bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Work and Property
Authors: Gill Eric
Published: July 2007

Work and Property To the Editor of Blackfriars,

Sir,—Fr. Ceolfrid Heron’s very valuable and appreciative article in the August Blackfriars, on my book Work and Property, invites a short comment. Misunderstanding seems to arise from my advocacy of “collective ownership” by the “workers.” It is thought that such advocacy is out of line with adverse criticism of industrialism and the “leisure state.” People ask: how can you be in favour of collectivism and of a return to responsible workmanship at the same time? How can you believe in distributed property and also acquiesce in industrialism? The answer is easy. I believe in workers’ ownership of means of production and distribution. I believe in the village blacksmith (still one or two left) owning his own workshop and tools. I believe in the farmer owning his own farm and implements.

But what about the Great Western Railway? That also is an affair of workmen. Is it a bad thing? Is it immoral? Does the Pope refuse to go by train? And what about all the other great industrial enterprises? I may not like the kind of world they imply. I may be able to show that it is all wrong and leading to war and disaster—cheap amusements and conveniences, vulgarity on every hand, not to mention the corruption of family life, the destruction of humane culture and an increasing madness of international rivalry. But what of it? Does any theologian of importance condemn railway trains or telephones or tinned food? Does any theologian condemn the factory system, as such, or say anything against the wage system? As far as my information goes theologians ask for no more than good trade unionists do—higher wages, shorter hours, better canteens, insurance against ill-health and unemployment and possibly a share of the profits large enough to enable employees to buy a bit of property (if there's any for sale).
The Psychology of War-Mongering
Authors: Vann Gerald
Published: July 2007

“God,” said Voltaire’s Quaker, “God, who has commanded us to love our enemies and to suffer without repining, would certainly not permit us to cross the seas, merely because murtherers, cloath'd in scarlet, and wearing caps two feet high, enlist citizens by a noise made with two little sticks on an ass’s skin extended.” The ass’s skin has largely given place to the broadcast bray and the journalistic bellow; the effect remains the same. And the central problem for the psychologist is surely this: that while war is all but universally agreed to be an unacceptable form of human activity (and the waverers now have China to help to convince them), nevertheless we are faced with the daily possibility of an outburst, and with the certainty that at a word from their politicians the people will flock to the standards and prepare to do themselves what they are now execrating the Japanese for doing. How does this come about? How is it that the politicians, on the one hand, find themselves apparently impotent to prevent war? Is it sheer malevolence and guile; is it due simply to a peculiarly low grade of general intelligence; or is it a case of psychological maladjustment, a distressing complaint, but curable? On the other hand, is the consent of the populace to be attributed simply to the wiles of press and political propaganda, or is is due to psychological factors in the subjects themselves.
Lagrange on Orphism
Authors: McNabb Vincent
Published: July 2007

On reading the quiet, always scholarly and often humorous pages of a veteran’s book on a difficult subject, it is hard to know whether it is the book or the writer that holds us most. The bibliography given in Pére Lagrange’s study of Orphism suggests the obvious remark that the lyre of the Thracian god—if he be a god and if he be a Thracian—still renders spell-bound but not dumb-founded a throng of living beings.

Needless to say this latest writer on the Thracian god has not given his time and scholarship to one of those pagan myths that were hardly more than premonitory symptoms of the present world-wide outbreak of fiction. Pére Lagrange has been by nature and choice so authentic a defender of the Ark that even in his lightest words he has been at least brushing off annoying and persistent flies.

In this remote matter of Orpheus and Orphism the assailants of the Ark are not a company of irregulars. Loisy, Reinach, Boulanger and others are worthy of Pére Lagrange’s best defence, and le beau sabreur, even in his old age, does not disappoint us. If we were allowed to summarize Pére Lagrange’s summary of his own view we would say: In Thrace, in Greece, in Crete, the (orphic) religion of Zagreus was mingled with the Egyptian cult of Osiris. About the seventh century before Christ this fusion of Zagreus and Osiris was further mixed with the cult of Dionysos which had come from Phrygia and Lydia to Greece through Thrace. If Dionysos (or Bacchus) was an element of joy and even intoxication, the Zagreus-Osiris blend was an element of fear and even of pessimism. Indeed the original Orphism, as distinct from its Dionysian element, was not the wine but the vinegar of life.
The Dominican Nuns of Saint-Jacques
Authors: Toynbee Jocelyn M. C.
Published: July 2007

