An American newspaper has described the attack on Abyssinia as the wickedest war in history. And indeed few wars have seemed less excusable or aroused more universal disgust. Apart from all questions of British interests involved, and apart from the hypocrisy suggested by such an attitude (for it is undeniable that Britain has repeatedly done much that Italy is doing to-day), nothing could be better calculated to offend the sentimental-sporting instincts of the British public of 1935 than the spectacle of a well-equipped modem army with planes, bombs, tanks and (it seems) poison-gas invading a primitive, independent African state.

But though sentiment may give, up to a point, a trustworthy indication of objective right and wrong, it is in the light of dispassionate reasoning and the unbiassed examination of facts that the ethics of Italy’s attack must be scrutinized. What is to be said of it in the light of Catholic teaching? The ethical aspect of the conflict (which the Christian knows to be the most fundamental one) has received insufficient attention.

So much has been written about the effect of Gerard Hopkins’ vocation on his poetry that it may seem tedious to say anything more. Yet when the sum of things said has established a first-class misunderstanding, it is tantalising, if not requisite, to attempt a reconciliation.

Assuming, then, that Jesuits are provided with a mould in which each after his own fashion may mould himself (please note italics for subsequent reference), that mould being the Spiritual Exercises, and assuming further that the poet could not change his character without in some way changing his poetry, a double question arises, making room for two misunderstandings. First, as to the importance of the change—was it an inside transformation or merely an outside limitation? Secondly, as to its quality—was it for better or worse not only in Hopkins but in the general development of poetic expression?

The answer to both, which avoids alike religious enthusiasm and anti-religious dyspepsia, is that the Exercises were circumstances which channelled the poet's working just as other sets of circumstances, poverty, blindness, war, etc., have done to other poets, so that their importance though considerable is not strictly poetic; they make the critical occasions but are not the intimate origin of poetic thought. Their qualitative effect therefore is indifferent; not bad, because helping perhaps that chastity of mind and spare tautness of diction so much admired to-day; but hardly good because of repressions, etc. So: indifferent. If not tile Jesuit training, some other thread would have assisted results poetically equivalent however widely different in other respects. This answer is balanced, and likely to prove the acceptable one.

Future ages when chronicling the canonization of Thomas More by Pope Pius XI, on the 19th May, 1935. may perhaps ask their contemporaries to account it a pivotal event in the history of mankind. First of all it is an event in the city of Rome, which some cartographers claim to be the geographical centre of the habitable earth. Moreover it is a solemn and irrevocable nomination to the Peerage of Mankind made by a spiritual sovereign whose native land and whose official metropolis are Italy and Rome. Lastly, it is the strange almost bewildering action of an Italian giving supreme ennoblement to an Englishman beheaded by an English king four hundred years ago.

To those of us who know that Rome is Rome and that Simon Bar-Jona is Peter, because Jesus, Son of Mary, is Son of God, the canonization of an English Lord Chancellor or of a French shepherd-lass or of a South American halfcaste is but the arrival of the expected. Rome either is or is prepared to be the nursing mother of all nations, i.e., of all groups of human beings welded into one by the seemingly opposite forces of authority and liberty. It is not a matter of surprise to us Catholics, therefore, that an Englishman of the English should be given world-wide honour and recognition by the same Italian-centred force which one day sent the Levantine, Augustine of Tarsus, to weld warring settlers into the religious, and incidentally into the political, unity called England.

If at times Alma Mater Ecclesia tried to meet her somewhat spendthrift outgoings by demands upon her children, no accountant would dare to show that she had demanded over-payment for her nursing and teaching cares.

St. Thomas in affirming that the Birth of Christ took place at the time which was most fitting—convenientissimo tempore—supports one of his arguments with the fact that the governance of a single ruler, the Emperor Augustus, had given the world that most mighty peace—maxima pax fuit in mundo—in which Christ, Himself chose to be born. That temporal peace was instinct with tranquil expectancy. Men who looked to Jerusalem and to Rome as their Mother Cities were filled with hope: for the Jew, now under the Pax Romana, the lines of prophecy and portent were swiftly converging upon Bethlehem. Rome herself, so lately racked with civil strife, was ready to turn from bloodshed and proscriptions as ‘from a horrible nightmare, and to apply all her energies to reconstruction, and even to hail, in the Pax Augusta, the dawn of the new Golden Age.’

