All through his sixteen years as Provincial, Father Bede strongly held that discipline has no value after childhood unless it is self-discipline. He abhorred coercive and nagging methods of enforcing it. Under his rule the best had every incentive to do their best, and the worst all the freedom that God allows them to do their worst. He was eminently loyal to our Lord’s counsel not to resist evil but to overwhelm it with good. Like his Master he acknowledged openly that religion is the happiest hunting-ground of Pharisees and profiteers, and he never concealed his indignation when he saw one man’s evil hindering another man’s good; but his remedy was to exhort the good to suffer the evil, and so convert it—if haply it would be converted—to like goodness. He had a firm faith in the moral of the Beatitudes—that to the meek and persecuted alone is given all power in heaven and on earth to conquer the froward tyrant. He well knew that when any ruler makes this foolishness of the Cross his only instrument of government, scandals needs must come. He had to brave the saddening experience of more than one. But he was worried neither by them nor by the mistakes and failures to which his leniency might expose himself and others. Only the grace of God, he believed, could save the Province from disaster under his rule; but he confidently counted on that grace, neglecting none of the appointed ways and means of meriting it.

We have seen that the liberty of the Christian is, by definition, something super-human, absolute, inviolable. But if all this be so, how are we to set any limits to it? What room does it leave for rules and law? Are we not being so carried away with our idea of Christian freedom that we are being led to an anti-social anarchy, an anarchy all the more dangerous for being an anarchy of the Spirit? And in point of historic fact, do we not find throughout the history of the Church an abiding suspicion of such an exaltation of the liberty of the Spirit? How can we reconcile such claims with the demands of social law and order, with the well-being of the human community?

All liberty has both a personal and a social aspect, because liberty and the common good are bound up with one another. But does not this present a serious difficulty so soon as liberty be considered, not on the natural but on the theological plane? And is not this only to be expected when one passes from the order of the natural philosophy to that of faith? Is not the Christian, who measures his standards by God alone, free from the clutches—in his most intimate liberties at least—of every social obligation? Are we not to expect here a sort of supurnatural logic in direct opposition to the logic of nature?

Our first duty, now that war is upon us—and it will be increasingly our duty until the conflict is ended—must be to remind ourselves of what our attitude towards it should be as Christians. Morality is not Christian unless it is subsumed under religion; right action is determined primarily by our whole attitude to God; and in the context of war there is a Christian attitude of mind towards it in general as well as a detailed system of ethical principles. That attitude of mind should be our first concern now. In the litany of the saints we pray: From pestilence, famine and war, O Lord deliver us. War is set beside the other two scouiges with which God chastises the sins of the world. In the recognition of that fact, that war for the Christian is chastisement, lies the root of our attitude. For needless to say, the sin of which we shall think is not the sin of somebody else. It is easy, all too easy, to project the moral guilt on to our neighbour—in this case, those with whom we are at war. It is so easy that it is the first thing to guard against. It is not a question here of assigning the political responsibility. The drama of war is played on two planes, the temporal and the spiritual; on the one level we may as a nation be guilty or we may not; on the other, it would be the negation of all that Christianity teaches to regard ourselves as innocent. It is a platitude to say that the perhaps unspectacular sins of the Christian are more grievous than the spectacular sins of the pagan because they are a deeper injury to God’s love; but it is a platitude of Which we do well to remind ourselves. The first thing, then, is penitence: to desire, and work for, and pray for, a change of heart within ourselves.

One of the most terrifying of contemporary phenomena is the emergence of virulent anti-semitism, not in Germany or in Italy, not under this or that political regime, but within the Church. It is terrifying; because it means that the devil is active in the Church in a way for which there is perhaps no previous parallel. Evil has always been active in the Church; but it has taken the form of lust, avarice, ambition, pride. This is something far worse. The essence of Christianity is love, and understanding based on love. The essence of ideological anti-semitism is hatred, and stupidity based on hatred. One was shown recently some leaflets written, according to their own testimony, by a Catholic, and urging Catholics to unite against the Jews and their threat of world domination. They made painful reading because of their extraordinary vulgarity. But they were terrifying because of the sheer violence of hatred they revealed. One felt that one was looking at the naked face of evil. Suppose that the author of these leaflets were right in his contention that world Jewry is plotting to dominate the world, to destroy Christendom; there could still be no excuse for tearing the Christian faith to shreds in a way that no outside force, Jewish or otherwise, could ever begin to do. To disseminate this poison in the name of Christ is a betrayal that is only possible to a Christian. But in face of such a betrayal, all calamities to the Church from without are negligible.