Is intellectual work compatible with the religious life? According to St. Thomas Aquinas a life of contemplation and asceticism normally demands it. Intellectual activity is closely bound up with contemplation and the teaching apostolate. Study is not just idle curiosity; for it springs from a love of all truths included in the Supreme Truth, in the Being Whose essence is Truth: God. Love of God demands contemplation, and contemplation, in its turn, demands study. Whosoever loves God desires to know Him and to explore the secrets of His infinite perfection; and without study it is impossible to have a clear and intelligent faith. Again, if contemplation should express and complete itself in the mission to teach divine truth to others, a knowledge of religious doctrine, as complete as possible is obviously essential.

The Order of Friars Preachers has so thoroughly understood the importance of intellectual work that it regards the latter as a fundamental necessity and has placed it, alongside of the Divine Office, first in the hierarchy of means. It was St. Dominic’s wish that his sons should be sufficiently detached from primary material interests to apply themselves, without intermission, to study, prayer and preaching. The Order of Preachers was, in fact, the first religious group to make organised and collective study an essential part of the religious life. The Friars Preachers were students; and there has been no modification of this characteristic of theirs during the course of the centuries.
The Way of Truth
Authors: Carpenter Hilary J.
Published: July 2007

Though it is eminently true that there is but one way for all men through the tangled wilderness of human life, namely the way that has been opened and trodden by Him Who declared: I am, the Way, nevertheless there is a sense in which it is true to say that the ways of God are as diversified as the individuality of those who seek Him. All are Members of the Mystical Body of Christ, but the hierarchy of place and function within that Body comprehends, and indeed demands, a variety of state and action that covers all the needs and capacities of human nature. It is not a difference of way, but rather a difference of emphasis. In its essentials the Christian life and the Christian ideals are the same for all men—union with God through union with the God-man; but in its variety of emphasis the Christ-life which men are called to lead is a jewel of a myriad facets.

It is in this sense of emphasis, therefore, that we may speak of Dominican spirituality as the Way of Truth, without wishing to appropriate that quality exclusively to the Order of St. Dominic. The word Veritas, the distinctive motto of the Order, undoubtedly sums up the ideal which St. Dominic realized in his own life and set before the members of his Order as the essential means of their sanctification and of their apostolate. Into how great a tree this mustard seed can grow is made strikingly clear in a notable work of the late Père Joret, O.P., which has recently appeared in its English translation.
The Revolutionary Intellectualism of St. Albert the Great
Authors: Chenu M. D.
Published: July 2007

It was not, perhaps, without a certain over-simplification that, in the course of the Middle Ages, men were pleased to qualify the great Masters of thought and Doctors of the Church by some epithet which expressed the most typical feature of their intellectual and spiritual make-up. St. Thomas was the Angelic Doctor, St. Bonaventure the Seraphic Doctor, Tauler the Ecstatic Doctor, and so on. At any rate, we must not stop short at the obvious implication of these epithets, nor limit the rich genius of these Masters under pretext of determining its characteristic. Bonaventure the Seraphic was an extremely vigorous speculative thinker, Thomas the Angelic admirably described the powers of Love, and Tauler the Mystic analysed in a most detailed manner the demands of simple asceticism. We must penetrate to the profounder significance of these epithets, and see in them, with the superabundance and variety of gifts, the type of an intellectual and spiritual life, the unifying point in which all these gifts are rooted and co-ordinated.
Patristic Revival
Authors: Mathew Gervase
Published: July 2007

For a Thomist the validity of any method in patristic study can be gauged by the effort to attain to an objective knowledge of patristic thought. It is only for its own sake that truth is to be sought for if we are to chance to find it. The theologian who brings his own preconceptions to the study of the Fathers will only rediscover what he has himself preconceived. The controversialist who uses patristic texts as missiles will find them both as malleable and as harmless as snowballs. It is a futile thing to read the Fathers in relation to problems and to controversies that were beyond their imagining, for their writings can only be intelligible in terms of their own setting, not of ours. Hesitatingly and clumsily we must try to place them in the time context and the cultural pattern of their lives.