Ultima Cumaei venit jam carminis aetas;
magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo,
jam redit et virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna,
jam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto.

Now hath the last age come, foretold by the Sibyl of Cumae;
Mightily now upriseth a new millenial epoch.
Justice the Maid comes back, and the ancient glory of Saturn;
New is the seed of man sent down from heavenly places.

Her power was at its zenith, her most brilliant writers expressed for her the standards of human virtue and justice which were fitting her for iter true destiny.

Americans, as a result of regional divergencies, are often more remote in culture from each other than from England or even from the Continent. But the roots of our culture are Protestant and English and there is, moreover, a similarity of spiritual background and problem which unites American and English Catholics. We are confronted by the same religious apathy within the fold; we must combat the same ignorance from without. Americans are beginning to realize how different would have been the background and the atmosphere of our country had the French and Spanish continued to settle North America; not because these settlers were Latins, but because they were steeped in a culture engendered by the living tradition of the Latin Church. The friars in California, the French in the south and in Canada might have moulded a people to beauty, as M. Maritain says, and we would not be in our present dire need of traditional influences and customs which must become aged in wood or stone or generation. Ere they were forged, our links with a Catholic past were broken by the Yankee ascendancy. In England the surviving faithful few held the broken ends together. So it follows that the culture of the American is more bankrupt than the culture of the average Englishman. But we may take heart, for as Mgr. William J. Kerby told the students of the National Catholic Schoool of Social Service: “Our Catholic vision of life is wide and our countiy's need of that vision is profound. We bring the best in motive.“*

As the work of the lay apostolate swings into the mental orbit of the earnest American Catholic, there are certain high lights which illumine his vision, certain dim torches which would bum bravely if given the impetus.

“Equal Justice Under Law,” is the inscription carved on the pediment of the new United States Supreme Court building. Recently erected, this legal temple in white marble stands majestically on a hill near the national Capitol, a fixed reminder that the judiciary is a co-ordinate branch of the government.

For the past seventy-five years the sessions of the court were held in the small chamber that once housed the United States Senate. Its walls seemed to whisper memories and great names of the past. Here Webster, Clay, Calhoun and other famous statesmen before the Civil War battled with the nation's problems. Around the curved wall are busts of former Chief Justices. It is, no doubt, with a feeling of regret and a spirit of estrangement that the court has moved into its new quarters with its huge Sienna columns, ornate ceiling, heavy crimson hangings, and bas-reliefs.

The nine gowned men who sit on the bench of the highest judicial tribunal in the nation are not spectacular: no aura of Olympus surrounds them. Each has a deep appreciation of the dignity and responsibility of his office: and all, despite an external austerity and necessary aloofness, are very human. Their appointment, which is for life, is made by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate. They can be removed only by impeachment. During their tenure of office they cannot occupy any other position. All interests, no matter how profitable, which might possibly influence their judgment are severed. No justice sits in a case with which he has been previously connected as counsel, or in which he has any direct personal interest.

In the course of history the relation of Catholicism and Protestantism undergoes, as it were, physiognomical transformations, which, while they do not affect the inmost dogmatic division, strike deep enough to impress on these two systems new and unforeseeable characteristics in different times and places. The essential division in belief, as a theological phenomenon, remains just what it is; and in view of this, it is impossible—even for men of good will—to explain it away or compromise on it. This undebatable and irreducible phenomenon can only be effaced by unity in the Faith. We do not wish prim, arily to treat of the relation of Catholicism and Protestantism from this purely theological aspect of dogmatic difference and reunion, although even our present consideration can only be read under this explicit proviso, and in view of this final and deepest problem. For if Catholicism and Protestantism are from one point of view and in modern history simply two great historical forces, we cannot on that account act as though the problem belonged only to the sphere of historical research into cultural spirituality. Beyond the scope of history there is an enquiry of theological import.