With the publication of Mr. Shane Leslie’s Life of Mrs. Fitzherbert, which appears a little over a century after her death, the clouds which so long hung over the name and fame of that sorely maligned woman have surely lifted at last and for ever. None will more rejoice at a final vindication than will the spiritual descendants of the English Catholic body, to which she belonged, and which (even when appearances seemed most adverse) always clung loyally to her. Her fellow Catholics were sometimes puzzled at and bewildered by her actions, but remained convinced that ultimately she would be found never to have strayed from the right path. Dr. Kirk, writing in her life-time his Biographies of English Catholics, well expressed their feeling: ‘Mrs. Fitzherbert’s long and mysterious connection with George IV when Prince of Wales rendered her the topic of general conversation, more than perhaps any other woman of her time; but by her friends and relations, and by all who ever enjoyed her acquaintance, she has always been regarded with the most unqualified sentiments of approbation and esteem.’

To all students of her period, Mrs. Fitzherbert’s name and personality are well known. This ‘wife who for reasons of state had to pretend to be a mistress’ figures constantly in the histories, memoirs, pamphlets, lampoons, newspapers, paintings and caricatures of the entire epoch, by some sneered at as a light o’ love, by others placed on a level with the Valiant Woman of the Scriptures. Mrs. Fitzherbert’s father was one of the Smythes, Baronets of Eshe and Acton Burnell, her mother an Errington of an ancient Catholic family in the North.

‘Poor Whites’ is a convenient label, used indiscriminately to describe the white population of North America living in two quite distinct areas south of the Mason-Dixon line; the coastal area with its coloured people and cotton and tobacco plantations, and the mountain area of the Southern Appalachians. The material poverty that marks both groups has led the industrialized Northern States to lump them together under a common condemnation. Poverty is scarcely a virtue to men whose Calvinistic background once made material prosperity a manifest sign of divine favour. Hence the average New Englander, for example, bred in a highly acquisitive tradition had little re-gaid for those whites of the South, who had been left far behind in the race for worldly possessions and still lived in circumstances not far removed from those of primitive pioneering days.

In the case of the Poor Whites proper, who live in the Tobacco and Cotton States, economic and climatic factors have been responsible for their depressed condition. Before and since Emancipation the coloured people have provided the labour in the plantations; they are better suited to heavy toil in a warm climate and cost less than white labour. Consequently the poorer whites have gained a reputation for shiftlessness and lack of enterprise. The coloured population generally refers to them as ‘Poor White Trash,’ and the name has spread all over the continent.

Under the direction of the local committees of the K.F.A. film circles have been started. Very soon meetings were held in which authorised speakers explained the meaning of the film problem, and demonstrated that a film circle must be a nucleus of local activity in the sphere of Catholic Film Action. The members of such a circle form a bodyguard of workers in the great action for good films. They contribute energetically and in various ways to the realisation of the aim of Vigilanti Cura, and this not only by study and practical film labour, but also by participation in the propaganda of K.F.A. They are the people on whom K.F.A. can rely in the most difficult hours.

The film circle in Bois-le-Duc has already achieved much that is important. It has become active in the three most important parts of our task: study, propagation, and practical film work. Soon after its commencement this Film Circle held meetings, at which the problem of good films was treated in conformance with the Encyclical and short films were shown and discussed. It showed to the outside world very clearly its propagational character, when the local department of K.F.A. began its offensive at the beginning of June, 1937.

After the faithful had heard en masse of the inauguration of the world-film-action through a film-Sunday, about seven parochial meetings were held. At these meetings the film The Eternal Dream was shown, and at the same time the assembly heard an explanation of the essence and aim of the K.F.A.

The principal members of the Film Circle appeared as speakers and arrested the attention of the masses to the work of the K.F.A., through innumerable articles in the local Press, by home-visiting and other stimulating activities. In the domain of practical film labour also the film circle of Bois-le-Duc has turned to action.

People, and peoples, will often act, and still more often claim to act, because, as they say, their honour demands it. If a war be engaged in, whatever be the immediate motive of economic interest, imperial ambition, or fears for national security, members of the nation are encouraged to believe that the national honour is at stake, and examples in plenty are not far to seek in our own and other countries of the strong appeal which this motive makes to the heart of man. History indeed is not wanting to show that the defence and preservation of honour can become, under the subtle habituation of artificial convention alone, a most powerful influence even in private life. Intermediate between that and the actions of the public person of the State, the military and in their own way other professional corps have, and have always had, what are known as their codes of honour, for which men who have been bred in them will risk their money, their social standing, their very lives. At times, undoubtedly, the keeping of his honour undimmed is the only motive present to a man’s consciousness, so trained can one become to act in that light without hesitation, and as it were by instinct. But if we want to see the full power of attraction which it can exercise, we must look at the book where human aims are writ large, in the political sphere, in which the motions of desire are more striking, the risks run more easily appreciable, the effects more widespread, than in the lives of individuals.