It is only gradually that such a method is becoming possible. It would be naive to ignore the value of the labour of the past. French and German Catholicism have maintained a record of continuous achievement in patristics which is only paralleled by the high tradition of Anglican scholarship. But of their nature such traditions cannot be static. Our knowledge of Hellenistic cultural factors is as new as the science of Byzantine palaeography and both are critically significant for the reading of Greek texts. The study of Hadrianic culture has been transformed since 1906, scientific Byzantinism is not yet forty years old, but Hadrianic and proto-Byzantine culture formed the setting of two out of the three decisive epochs in patristic thought.
Ends and Means
Authors: Vann Gerald
Published: July 2007

That “to raise up hatred against hatred is to prepare the ruin of political life”; that violence is a boomerang, the attempt at violent repression of an evil merely causing it to spring up elsewhere with renewed virulence; that “Christendom will re- create itself by Christian means, or it will collapse completely”; in a word, that the “problem of means ... it of absolutely central importance’ ‘; and that only the Christian means of patience, unity, love, can do anything to save the world; these are the leading ideas in M. Maritain’s preface to Professor Mendizabel’s Aux Origines d’une Tragedie. They also form, with certain obvious reservations, the leading lines of thought in Mr. Aldous Huxley’s latest, and greatest, book; and one notes them here because of this sometimes startling similarity, extending almost to verbal parallelism.

About the goal of human endeavour, that we ought to be advancing towards an age of liberty, peace, justice and brotherly love, “there is and for long has been a very general agreement. Not so with regard to the roads which lead to that goal.” And if we search for a definition of the ideal we ought all to be becoming, we shall find here too that; if “the enslaved have held up for admiration now this model of a man, now that,” on the other hand, “at all times and in all places, the free have spoken with only one voice.”
The Catholic Outlook in France
Authors: d'Aragon
Published: July 2007

“As at other epochs in the history of the Church we face a world that has once again fallen into paganism.” These words of the Holy Father must have found an echo in the serious-minded of many countries, and in France we find them abundantly justified. In most of her institutions paganism is rife, in her literature, schools, theatres, cinemas and radio. One can discern it in her economic outlook and in the manners and customs of our contemporaries; and, most insidiously, it is penetrating the lives of an appreciable number of Christians, attached to the Church by sentiment and tradition but exposed to the worst forms of selfindulgence by their lukewarmness and lives of ease.

Rather than enumerate the various spheres where this neo-paganism is specially rampant, I will give you some recent statistics. Something like 10% of the French people are unbaptized, not a quarter fulfil their Easter duties, and not quite a fifth attend Mass regularly on Sunday. This sufficiently indicates the state of Catholicity in France to-day, the France of the Crusader, the France of Saint Louis.
A Note on Suffering
Authors: McKechnie W. P.
Published: July 2007

The animating principle of the Christian life is love: the Christian life at every stage is shot through with suffering. God is good and omnipotent: physical and moral evil never cease to abound. The least reflective intelligence is apt to be given pause by these conjunctions. To face the attacks of unbelievers and to reduce, if may be, our own perplexities, we do well to draw certain distinctions. God is perfect but the creatures he made could not fail to be imperfect. A greater good is achieved by creating free intelligent beings whose nature involves a real possibility of moral evil than by refraining from communicating his being beyond the confines of the inner life of the Trinity. Crudely, the order we must see things in is: God, angels, satan, man capable of achieving destiny without falling into moral evil, man falling into moral evil with consequent privation of supernatural and preternatural attributes, man restored to the supernatural, i.e., heaven made available, but without the preternatural impassibility, immortality, etc. And that brings us to ourselves. All this is penny catechism matter, but worth having in mind, if we are to avoid asking ourselves questions which have no legitimacy for Christian men.
Baron von Hugel
Authors: Drewitt Norbert
Published: July 2007

Sir,—Baron von Hugel was not a professional theologian. He was devoted to the philosophy of religion and to theology because he was a Christian and a Catholic, but he was profoundly more than a theologian because he was an integral Catholic.