We take as our starting point the fact that Catholicism and Protestantism appear on the stage of history as two forces, each of which presents a whole system of human cultural values, and so an entire totality of life. Ultimately, in the theological field, Catholicism and Protestantism are incommensurable—though even here some qualification is required. But as formative powers of history, as complete forms and formulas of historical existence, Catholicism and Protestantism are fundamentally commensurable. On this plane, then, we find a series of problems which is common to both. Even their very opposition continually creates a common point of contact for their opposing principles. We find, on this plane, a relation between Catholicism and Protestantism which has proved historically to be manageable and valuable, and which at the present time is well defined—a relation sometimes of enmity, sometimes of cold indifference, sometimes of an inner human nearness and readiness to understand.

Both to the poets who have created high tragedy and to the critics of all eras who have thought deeply about it, its proper matter has always been that involved in some aspect or other of the Problem of Evil. In the theorists this is clear, from Aristotle down through what faint consideration tragedy was given in the Middle Ages, through the Renaissance in all lands, through the Reformation in some, through Cartesianism and Rousseauism wherever they penetrated, through English and American thought, to the twentieth century. Among the writers of tragedy the same unanimity has prevailed, from Aeschylus to Eugene O’Neill, from The Suppliants to Days-Without End. All have recognized that to be human means to yearn for happiness; and implicitly at least that tragedy is the quest of poetic insight, in so far as insight may be gained, into the riddle of high interference with human happiness.

In any consideration of the Problem of Evil, and therefore in tragedy, there is involved a theodicy: an attempt to penetrate the ways of God with unhappy mankind; a poetic exploration of human disappointment overhung by an Omnipotence that yet must be friendly; a wistfulness to reconcile in mortal vision, if it be possible, distant Divine Goodness and its permission or direction of instant human mishap; an intense effort of poetry to fuse these two factors together into one heightened picture of satisfying colour, light and shade, proportion and perspective. There is no question here of a clear-cut solution of the riddle—if that were possible tragedy would be shorn of most of its fascination and beauty; its only use would be its brief, poetic refreshment of a known answer that conceivably might need occasional rehearsal by short human memory, clouded ever anew by the turmoil of sublunary things.

We have become accustomed to condemn outright those reactionaries who would wish to return to the manners of the Middle Ages. So much apparent good has come to light since those dim and ruthless days that its denial seems almost blasphemy against the Creator who gave man powers capable of continuous development. In the main a condemnation of this sort may be justified, yet there existed at least one fundamental attitude of mind, lost in the debris of the medieval ruin, the absence of which we must deeply lament for it would be capable of setting the modem world in order if it were present to-day. This attitude, crystallized in the word “objectivism,” has been supplanted by its opposite, a disruptive force which is responsible for many of the modem evils, for when modem subjectivism ousted the medieval objectivism at the Reformation a unity in multiplicity gave place to a multitude of units. It is a commonplace that the Reformation with its insistence on the importance of the individual and its implicit denial of the mainstays of human society gave birth to a subjectivism and a concentration upon self which the Christian world has never since been able to master.

This false attitude of mind has become part and parcel of our mental make-up. It has been handed on from father to son until it has become almost connatural in every act of the mind or will. We can to-day think only in terms of reference to ourselves, forming all things to our own image and likeness as though we were at once the begetter and the conclusion of all things. One’s birthday is a great feast, remembered every year, for that was the beginning. In the beginning was myself, and I am my own god.

“If life must come to an end,” says Fritz Strich, “it is not in itself necessary; it is not bound to live. Out of the depths of this dolorous recognition and experience there arises that which alone makes the spirit to be spirit, and man, man: the will to something that is necessary in itself, that necessarily must perdure and never can terminate.”