Nowadays there are few professional critics who praise or condemn books for moral reasons. That custom, one of the virtues of the old Edinburgh, can be seen dying in the early Victorian reviews. For years critics have smiled good-humouredly at Dryden and Dr. Johnson for their preoccupation with moral values, and writers have laughed at Milton and Sir Philip Sidney for their desire to instruct and improve. But the decline is less noticeable among those who do not have to write for money, who receive their books, not with the publishers’ compliments, but through buying or borrowing, and are as a result more inclined to read them right through. Really most of us are ignorant of æsthetic principles: we are little interested in the Will o’ the Wisp incantations of La Poésie Pure, nor do we care to try the slippery path across the Crocean bog. To the disgust of those critics who wish us to judge by their own mysterious esoteric standards, most of us insist on having a little index of our own. There are many books, said to be masterpieces, which we object to for moral reasons, and will not, whatever their artistic merits, admit to our shelves. Against this attitude, which is at least as old as Aristotle, the professional critics have often fought in vain. Most of us still insist on liking books for other than purely aesthetic reasons, and, to make more popular a writer of whom he thinks highly, the critic has to stoop to our level.

The cause of the early neglect of Shelley’s poetry was certainly moral. He lived at a time when it was more than usually easy for a rather wild young man to make himself disliked. Most people were sick to death of the ‘new’ ideas which had fired the French Revolution and sustained the Napoleonic Wars.

In June, 1914, when he had been six years an active member of the Dominican community in London, Father Bede’s brethren elected him their Prior. He was unusually young for such an office—only thirty-three. To his other duties was now added the heavy responsibility of governing a community of religious men, priests and lay-brothers, and exercising authority and jurisdiction over them according to the Dominican Constitutions in all matters spiritual and temporal.

‘As you can guess,’ he wrote to a friend who had sent him congratulations, ‘it is all rather distasteful to me, so that I should be grateful for your prayers when you have any to let.’

Scarcely had he entered upon this new phase of his life when the European war broke out. England entered into it on the Feast of St. Dominic, August 4th.

He published in the Rosary Magazine a translation of the prayers pro pace, ordered by the Cardinal, and added:

‘All our thoughts are preoccupied with the war. Waking, it is perhaps our first thought, and sleeping our last. We have each of us friends and relations who have gone off to their ships or regiments to do battle for their country’s cause, and there are the far larger number of those who, at home, live the more difficult life of peace. Prayer, of course, must take a very large place in our energies. But we must add to that the activities of practice.’

The Order of Preachers enjoys an old-established reputation for learning. There is nothing to show that this was the cause of Cyril Jarrett’s first attraction to Dominican life; but once he realised that the Dominican ideal invites every Friar Preacher to be a saint, and all who can to be scholars, he made saintly scholarship the object of his very ardent ambition.

His record at school and his experience of himself as a student more than justified such an aspiration. He was docile to the teaching of masters and books. All the masters under whom he ever sat have testified with one voice that he was one of the most industrious and intelligent pupils that passed through their hands.

The course of study he had to follow at Woodchester and Hawkesyard was strictly ordered as a preparation for the ecclesiastical and religious state. It included logic, scholastic philosophy and speculative theology. He applied himself diligently to these subjects, passed his examination in them with conspicuous success, and was able to turn them all to good account in later life. To the discipline of logic especially he yielded himself with unquestioning faith and a rare obedience. It strengthened his methodical habits of clear, accurate thinking, speech and writing. About the time he made his solemn vows, and for some years afterwards—years during which he was very consciously forming his character in force and freedom— he indulged in much speculative enquiry into the psychology of the human will. His researches into this problem took him beyond his text-books; and he supplemented his reading by his own written reflections. This was in accordance with his habit of making and keeping notes of whatever in his reading impressed him deeply.