To ask whether he was centrally Catholic and to examine his theological credentials alone is not enough. A religious personality can be psychologically heterodox under a number of aspects, of which the two more important are the theological and spiritual. A man can be theologically immaculate and spiritually lop-sided, in which case he is not centrally, i.e., integrally, Christian. I do not intend to add the slick correlative that a man may be spiritually impregnable and theologically nebulous, because both speculation and history prove that this is not true. But a mind which is mistaken on single propositions in a time of crisis may most emphatically possess spiritual grandeur of an outstanding kind. Moreover, even the greatest Saints are not normally without sin and moral wavering until after the biographers have plastered up the chinks, and some of the noblest religious personalities in history have value for us precisely because of their bearing in face of their own moral contractions and mistakes. Baron von Hugel is for some the greatest example of this that our age has known, and his spiritual message would carry infinitely less meaning for us were there none of these contractions and subsequent gigantic renunciations of his life. Von Hugel’s soul is first and foremost a synthesis of opposed moral forces: a neurotic, violent, easily jarred character constantly transformed and driven into massive unity by divine love.
The Spirit of Catholic Action
Authors: Farrell Ambrose
Published: July 2007

Even in His manhood Christ Our Lord, being endowed with the fulness of grace and truth, enjoys a divine intimacy of love and vision which is incomparable. Since He is at the very apex of perfection made a “little less than the angels” but to Whom all things have been subjected, He “is able to save for ever them that come to God by Him.” Anointed with the glory of the Godhead the grace that is His is not only an endowment of His own sacred humanity but a fount of supernatural life which is meant to pervade all who are redeemed. The first among creatures to receive within herself the author of divine life was Mary the Mother of God, by whom God gives Himself to the world. “The Blessed Virgin,” says St. Thomas, “received such a fulness of grace that she was nearest of all to the Author of grace; so that she received within her Him Who is full of all grace; and by bringing Him forth, she, in a manner, dispensed grace to all.” And again he writes: “Indeed it is a great thing in any saint that he should have such an abundance of grace that it is enough for the salvation of many: but when it is so abundant as to be available for all it is in the highest degree, as is the case with Christ and the Blessed Virgin.” By the man-becoming of God, the God-man is consecrated priest and anointed as king.
La Bourgeoisie Chretienne
Authors: T.O.S.D.
Published: July 2007

The analysis of the present Catholic position in France, with its hopes and fears for the future, as presented by the Marquis d’Aragon in the January issue of Blackfriars was both interesting and inspiring. On one point however he was rather reticent. Certain it is that in large measure the apostasy of the working class in that country was due to the fact that quite a number of employers were practising Catholics. In their own circles, in their families and in all that concerned the practice of religious duties, they were without reproach. But this did not prevent them, with a few notable exceptions of whom the most glorious example was Leon Harmel, from being “amoral liberalists” in their treatment of the workers. Harmel, writing to a priest friend, described them thus: “They are little Louis XIVs, in their factories and in their towns. Their ideas go no further than the patronage, and the publication of new ideas for the education of the people, for popular initiative, and for devotion to the working class, seems monstrous to them.” How can one blame the workers for associating Catholicism and wage-slavery? The struggle of the C.F.T.C. (Christian Trade Union) to play its proper part in the relations between Capital and Labour in France is sufficient proof that Rerum Novarum found many stony hearts among French employers. The result of this was that apostasy which Pius XI termed the greatest scandal of the twentieth century.
Personality and Gain (II)
Authors: Hope Felix
Published: July 2007

