzle, but with a bang, and the sooner the bang the better. Spengler promised something at once scientific, catastrophic, and fairly soon; though perhaps it was not generally realised that ‘soon’ on the lips of this juggler with milleniums might mean quite a number of centuries.

But the appearance of these volumes—they were first published in 1918—was also well timed to meet a more passing mood. In those days of disillusionment it was gratifying to read this comparative study of the rise and fall of civilisations, this deterministic conception of repeating historical cycles, with its assurances that the signs of the times pointed to a speedy downfall of our own discredited culture. It was particularly gratifying to defeated Germany.

What are the relations between Christianity and the social order, between the Church and those societies in which men live? Sometimes the Church is blamed because she has not solved effectively the many evils which afflict organised humanity, because she has not stopped war, for instance, or issued a remedy for the unemployment problem. Sometimes, on the contrary, her teaching with regard to current questions is disdained’ as either too medieval or too corrupt to be of use. In any case, the assumption is there; she should have something to say to enlighten a world in darkness. Another factor that has increased the demand for a statement of the implications of Christian principles is the emergence of a new and formidable political and economic force, equipped with a fighting doctrine. Communism, with its practical and apparently successful realization in Soviet Russia, is a challenge not only to the capitalistic societies to which it is formally opposed, but also to the basic ideas which have formed the Christian tradition. Lenin, of course, identified the two and saw in religion nothing but a support and sanction of the dominant regime: for him as for Karl Marx it was simply ‘dope for the people.’ The fact that he was wrong makes it all the more urgent to clarify the issue and make the independence of Christian teaching plain.

This book is a commendable effort in that direction. It has a twofold aim. In the first place it seeks to give a systematic account of the history of the Christian Social Movement in England with some reference to its growth in the United States.

To those of us who reside in countries where Catholics and dissident Eastern Orthodox live, as regards one another, in practically ‘water-tight compartments,’ it would not appear that the death of an Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem (Mgr. Damianos Kassiotis, died August 14th, 1931) is of much interest to those in communion with the Holy See. Nevertheless, it must be realized—as it is realized in the Levant—that such an event has not merely interest for local Christians of all the ancient churches, but might conceivably result in events which would have significance for the Church at large. For the death of a patriarch involves the election of a successor; such an election involves ecclesiastical and even secular politics; and in the Near East politics of all sorts are fruitful of religious changes. Ever since, and even before, the break-up of Catholicism, religion in Palestine and Syria has gone hand in hand with politics ; and many of the numerous small mass-reunions of Eastern Christians to the Catholic Church that have taken place during the past three or four hundred years were directly traceable to ecclesiastical politics, and sometimes to grievances of a secular nature. Precisely for that reason some of them have not subsisted, and the reunion has collapsed in renewed schism, bringing upon Eastern Catholics an undeserved stigma of ‘tendency to disunion’; others have remained, and what began as a political move has developed into a soundly religious state of affairs.

It was recently reported in the Press that Judge H. W. Falk, of Los Angeles, had granted permission for microphones to be installed in the witness-box and at counsels’ table in his court in order that the trial for murder of a former District Attorney might be broadcasted.

An innovation so profoundly affecting the conduct of courts of law gives rise to questions which concern intimately the judicature, the radio and the general public. It is true that the case in point hails from the United States, where the judicial atmosphere is less rarefied than it is in this country, and where restraint in matters of jurisprudence is not a particularly salient characteristic of public affairs. Its significance lies in its being the first indication that wireless threatens to invade a department of public life which has hitherto been regarded as sacrosanct, as much, one believed, by common consent, whether for reasons based on sentiment or public expediency, as, privately, on grounds of good taste. Although there does not at present appear to be any likelihood of the occasion at Los Angeles being cited as a precedent for similar action in this country, it marks an appropriate moment in which to review certain aspects of broadcasting with which considerations affecting public policy and decorum are closely bound up.