“The will to something necessary”: echoes of the Schopenhauerian world as will and imagination? An eminently “Western” will; a will to action, to movement. A will to change, then? And yet a will to something unchangeable, necessary in itself, solidly static!

“Unquiet is the human heart, until it rests in Thee, O God,” confessed St. Augustine. He did not, in the first place, “will” God: before willing Him, He recognized that He was already, and that He is necessary in Himself—not only so, but that He is the only thing that is necessary in itself. Knowing God, he willed to rest in Him and thus to transcend the world of change and death, of becoming and ending, the world of samsâra, as Indian thought would express itself.

What is the nature of Man—“Quid est homo? … Constituisti eum super omnia opera manuum tuarum.” In what is this superiority? “I have said you are gods.” In what way are men as gods? What do we know of God? Credo in Deum … creatorem coeli et terrae. Creatorem—what does create mean? The Shorter Oxford Dictionary says: to bring into being; to cause to exist; to form out of nothing; to originate.

Now the existence of anything is dependent upon four causes. Take for example this table, (I) There is something that makes tables tables and not candlesticks; this kind of thing, not another kind. But, further, as an individual thing: this particular table and not that; a table like this one and not like that one—what makes tables tables, and this particular table this particular shape is the formal cause and without that cause this table would not exist.

About the year 1528, the parents of St. John, Gonzalo de Yepes of Toledo and Catalina Alvarez of Toledo, were married in the village of Fontiveros on the plateau of Old Castile. It was not a mariage de convenance, but undeniably a love-match. Spanish biographers of the Saint tell us that, whilst Gonzalo was of ‘rich and noble parentage,’ Catalina was of parentage that was not noble nor perhaps reputable. But these same biographers, as if to soften Gonzalo’s misdemeanour in marrying beneath the family, take care to add that the young girl he loved was of rare beauty and virtue. As was to be expected in the Spain of the midsixteenth century, Gonzalo’s choice of a wife was never forgiven by the family. But, on the other hand, it was never repented of by Gonzalo; whose simplicity of mind seemed to think that a wife not only good but good-looking had the makings of a successful life-mate for himself and mother for his children.

We are not to take too seriously what the biographers say about the nobility of Gonzalo’s family. Their noble Castilian blood did not forbid the Yepes family from making their money by trading in silk. When Gonzalo’s marriage with Catalina meant his dismissal from the service of his silk-mercer uncle, love and poverty became the abiding guests of their home.

The most recent biographer of St. John has wisely drawn a picture of this home into which the doctor of Mysticism was born.

The beginning of all our knowledge of St. John Fisher is a life written in the reign of Queen Elizabeth from thirty to forty years after his death. This account, after circulating in manuscript for almost a century, was finally published as The Life and Death of that renowned John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester. Comprising the highest and hidden Transactions of Church and State in the Reign of Henry the 8, with divers Morall, Historicall, and Political Animadversions upon Cardinal Wolsey, Sir Thomas Moor, Martin Luther, with a full relation of Queen Katherine’s Divorce. Carefully selected from sever all ancient Records, by Tho. Bailey, D.D. London. Printed in the yeare, 1655.

The Dr. Bailey thus responsible for this first publication was not however the author of the Life. A manuscript of it, that belonged at one time to the English Benedictine monks of Dieulouard in Lorraine had come into his hands and “making some alteration therein"—“verbiage, méprises, et sottes interpolations,” the later scientific Bollandist styles them—he had printed it as his own work. Bailey was soon found out, but his ill-informed and stupid manipulation of the text threw a discredit upon the biographer whom he had exploited which lasted down to our own times. The pioneer in the work of restoring the credit of this sixteenth century writer was Fr. T. E. Bridgett, C.SS.R., whose monumental life of the martyr appeared in 1888.

In the course of a work on glorified bodies, which St. Paul calls spiritual bodies, the author, passing from the domain of sight to that of hearing, has been led to examine the mystical meaning of the various instruments enumerated in the psalms: strings, trumpets, organs, cymbals, flutes.