Granted that Capitalism arose under Catholicism and not, as Weber and even Marx believed, only with the loss of unified temporal power by Rome and the rise of the Protestant Reformation, individualism and the spirit of free inquiry; yet, as Fanfani explains, Catholicism and capitalism are unalterably opposed, two utterly different views of life and ethics, and any study of their interrelations must take note of that. A distinction must be made between what actually happened and how it should have happened; the moral question with its implication of the whole of Catholic doctrine permeates any factual, dispassionate analysis as such. He distinguishes between religious ethics and the actual apparatus of the Church. “The relations between capitalism and the Catholic Church as an organization must not be confused with the relations between capitalism and the Catholic religion”; “it should be plain to all how mistaken it is, in considering the relations between capitalism and Catholicism, deliberately to pause at this or that fact, this or that measure, this or that action, for which, whatever its results, responsibility lies not with Catholicism as a doctrine, but with some individual Catholic, be he Pope or sacristan.” An arraignment of capitalism on such grounds is almost literally an ideal one; it moves with an exclusively moral sphere, and it never allows the actual recording of history to be confused with constructive suggestiveness.
The Catholic Trades Unions of Canada
Authors: Chicanot E. L.
Published: July 2007

A Source of continual irritation in Canada, not only in industry and business, but among the great mass of the people, is the existence of affiliations of foreign organizations in labour ranks and the influence, upon Canadian workpeople and their affairs, of unions with their headquarters and greatest membership in the United States. Trades-unionism has made giant strides in Canada in the last twenty years, more than doubling its membership,’ but to-day international labour unions have three times as many local branches and members as Canadian central labour bodies (largely founded by former members of international unions who for various reasons severed their connection with the parent bodies and are for the main part in direct opposition to the international organizations), and twice the local branches and members of all Canadian labour bodies taken together.

Without going into instances or details the objections to such a situation can readily be appreciated. Under existing conditions Canadian labour, and indirectly Canadian business, can be dictated to by United States organizations possessing the balance of weight and power and Canada, perhaps against her own will and her own best interests, involved in labour wars which may be politically inspired across the border or waged purely for the benefit of workers in a foreign country. A feeling has long been gathering strength that Canadian labour should be organized in purely Canadian organizations and Canadian workingmen be free from foreign dictation and possible exploitation.
A Phantom City
Authors: Pope Hugh
Published: July 2007

In 1929 the French archaeologists unearthed at Ras Shamra on the N. Phoenician coast the remains of a once famous city, Ugarit, and the story of the wonders there brought to light is familiar to many. Now there has come to light another and in some respects even more important city. Nearly opposite where the R. Khabour flows into the Euphrates (the “Chobar” of Ezechiel i.i, etc.) is a mound, Tell Hariri, where M. Parrot has been working since 1933. His report on his third campaign, December 1935 till March 1936, is full of interest. For here stood a mighty city on the Middle Euphrates, on a line drawn between the island of Cyprus and Ecbatana, and somewhat below Carchemish, which has now been identified as Mari, one of the eleven “cities of royalty” according to later scribes, and ranking with such well-known cities as Kish, Erech, Ur, Agade, etc. Previous to these excavations little was known of Mari, though the name of one of its rulers had appeared in an inscription, and it was also known that the famous dynasty of Isin had been founded by a Semite from Mari, c. 2180 B.C. Up to date two main features have appeared: an immense palace and a series of superimposed temples of Ishtar. The last of these temples was destroyed by Hammurabi in a campaign conducted from his thirty-third to thirty-fifth year. Under it was an earlier, pre-Sargonic temple with an extraordinary wealth of ex-votos, etc., the whole surrounded by a wall.
Unfelt Joy
Authors: Thorold Anthony
Published: July 2007

In an age like ours, when feeling predominates over thought, the title of this article will strike a very bizarre note. And yet the fact that joy can be experienced without the grosser exhilaration of the senses is a truth witnessed to by the saints in every age. The Kingdom of God in the soul is a foretaste of the joys of heaven, and if the separated soul can experience the beatific joy of gazing with unclouded vision on its God, then surely it will be able in some measure to exercise a royal independence for tasting the divine delights even in this life. Joy is an experience which normally causes the whole man to- vibrate, but although “cabin’d, cribb'd, confined” through its companionship with the body, there seems no adequate reason why the immaterial soul divinized by the indwelling of the Blessed Trinity should not be able at times to vibrate with a joy that is wholly spiritual. If the faculties of the soul shot through with the divine splendour could not occasionally breathe the more rarified atmosphere of the supernatural without the cacophony of the senses, its deeply embedded hopes of immortality would lose their tonic effect, and we should soon begin to wilt under the weight of our material surroundings.