Those novels about the Young Idea versus Crabbed Old Age, those films about Our Dancing Daughters, those Boy-Scout Jamborees, that Hiking Movement, that Slimming Campaign, that ‘Beaver’ Ramp, those foolish letters to the papers from alleged old colonels about the spinelessness and cocktails of the younger generation, those nostrums for preserving the School-girl Complexion, that glorification of Charlie Chaplin and Jackie Coogan, those prodigies of Jehudi Menuhin, those babblings of Gertrude Stein, that smile of Mr. Drage, that shortening of skirts and bobbing of hair, those Nazis and Fascists and Bright Young People—perhaps you did not even see a connexion between these things? And, so far as the newspaper stunts were concerned, perhaps you did not take them seriously at all? Or are you one of the crétins who swallow the whole thing?

Now Mr. Wyndham Lewis takes it all very seriously indeed. He has written a book about it which claims to be a ‘research, as “scientific” as any branch whatever of biology or chemistry.’ He has made a valuable collection of this nonsense from the press, but he does not regard it as nonsense. He sees a Sinister Purpose behind it all. The gigantic ‘Youth-racket’ of these post-war years is a put-up job. It is a machination of Big Business in its bid for power. It is baby-snatching on a large scale for the enslavement of Western Man.

By architecture we mean building considered as a fine art—that is to say, an art which subserves mental and not merely physical necessities. Art is primarily simply skill—thus we rightly speak of the art of the dentist and the art of the pickpocket, and there is great art in washing up. Upon this lowly base is built up the grand erection of human accomplishment. To do or make something well is the root of the business.

But as it commonly happens that human works are used by human beings as well as done by human beings, it follows that the idea of suitability as well as that of utility occupies the mind of the workman. Hence even in the simplest articles of use the two ideas combine, coalesce or conflict, and the chair-maker who sets out to make simply a thing which will fit the sitting human body finds himself involved in all the complexity of the problems aroused by the question, what human body, or whose human body—am I making a child’s chair or an office stool, a chair for the dining room or one for the bishop in his cathedral?

Thus has grown up the distinction between art and fine art. By art is meant simply the skill to do what needs doing or the skill to make what serves a physical use simply. By fine art is meant skill to do or to make that which is simply delightful to the mind. At the one extreme are such things as dentistry and pure engineering (though even dentists play about with gold stoppings for no real utilitarian reason), such things as working a London tube lift or mixing concrete for foundations.

If St. Thomas had not been born a Catholic, his philosophy would have brought him to Catholicism. If he had not been—or if he were not—by temperament a humanist, Thomism and the Faith were sufficient to make him one. These three, which meet and fuse in the human soul, are so intimately linked together that it ris impossible perfectly to possess any one of them without possessing the others. All three find common expression in the enfranchisement of the personality. Humanism in the full and real.sense is more than the incomplete humanism of the ancients; more than the atrophied humanism of the Renaissance. For in humanism there are two elements. There is the worship, the love, of beauty, wherever beauty is to be found. There is the realization of the personality in whatever sphere that realization is possible. And both Greece and the Renaissance failed in fullness in these things. If there be any realm of reality, any part of the university of being, whose beauty finds no echo in the heart of a man; if there be anything of life and its fullness to which his personality will not respond, that man is, in that degree, no humanist. In the same degree he will be, logically, no follower of the philosophy of St. Thomas or of the religion of Christ.

It need hardly be said that such a conception is in no conflict with the Christian idea of what is called detachment or of mortification.

The purpose of this article is to give some idea of the way in which Catholics in Belgium are attempting to deal with one of the most influential forces of our time—the Cinema. Under the stimulus and direction of the Dominican Father Felix Morlion, they have evolved a method which is at once intelligent and eminently successful. In England very little has as yet been done; and this brief survey may be of interest to those who realise the importance and urgency of the problem.

The rise of the film to its present status of universal predominance is surely unique in its rapidity. Between 1887 and 1889 Edison invented a toy, the Kinetoscope; you looked through its peephole and saw a series of pictures of somebody who was moving, awkwardly moving, it was true, but moving. The toy became popular; but it had this limitation, only one person could peep at a time. This restriction inevitably provoked the idea of projecting the pictures on to a screen by means of some sort of magic lantern, thus making them visible to a roomful of people. The instrument was made, and the first Vitascope was shown on Broadway in 1895. It met with immediate success: the Cinema, as we know it, had begun.

A FEATURE of the Japanese Labour Movement as compared with similar movements in other countries is the prominent part played in it by the agriculturist. It is as strong in the country as in the town. Roughly 10 per cent, of the adult male agricultural population is organized into peasants’ or tenants’ unions, a state of affairs which compares very favourably with the position in the industrial world, where the percentage of trade union membership is, according to the latest returns, only 7.5.