To ensure a full understanding of the situation to which the publication of the Report of the Archbishops’ Commission on Christian Doctrine has given rise, it must be viewed against the background of Anglican history. The upheaval of the Reformation tore the Church of England violently out of the living tradition of Latin Catholicism, but it did not place it completely in either of the main streams of continental Protestantism. From the moment of its final separation, it stood in isolation—with a heritage from the Catholic past, and a considerable infiltration of contemporary Protestantism. It appealed, not as did Catholicism, to a living voice, nor to a great interpreter of God’s revelation, as did Calvinism and Lutheranism, but to the primitive Church of the early centuries. Thus, while Catholicism invoked a living continuous tradition as final witness to the faith, and Protestantism, tending to ignore the interval between the Apostles and its own second founders, presented a new interpretation, Anglicanism, rejecting both, based itself upon an appeal to the earliest ages of Christianity, and created a tradition orthodox, sacramental, sober and learned, biblical, patristic and historical in approach, but dogmatic only where the primitive Church seemed plainly to have given its decision. Scholasticism, with its tradition of close theological thinking, was set aside, and so in the main were the systems of the continental reformers, and thus grew into being the characteristics of the Anglican ethos.

The familiar representations of our blessed Lady giving a rosary to St. Dominic are symbolical of a tradition, so tenaciously upheld by the Church, that she not only insists upon such representations being placed on, or near, the Rosary Altar in every church where the Confraternity of the Rosary is established, but forbids all representations of Our Lady giving a rosary to any other Saint.

This tradition has been questioned, being alleged to date only from the time of Alan de la Roche, who was born in 1428. This zealous preacher of the devotion of the Rosary, so it is insinuated, foisted upon a credulous public the legend that St. Dominic had been commanded by the Mother of God to preach the Rosary, and the legend has persisted ever since his day. Alan appealed to ‘tradition and documents’ in support of his assertion, but there are no documents, we are told, and there is no tradition anterior to Alan himself. If this were indeed the truth, it is amazing that Alan could have succeeded in causing his claim to be accepted. Even if criticism in those days was not so acute or perfect as it is in our own, it is difficult to think that there were no critics able and ready to show that Alan was romancing. We do no know if Alan was brought to book for his statement, nor have we found that he was accused of having invented or imagined it. But the later critics do not fail to emphasize the silence of St. Dominic’s early biographers with regard to the Rosary, pointing out that there is no mention, direct or indirect, by these writers, their contemporaries, or immediate successors, of the supposed fact that the Founder of the Order of Preachers was also the Founder of the Rosary.

Disregarding the various theories that have been put forward in place of accepted tradition, we offer for consideration the following facts which will be found both illuminating and authoritative.

Even in the abridged form of the English translation the Journals of Kierkegaard are not to be read at a sitting, or even in a series of consecutive sittings. Their thought is at once too concentrated and their range too vast. Covering his jottings and reflections de omni re scibili et quibusdam aliis over twenty of his most creative years, the Journals could perhaps be assimilated in scarcely less a span. Not, therefore, a book to borrow. But emphatically a book to possess, to browse in and to browse upon, to open and to close at well-spaced intervals which allow ample time for digestion, for assimilation and rejection. A book to feed upon, for it contains in epigrams and tabloid essays the marrow of his thought. But for that very reason a book which, consumed gluttonously, must infallibly produce biliousness and dyspepsia accompanied by dizziness and nausea.

There will be some who find Kierkegaard indigestible and nauseating anyway. And that not only for the reasons which he himself anticipated; the reasons which would reflect upon his readers rather than upon himself. Not only, that is to say, because ‘every man is afraid of the truth,’ and ‘between man and truth lies mortification,’ or because he sought ‘to tear the veil from human twaddle and from the conceited self-complacency with which men try to convince themselves and others that man really wants to know the truth’ (1153). Not only because of the ‘scandal of the Cross’ which he proclaimed, fully understanding that if you ‘act just once so that your action expresses the fact that you fear God alone and do not fear men: you at once “scandalise” people,’ and that ‘whatever avoids “scandalising” is only what, out of fear of men and human respect, conforms entirely with worldliness’ (1116).

Liturgy may too easily be thought to include nothing more than a somewhat archaic formula of public and official worship in the Church confined to the Mass and the Office of the day. It is true that these latter constitute the essence or core of the liturgy; but if we care to probe deeper than a mere study of chant and formulae and rubrics will take us, we discover beneath these a spirit emanating organically from the fundamental doctrines of the Church and the more primitive outlook of Christians upon life as a whole. The liturgical rites and ceremonies we now know did not spring from an early and undisciplined urge to worship such as is common in all primitive peoples. Though based upon this universal instinct, they were evolved through well-defined motives for worshipping in a particular way the personal God Whom divine revelation had made known to them with certitude and much understanding. The liturgy as we have it came into being gradually as the expression of a desire at once human, being based on a specifically human urge to worship, and at the same time intensely Christian, being the development and perfecting of that urge by the light of Faith and the inspiration of the Holy Ghost coupled with the human rendering of divine truth in the Incarnation. Thus the liturgy was the direct expression of the Christian mind, somewhat as the music of Grieg was, within a much narrower compass, an expression of the Norse mind and the literature of Shakespeare of the English mind. We might add that in the same way the very absence of effective liturgy is an expression of the Nonconformist ethos and the plain table and severe interior of the Scottish kirk the reflection of the Puritan attitude to life.