The stammerings of the mystics point to an experience which escapes the power of rational analysis. They describe darkness in terms of light, and their growing contentment would seem to keep pace with an ever-deepening conviction of the incomprehensibility of God.
Concrete
Authors: Watts Bert
Published: July 2007

It is not without significance that in these days we no longer speak of the craft of building but rather of the “building trade.” As in most of the occupations of the working man there has been a revolution, so in building great changes have been made. It seems likely that the revolution in all branches of industry is ultimately traceable to a few common factors.

In this paper I do not wish to examine the morals of the industrial change as a whole, but rather to consider one small and apparently unimportant matter—what the use of concrete has meant to the human side of building. But. in passing, it is worthy of note that practically all these changes have one common result—they all deprive the workman of the exercise of his function as an artist. When something vital in the make up of man is treated as though it did not exist, the sociological consequences are nothing less than tragic. Unemployment over long periods results in something more than the lowering of material standards of living.

In the earliest architecture of which we know enough to consider it as a particular type—that of Egypt—is symbolised the social nature of the age which gave it birth. Most of the important factors in ancient Egyptian social life are reflected in the architectural remains from that time. Examination of a temple, for example, reveals an extraordinary area of construction, and this massivity of plan is repeated in elevation and perspective.
Lex Qu Ærendi
Authors: Drewitt Norbert
Published: July 2007

A Spiritual force incarnate and commingling with the material movement and flux of history. Beneath the phenomena a fact—the concreted result of a supreme revelation of the spiritual in space and time. That is the tremendous historic reality of the Religion of Jesus Christ. A hundred questions at once press forward to be uttered. This fact which the whole world recognizes, can it be defined, fixed, interpreted? Can the categories of the human mind enfold it adequately, or at all? What is the relation between defined doctrine and formulated thing, between the affirmation of faith and the reflection of theology, miracle and truth testified? What are our criteria and how are they to be applied to history? What is history for faith?

Less than a century ago there was a relatively limited number of answers. The human mind was comparatively insular—confined to its individual expressions in this man and that man and this and that class, country and creed. For protestant and papist, liberal and agnostic, there was a well-spread assortment of “cumulative” arguments. Each, being insulated, could afford to mix his own apologetic panacea (they still exist), and his position of stable equilibrium was chiefly determined by the ingredients he chose. Looked at from the angle of the isolated subject on his intellectual desert-island each position was curiously compelling.
Introduction to Thomist Politics
Authors: Vann Gerald
Published: July 2007

“Plato by a goodlye similitude declareth,” said Sir Thomas More, “why wise men refraine to medle in the common wealthe. For when they see the people swarme into the streets, and daily wet to the skinne with rayne, and yet cannot persuade them to goe out of the rayne and to take their houses; knowynge wel, that if they should goe out to them they shoulde nothinge prevail, nor wynne ought by it, but with them be wette also in the rayne, they do kepe them selfes within their houses, being content that they be saffe themselves, seinge they cannot remedye the follye of the people.” And so, Plato adds, the wise man “is well content if he can in any way live his life here untainted . . . , and, when the time for his release arrives, take his departure amid bright hopes with cheerfulness and serenity.” To-day, in the countries where it is still possible, more or less, to speak one’s mind, the trouble is this: that while there is surely no ground on which angels are less likely to be ready to tread than the floors of parliaments and chancellories, we for our part are all constrained to rush in, driven no doubt by some kind of epileptic irresponsibility, congenital in human nature; and the upshot is a sort of incessant crossing of the floor of the house of commons; for finding ourselves in violent disagreement with one side we rush incontinent over to the other, where a similar process has been taking place.
The New Communism
Authors: McNabb Vincent
Published: July 2007

You have set me a very difficult problem, which my fifty years study of theology makes me chary of solving. In using the word difficult I do not mean the difficulty of gathering from your long letter with its many anxious repetitions the few points of uncertainty which you wish me to solve. My main difficulty after having gathered the heads of your difficulties is to solve the few difficulties which I have gathered.