The explanation for this is to be found in the peculiar status of the Japanese peasant and the conditions under which he gains his living. It must first be pointed out that the landless labourer as he is known in England does not exist. The Japanese farmer is either an owner, or a tenant, or part owner part tenant, the figures being respectively 31 per cent., 28 per cent., and 41 per cent. This does not, however, mean that he is any better off than the farm labourer. The total arable area is fifteen million acres, which are split up among five and a half million families (33,000,000 people). The average family holding is a bare 2 1/2 acres; 35 per cent, farm under 1 1/4 acres, 70 per cent, under 3, only 10 per cent, over 5, and in all Japan there are less than five thousand proprietors with over 125 acres.

It is obvious that with such small holdings as these figures indicate it is as much as the Japanese peasant can do to extract a living from the soil.

My text is one of those which we are accustomed to carry in our heads without remembering the occasion upon which the utterance was made, and, partly for that reason, to hesitate about the precise meaning we should attach to it. It comes, actually, at the end of that great chapter, his thirteenth, in which St. Matthew has collected for us seven of our Lord’s parables, six of which, if not all seven, deal with the growth of his kingdom, the Church; the Sower, the cockle among the wheat, the mustard seed, the leaven the hidden treasure, the merchant seeking pearls, the net cast into the sea. And four are particularly concerned to point out to our Lord’s hearers that his kingdom was not, as some of them imagined, to be a clean sweep of all that went before it, a complete break-away from all human experience. It was not to be a millennium, in which all sin and suffering would have disappeared ; those who were partakers of it would not be all perfect souls, already confirmed in goodness and destined for eternal life. No, the new kingdom or ecclesia of Christ was to be in some ways like the old ecclesia, the old congregation of the Jews. There would still be tares among the wheat, worthless fish among the catch, side by side with the others.

It is a misfortune for those writers who base their character sketches on historic fact that they are tempted so often on to ground where it is necessary for the success of their artistic effort that they should form some conception of the reactions and background of the Catholic mind. In the recent past no difficulty was experienced in England in this matter. That reasoned and subdued religious temper which was the legacy of the matured Anglican tradition provided a secure fortress for the spirit from which the ecclesiastical archaeologist could sally forth on those delectable voyages of Victorian discovery. It was a time, too, in which historical episode had to bend itself to the slow movement of the lych gate and attune itself to the dust-laden sunshine of a rector’s study, to the ink wells and the long quill pens, to the Bible and the calf-bound books of sermons, and sometimes to those early, temerarious volumes of an Anglo-Catholic theology, before it could hope to reach the light of print. The broad lines of political history might be seized by some Whig historian, fashionable and remote, but how completely and with what slow content did this clerical atmosphere pervade the Tory camp. But it was never a purpose of the influential Whigs to concern themselves with monks and the old Church life and the Elizabethan priesthood, and it was in the vicarage gardens of the English country that such trees of knowledge grew.

Example is the best definition,’ says Sainte-Beuve. Far from it, say we. It is the easiest, as small boys find out before their preceptors. It is the test, the touchstone of definition, but it is not definition, so how can it be the best? French clarity, where art thou?

Now what is a Wowser? It would be easy to define by examples. Stiggins and Chadband were Wowsers with a difference : they embodied only a sect, a thing, virulent and intense; even if drowned in Dickens’s scorn of all the tribe. The thing was extant in his day (when has it not been?), but the inspired nomenclature was in the womb of time, if this be not an indecent expression by now (for the Wowser works like the coral insect, defiling words deep down by identifying them with defilement in his imagination, and he rages like the tempest against Beauty and her father, Freedom-of-Heart, and her mother, Simplicity).

St. Thomas’s originality lies in the fact that he made his philosophy a welded, organic whole including and co-ordinating in the sweep of its horizon the entire panorama of being. To understand the humanism which is one facet of his philosophy. We must understand his W eltanschauung : his vision of the world, of reality, as a whole. It is the aim of this essay simply to set forth St. Thomas’s teaching, hoping thereby to shew that his philosophy is humanist in what has been submitted in the preceding pages to be the true meaning of humanism.