Now let the apple of thine eye cease! says the Book of Lamentations (2, 18).

The texts last cited are themselves an invitation to cross over from the domain of sight to that of hearing, from the domain of proportion to that of modulation, and from that of values to that of tonalities. Nothing in this world, says Saint Paul (1, Cor., 14, 10) is without voice. Even soulless things, be they flute or dulcimer, if they give not a distinction of sounds, how shall it be known what is piped and what is harped? And if the trumpet give forth an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle? Likewise you, except you utter by the tongue plain speech, that tongue which the Holy Spirit for evermore has put into our mouth, so that we might at last express ourselves, yield to the loving invitation (Arise, speak, my beloved, let me hear thy voice—as I have taught thee to hearken unto mine—for it is sweet). Canticle. The soul is become entirely praise and the daughter of music, after the phrase of Ecclesiastes (10, 2, 4), of that song, that resonant and melodious breath-control or neum (pneuma) of which the craving came to her at night (Job, 5, 10). Entirely is she herself the harp, in herself covering the gamut, and by octave upon octave the means of attaining from the lower to the higher. Arise, says David (Ps., 56, 9) Arise my glory, psaltery and harp. The flutes and psaltery make sweet melody, but a pleasant tongue is above them both (Ecclesiastes, 40, 21). He hath disposed ascensions in his heart, says the eighty-sixth Psalm.

Last May saw the publication by Messrs. Sheed & Ward in the Heythrop Theological Series of an important manual of Moral and Pastoral Theology by Father Henry Davis, S.J. This book undoubtedly deserves careful consideration for two reasons: for its notably good qualities and for the conception of Christian morality that animates it.

In four large volumes Fr. Davis treats of the principles of moral life (Vol. I); of the commandments of God and of the Church (Vol. II); and of the Sacraments (Vols. Ill and IV). His clarity of exposition, simplicity of expression and liveliness of style contribute towards making the work not only readable but even attractive—a rare quality in works of this sort.

Moreover, this ease in diction is made the vehicle of an accuracy of information, a thorough knowledge of Canon Law and the results of wide experience in dealing with souls that combine to make the book a work of real value. The treatise on the Sacraments has received the author’s more special attention and is particularly successful. In it will be found, accurately and concisely set out, copious instructions and practical directions which will be of great service to the worthy and efficacious administration of the Sacraments and will be readily and profitably referred to by priests engaged in the active ministry. Finally, the author has courageously given unusually full treatment to more delicate questions; he has made considerable use both of papal encyclicals and the results of scientific research on such thorny subjects as education and the difficult problems that confront the consciences of physicians and surgeons.

If it is by inspiration that idea takes bodily form, the word is made flesh, it follows that, given a common material, the greater the inspiration the greater will be the completed reality. Moreover, the greatest imaginable inspiration (that is, God Himself in entire perfection, rather than in isolated attributes) would demand and receive an infallible response. We have, therefore, in seeking for a religion that is unconscious art, to seek for a religion that claims direct, certain, and complete infallibility from God. There are many such religions, including the Catholic Church.

But the Catholic Church differs from the rest, not only in the actual authority for its infallibility (a matter beyond the province of metaphysics and aesthetics), but in the fact that it alone claims to be the Body of Christ, the Word made Flesh. Thus Catholicism, since it is a continuation and extension of the Incarnation, becomes not only a work of art, but the abstract type or pattern of all works of art. For, just as Christianity claims Christ to be the incarnation, the world of God in the world of flesh, so does Catholicism claim the Church as the incarnation of Christ in the world of history and institutions, though with this difference, that whereas Christ, being God, was perfect as man, there can be no such guarantee for the private lives of the personnel of institutions (however divine). In Christ God associated Himself only with man’s imperfections, but in the Church Christ associates Himself with man’s sins. Those who reject, ‘on spiritual grounds,’ the possibility of the incarnation of Christ in a ‘corporation,’ should be led to reject also the possibility of the incarnation of God in a human body and soul. Both these doctrines comprise the realization and justification of the supreme experience of the aesthetic world—that of the Word being made Flesh.