(I)

Now in those days Marcus Aurelius was Emperor and it seemed as if Wisdom herself in the person of this adopted son of Antoninus Pius, this disciple of Epictetus, ruled the Roman world . . . Nevertheless the Philosopher Justin, accused of being a Christian, was brought with several companions before Rusticus the Prefect of Rome, the very man who had placed in the hands of the young Emperor the Discourses of Epictetus.

‘What is your branch of study?’ Rusticus enquired of Justin.

‘I have studied all the sciences in turn and I have come to find rest in the teachings of the Christians, unacceptable though they may seem to those led astray by error.’

‘Miserable man, is that your chosen study?’

‘Yes, for the Christians possess the true doctrine.’ Rusticus turning to one of Justin’s companions, asked: ‘And you, what are you?’

‘I am Caesar’s slave, but Christ has given me freedom.’ But the accused men refused to obey Caesar and sacrifice to the Gods and the Prefect passed sentence upon them. Justin and his companions were beheaded.

‘I am Caesar’s slave but Christ has given me freedom.’ My whole discourse is based on this clear, this dazzling reply. My one object will be to make you conscious of its deep meaning. For to me falls the honour of bringing before you during these discussions on the subject of liberty in social life the testimony of the Christian, or, to be more precise, of the theologian; that is to say, of the Christian whose task it is to justify his religion to himself, to examine its structure and its inside workings.

Now that events have settled the issue between peace and war a new situation arises which demands the attention of the theologian in respect of the readjustment of life in accord with Christian principles. Many new elements have been brought into our lives, and we not unnaturally pause to reflect how, if at all, they can find place in the Christian life as such.

We are not without reasons, and compelling reasons, in support of our cause. Much as we may abhor jingoism, we must learn to distinguish it from authentic patriotism, a Christian virtue authorised by God and the Church. Yet even patriotism, taken in its fullest sense as a Christian virtue and duty, does not make the whole issue crystal clear; it does not diminish the realities of the horror and attendant evils of war, but on the contrary makes those realities more actual and those evils more apparent, urging thought as to the reorganisation of individual life to meet them. Patriotism emphasises the need of accepting readily the restraint and sacrifices inevitably imposed on all. Can this acceptance be a truly Christian thing, and can the new conditions of civil life be integrated into the Christian life?

There is much that will chiefly affect only one’s private life; and this at least can be accepted in a Christlike way, sanctified and made sacramental. Much has been spoken and written of the life of the Christian in the Body of Christ and of his share in the Sacrifice of the Mass, and it has rightly been pointed out how this participation dignifies human nature and how the quality of ‘alter Christus’ places a man, in some sense, higher than the angels, invited to embark, as an Apostle and Coadjutor of Christ, upon the conversion of the world.

‘Stranger,’ says Arete in Lawrence’s translation of the Odyssey, ‘this have to ask of you from myself; first, What man are you, and where from? Who gave you those clothes? . . . .’ Resourceful Odysseus answered: ‘It is grievous for me, O Queen, to give a connected history of my pains: the celestial gods have given me too many. Yet this I will say to meet your questioning.’ ‘Who gave you those clothes?’ is the question many have asked at the spectacle of Lawrence in the uniform of an Aircraftsman. Here is the answer to the question and the connected history of this Odysseus’ ‘many pains.’

The six hundred letters given in this volume form an enormous book of some eight hundred pages. They are written to bankers, statesmen, artists, children, private soldiers, Marshals of the R.A.F., M.P.s, Under-Secretaries of State; to Mr. Bernard Shaw, Lady Astor, C. M. Doughty, Mr. Noel Coward, Mrs. Thomas Hardy, and a dozen others as eminent. A single afternoon at Karachi produces four long letters, to the American typographer Bruce Rogers, H. S. Ede of the Tate Gallery, Mrs. Thomas Hardy, and E. M. Forster. Without learning the sensational and the unnecessary we have given us, probably finally, the substantial man in all his complexity. Some indeed of the letters, revealing the depths of suffering to which he subjected himself in the Army, make such painful reading that one might wonder why his friends have given them to the world. It is true that no English figure since, perhaps, Lord Byron had attained so great a ‘news-value’; but this was clearly not the motive of those who loved him and have revealed his confessions to the world.