Man is not to be studied as an isolated phenomenon : he is part of a design infinitely vaster than himself. It is of importance to realise that St. Thomas’s metaphysic, like Aristotle’s, is teleological. In exitu creaturarum a primo principio, he says in the Sentences, attenditur quaedam circulatio vel regiratio, eo quod omnia, revertuntur sicut in finem in id a quo sicut a principio prodierunt. He sees the birth of worlds, the march of centuries, as an emanation from the infinite, which in a vast sweep runs its course back to the abyss of energy from which it sprang. The Aristotelean idea of potentiality applies to the universe as a whole : each entity aspiring towards its proper actualization, the cosmos itself is viewed as ‘yearning,’ in the Aristotelean phrase, for its fulfilment. The desire of the soul for assimilation with the godhead is the supreme human example of this general trend.

Population is vexation,
Genetics are as bad;
The law of God perplexes me,
And babies drive me mad

Ostensibly to deliver a serious lecture, but actually to spread birth control propaganda, Dr. Marie Stopes came to Oxford. Her talk, which had been announced as a scientific one, soon wandered off into a maze of confusing statistics and sentimental appeal. Having tried vainly to disentangle these elements from the rest of the text, the casual observer must be forgiven for wondering whether Dr. Stopes is ever capable of either scientific or logical thought.

Dr. Stopes, who is a doctor of philosophy and not a medico, is a lively and amusing speaker, as well as a woman of considerable charm, but it is difficult to decide whether she is a sentimental scientist or a scientific sentimentalist.

Taking her audience into her confidence at the very start, Dr. Stopes, very prettily, asked them please to stop smoking, not only because it hurt her throat, ‘but because,’ with a slight feminine flutter, ‘I just don’t like smoking.’ Having taken this womanly prerogative, she launched into her unwomanly subject with considerable vigour.

This is certainly the very type of biography Scott would most have desired. For him history was the clash of personalities, was a sustained human drama; he could only think of it as dynamic, moving, alive. While he was moved by ancient things, he had wit enough to know that ancient things were but relics of a living age; yet because of the living age they were descended from, he was content with relics. His imagination supplied all the life that had departed from them. Yet, curiously, his imagination seems to have needed a centre on which to focus. Clairvoyant as he was, he needed some personal belonging of the dead to be put in front of him before he could see him as once he was in his habit as a man. Hence he developed an overwhelming passion for collecting the flotsam of heroic ages; to Lady Scott it was a tiresome interference with the orderliness of house-keeping, to Sir Walter it was the central need for his creative power to set itself working. Out of it his memory, working under the spell of the contact, was roused to see and describe the man and his age. The long sword of Montrose was the most sacred object of the shrine of Abbotsford; it not only pleased Sir Walter to see it, but it actually moved him to understand Montrose. There was a curious earthliness about Sir Walter; he might weave romances in the air, but he wove them out of the solid materials of the earth.

The cinema hoardings proclaim, if not so insistently now as a few years ago, the advertising value of the words sin and sinner. The devil is not regarded as a bore—at least by his nodding acquaintances. Vice is thought interesting, and virtue dull. Perhaps it is the fault of the novelists whose villains are more likeable than their heroes; perhaps because the notion of immorality is restricted now to the more exciting forms; perhaps because some of our vices have the reputation of virtue. These are the deadly vices, the deadly-dull. Virtues gone flat. Or, as St. Thomas says, the vice that looks like virtue; false prudence, for instance, and religiosity, and deadness to sense.

Anyhow, there it is, sin is definitely news. You remember how people flocked to the Albert Hall to hear The New Sin expounded. Only to be mocked. Similarly, the title and opening of a recent book on Buchmanism rouse the same attention. ‘It comes to grips with an unlovely subject,’ we are promised. ‘And’—the superb assurance—‘solves its riddle.’ But only to disappoint. (Pouf! call those sins, said the Borgia courtier squaring his shoulders, now if you really want, etc., etc.). Perhaps it is a back-handed compliment, but the Catholic literature of conversion is decidedly more thrilling, and does more than skate on the conventions. François Mauriac or Julien Green will point the contrast.

Making allowance for the fact that vice is often unprintable, and noticing the Buchmanite recognition of the pervasiveness of sin, this book still leaves the impression that the sins that matter are the indulgences That Spell Inefficiency.