While it is trite to speak of the realism of St. Thomas, it is less so, perhaps, to attempt to give its precise shade and meaning. The initial question, which I should wish briefly to answer, is whether or not this realism is in the technical sense a critical realism. We are all aware of what is meant by the critical approach which is said, rightly or wrongly, to mark one of the great advances of modem thought. It is just this critical approach which is said to separate thought lifted to the philosophical level from thought which remains on the popular level of ordinary, and perhaps puerile, intelligence. The critical approach requires that the mind should no longer accept anything that does not completely justify itself before the mental court of enquiry. Anteriorly, common sense accepts without discussion a certain number of natural certitudes. Moreover, it is possible to conceive of a philosophy rooted in common sense, which accepts all that the latter accepts in order to hasten forward to the discovery of new truths. To delve into the mystery of things, to scale the heavens, to soar on intrepid wing up into the infinite heights of metaphysics, that is indeed worth the labour of the dialectical effort it demands.

Of what use is it to philosophize except in order to know a little more than that which everybody knows without even having learnt it? But first of all Descartes and, following him, Kant, and after them the whole of nineteenth century philosophy, come to pour cold water on this fine enthusiasm. Before leaving for the stratosphere they require that the mind should assure itself of its jumping-off ground and test its equipment.

The scholarship and wit, the lovable personality and frank geniality of the late Professor Drennan have been spoken of in two notices in the Times, the month of his death, January, 1935.

Therein, too, it is noted that, in his England, at seventeen he adopted Catholicism “with characteristic enthusiasm.” From these convertites there is much matter to be learnt, said Jaques. There is; and from their wandering away; and from their return. ‘Twas so with Drennan, truly a wanderer from his birth. Bom in home county Banbury, he had taught in Ceylon under the Oblate Fathers, and had been in the United States before I first knew him, when he and I taught together, in Canada in 1903. Later he was Professor of English in Galway, at the time of the European War and of the Irish Rising of 1916. And, last of all, he was in Johannesburg (from 1917), where for nigh twenty years he lived; and where he died. In South Africa he said he at last found a home wherein he could settle down. But he kept in touch with England, as a member of the Authors’ Club, London; which he joined, he said, “in the impossible event of my going over.” And he was a not infrequent jester in Punch. His humour, if it had a distinctive touch, may, perhaps, be said to be specially English; although Protestant Irish, seemingly all Celtic, was his descent. Persons of mind have praised M.D.’s Punch pieces. In Canada, he was The Canadian Month’s “Eno Poppyhock,” with his “Olla Podrida,” finding “irrational” the almanack's June 25 succeeding June 24. “It is also monotonous. Why should April 2nd always follow April 1st? Is there any reason why it should?

The recent number of the Revue Thomiste, completely devoted to the life and work of Thomas de Vio, O.P., Cardinal Cajetan, is a model of its kind. The occasion of this publication was the commemoration of the fourth centenary of the death of that prince of Thomist commentators. He died on August 10th, 1534.

Though the studies are as diverse in character as in authorship, yet they present a remarkable unanimity with regard to that which was the chief characteristic of Cajetan’s life and work, namely the independence and objectivity of his mind. Those who have used his works will not be inclined to question this. He has been accused by some, indeed, of having shown an independence which was indistinguishable from rashness. But rashness was not his fault. His independence proceeded rather from a great intellectual honesty and courage which led him to carry principles to their logical conclusions without allowing human respect, or any equally unworthy moral influence, to hinder the steady course of his reasoning. If that was not due to his natural character, he had, at any rate, learnt it from his master, Aquinas, who had himself followed his principles unswervingly even though it meant committing himself to, as some think, terrible conclusions about the relationship of God to this world. But both one and the other preferred to be logical and come to a full-stop at inexplicable mystery, rather than to make compromises with sentiment and end in a contradiction which is irreconcilable with the very notion of God.