Throughout the fourteenth century the great Mongol Tartar Empire dominated Asia. Under its benevolent religious policy Christian missionaries were enabled to penetrate to districts never before reached by preachers of the Gospel. With the exception of some Augustinian Friars, working in Persia and Armenia in the latter years of the century, these missionaries were all members of the Preaching or Minor Friars. Hand in hand the two Orders faced hardship and martyrdom amid the snow-swept peaks of Armenia and the Caucasus, on the barren wastes of Turkestan and in the burning heat of India, in the union and brotherhood of their Saintly Founders.

The word of the Great Khan in Khanbaliq (Peking) was law from the shores of the Yellow Sea to the banks of the Vistula, and from the Himalayas to Siberia. South of the Himalayas, where the Mongol horsemen had not penetrated, lay the Moslem Sultanate of Delhi, whose rulers were of Turki race. They claimed dominion over the whole peninsula, but even after Alaud-din’s conquest of the Deccan in 1330, their effective sovereignty did not extend far beyond the modern Bombay. In the south, among the native rulers of the Malabar Coast, its acknowledgement was confined to the occasional appearance of some Moslem pirate levying toll for himself in the name of his Delhi master. Away beyond the foothills, in the interior of the country, even this ephemeral authority was wanting.

As an instance of the work done by the Friars Preachers for the good of England, it is interesting to remark the part Dominicans played in keeping the country faithful to the true Pope during the Great Schism. This has not been sufficiently noticed in the history of that sad time.

On March 27th, 1378, Gregory XI died at Rome, whither he had returned from Avignon in 1376. The chief instrument used by God to persuade the Pope to take this step was that great daughter of St. Dominic, St. Catherine of Siena. She it was who reminded him of the secret vow he had made to return to Rome; and when innumerable obstacles were put in his way by the Cardinals, who were loth to leave the peace and luxury of Avignon for the grass-grown streets of turbulant Rome, it was Catherine who cried with holy boldness: ‘Be a man, Babbo miol’

The unity of Christians, Our Lord implies, is a necessary condition if the world is to accept His mission from His Father; He prays that His followers ‘may be one . . . that the world may believe that thou hast sent me’ (Jn. xvii, 21). The scandal, the futility, of the continuance of Christian divisions whose origins and meaning have been long forgotten is plain for all to see. Yet nobody with any sense of realities can be blind to the immensity of the obstacles which hinder Christian reunion, nor to the theoretic unsoundness and the practical hopelessness of the various well-meaning but man-made solutions that have so far been offered to the problem. Meanwhile, with bewildering rapidity, the alignments for what looks like becoming the final struggle between Christ and secularism for the soul of civilised man are being formed, leaving those who profess the name of Christ hopelessly divided among themselves.

Anglo-Saxondom has much to answer for in originating and continuing the divisions of Christendom, and it alone is responsible for most of the subdivisions of those divisions—the final atomisation of Christendom, the reductio ad absurdum of schism. But to Anglo-Saxondom is due also the origin of many of the efforts of recent years, however pathetically inadequate, to undo the damage. Faith and Order, Life and Work, the Branch Theory and the Bridge-Church Approach, all these are of British or American origin. And to all these, and to most other reunion schemes or dreams, ‘Rome’ has appeared as the great obstructionist.

Catholicism, like Jewry, is persecuted because of its solidarity. But we are not forgetful for want of reminders that there is a Catholicism accurately distinguished by inverted commas: a heresy as subtle as that of the Pharisees: a ‘faith’ impotent to find expression in action. It is the faith of multitudes, but more especially of the elect. I would explain: it is the faith that has been called super-Catholicism.

Super. For it is courageous in condemnation (where the weaker brethren, through foolish sympathy or fear of inhumanity, fail), it is admired, rather than considered inordinate, for its craving for Test. Its width is infinite; dare I say, its depth negligible? It deplores ‘materialism’; its affirmation of trust in the Providence of God and indemnification hereafter renders suspect, almost, any suggestion of the obligations of justice here below. Yet, in its ‘simplicity,’ it inspires prayer for much more than Daily Bread, the sufficiency for which our Lord taught us to ask: and a host of additional delicacies is said to be the reward of this ‘childish faith.’ A Heavenly intimacy reduces the Saints to the level of contractors; familiarity does not, however, breed contempt.

It has a frugal trend. It is less costly to lavish devotion upon an idealised Christ than upon the Saviour, who (dying for mankind) promised thereafter to disguise himself as suffering humanity.

Now it is Super-Catholicism, and not Catholicism, that has no answer to the charge of individualism brought by communists and others against the Church of God. Would they (my super-Catholics) be as surprised as Communists to learn that the doctrinal conception of the Sacred Heart presents human society with a theory of true Communism?

To the Editor of Blackfriars.

Sir,—I must resolutely disregard the red herrings drawn across my path by the correspondents who give such a sinister reading of my notice of Roy Campbell’s Flowering Rifle. I criticised the book only on literary grounds, and mentioned that works like Auden’s Spain and Spender’s Vienna were also poor art because of their excessive political preoccupations; and because I reject inferior Leftist art along with Rightist work, I apparently suggest that the Rightist writer is Leftist. A re

markable piece of reasoning to come from a great theological college.

It is precisely on literary grounds that the critics neglect to base their criticism. The book is lyrical invective at best, and in trying to make an epic of it, the poet has executed a mechanical exercise, which oftenest sounds like a brass band at its brassiest repeating ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ ad nauseam. The language of the less prosy parts is worn-out ‘poetical’ currency like ‘golden,’ ‘scarlet,’ ‘silver,’ ‘storm-red,’ while often the faded literary metaphors of ‘rhyme,’ etc., are used to jolt the poem into life. The author himself says the poem is not meant to emulate people like Claudel, and we can easily agree when we read such bathos as :

—the capitals being used to galvanise the cliche into some shadow of life. But above all, the epic lacks the structure of an epic, and is largely a broken record of literary quarrels.