Of course I know that you are not a Communist. I know this in spite of the wide-spread opinion that you are a Communist in mind and heart, though not in name. I know that what men and some of your fellow Priests take to be your Communism is your quite rational conviction that many of the alleged refutations of Communism do not refute. Of course you are too good a logician to think that you have proved a man’s opinion to be false merely by showing that the arguments for that opinion are false. A man may bring up wrong arguments to prove that the earth is round. But to show that his arguments are not true does not prove that the world is not round. Hence your refutation of the refutations of Communism does not prove that Communism is right. But still less does your refutation of the common refutations of Communism prove that you are, what many hold you to be—a Communist.
The Basis of Ownership
Authors: Kelly Bernard
Published: July 2007

Like most of the problems of modern life that of property is neither purely theoretical nor purely practical. We live in a transitional period in which profound social changes together with changes in the spiritual outlook of mankind have at once divorced legal institutions from their basis in the socio-physical life of men and have set in profound and dynamic movement desires and forces wholly disruptive to the compact life of a traditional social order. The challenge to the Christian thinker is taken up glibly enough at the level of pure theory, but an impatience is growing within the Christian body itself at the failure of theory effectively to modify and to change the system of dynamic disorder under which we live. In particular the defence of traditional property rights can and does lead to attitudes of pugnacious defence not of the traditional but in effect of the existing “order,” while a spirit of understandable but shrill and dangerous exasperation throws its hopes into one, and the most potent, of the forces of disruption. This does at least represent a real force for change rather than a system of hardened arteries through which the life of society cannot flow again; but in espousing the cause of Communism the loss for the Christian is the loss of a Christian mind. What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world for the workers and suffer the loss of his own soul? How terrifying a pedestal!
Lawlessness, Law, and Sanction
Authors: Farrell Ambrose
Published: July 2007

The general contempt for law and the breakdown in the machinery for enforcing it suggest the need for a reconsideration of the principles which give to law its binding force. The very conditions which must prevail in organised society necessitate a social control which is exercised through law and upon which must rest an orderly arrangement as a groundwork of social peace. Peace in society is dependent on social unity. All things naturally crave peace based on order, and although man is by nature meek lawlessness and inflamed passion are capable of making him the worst of brutes. Hence reason dictates the necessity for rules of conduct to be followed by all. Individual inclination must sometimes be restricted and accommodated to the larger interests of society as a whole. St. Thomas therefore defines law as “a dictate of reason, given and promulgated for the common good by one who has charge of the community.” There are, besides statutory law, properly recognised customs which in defect or written law retain their binding force. The obligatory character of law is derived from the power to legislate vested in the representatives of the people, whose charge it is to make provision for the common interests of the society over which they rule. It is by legislation that just relationship is established between members of the state; and as all legislation should be dictated by justice and gives rise to reciprocal rights and duties, every just law has an ethical value. But a law which is unjust is no law, and does not merit obedience.
Thomist Apocalyptic
Authors: Drewitt Norbert
Published: July 2007

“Le Silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie,” wrote Pascal.

Around us the miracle of nature towers heavenward under the huge pyramid of subordinated and interlocked beings. “Combien de royaumes nous ignorent!” But ourselves are introverted, egocentric. Even our earth readily becomes for us the core of the world about which the stars circle in a vast illusion.

It is the biggest contribution of Thomism to our lifethought that it tears us away from that little shrunken vision. We lift up our eyes to the eternal hills which surround us everywhere. Every rock, crystal, tree, flower, bird, is an “eternal hill” for those in whom the light of the vision has dawned. It towers upwards till it touches God and tells us of God.

Spinning electron hung over the void, electron supports atom and atom molecule; molecule supports tissue and tissue the rhythm of life. Through the wonders of science we learn to reconstruct in its richness the nature divided up by our analysis. Through division we reach a deeper unity; through the splitting up of the rainbow we know the inner richness of undivided light. As Goethe knew the beauty of holiness and adoration through the incense ascending from his childish pyramid of minerals, so we know the glory of God englobing us as we ascend the mountain of created being. “Un monde nouveau, comme si nous avions colloque avec les naturels d’une autre planète,” wrote Fabre of his insects. Every nook and corner of nature is such a new world.
Pere Lagrange
Authors: Vincent L. Hugues
Published: July 2007

On a ship in mid-ocean, buffeted by the fury of the waves, only the presence of an experienced captain, certain of his course and sufficiently master of himself to brave the storm untroubled, can stimulate the crew to action and inspire confidence in the passengers. But should the bridge be struck by lightning and the captain killed, then the danger is suddenly brought home to everyone in all its stark reality.

For nearly half a century, amongst the unceasing and furious storms loosed against Catholic exegesis by the excesses of unbridled rationalism, Père Lagrange stood facing the danger, his eyes fixed unwaveringly on the safe beacon-light of the Church’s divine authority, never taken unawares by the most violent or most insidious assault. He was an unfailing source of confidence, because of the intensity and energy of his scientific labours, and an attractive and fruitful example, because of the steadfastness of his faith founded on a most fervent practice of his Dominican religious life and nourished by unfailing prayer. And now, in a supreme act of abandonment to the Divine Will, this voice has been forever silenced here below. Père Lagrange entered into eternal life on March 10th, and his going from this earth has plunged in sore dismay those whose course he has guided among the rocks and the perils of the storm which now more than ever before rages against Truth, that is to say against Christ and His Church.
Bible-Reading Revival
Authors: Hoffmann Adolf M. , bei Bonn Walberberg
Published: July 2007

Of the various religious revivals of present-day Catholic Germany the biblical movement has, next to the liturgical, attracted most attention, even among Evangelical Christians. For centuries “Bible-reading” has been so marked a characteristic of Evangelical Christianity that those groups of Evangelical students which correspond to the various Catholic student youth-associations were spoken of as “B.K.’s” (Bibelkreise), i.e., “Bible-circles.” Since the Reformation, Bible-reading has been part of the daily life of every devout Evangelical family, at a time when, even in the best Catholic families, one could search in vain for an unshortened edition of the book in which the word of God was shown forth. There are to-day signs that this particular tradition among Catholics is weakening. Hundreds of thousands of copies of the “book of books” are sold every year; everywhere vigorous “bible-circles” are springing into life.

The 22nd of September, 1932, marked the foundation of something entirely new. On that day there came into being in Stuttgart a central organisation to deal with all matters connected with the propagation of Bible-knowledge. Stuttgart then became the centre of the Catholic Bible Movement. Was it the result of a novel imitation of Evangelical forms of piety, or did it mark the return on the part of Catholics to an ancient Christian custom, which was only discontinued for a short time when the Bible was in danger of being seriously misinterpreted?
Paid Holidays
Authors: Drinkwater F. H.
Published: July 2007

Holidays with pay is an idea which performs the almost impossible—it pleases everybody. The only people who really ought to object to it, on their own principles, are a few Catholic Distributists who display an excessive veneration for work and thrift and a rather puritanical hatred of the very words “leisure” and “plenty.” But even these, I feel sure, will not have the heart to be too consistent in this case.

We who preach the new economics naturally welcome the holidays-for-all-with-pay movement as a sort of miracle that confirms the truth of what we say. It is not consumer-credit, to be sure; essentially it is no more than an increase of wages with a shortening of hours. But it does prepare the way for consumer credit, and it does mean more purchasing-power in the pockets of the consumer as such. It does distribute money through some channel that is not exactly production. Above all it does make a beginning of a psychological break between the idea of work and the idea of a living or income. Or (to put it another way) it educates people towards the idea that work is something to be desired for its own sake, not because a living has to be earned by some drudgery or other.
Père Lagrange (II)
Authors: Vincent L. Hugues
Published: July 2007

Père Lagrange was inspired by a theological principle the rational consequences of which are from now on clearly in evidence. Inasmuch as the Bible is an inspired book it is wholly and essentially divine, therefore absolutely true and infallible as representing, with the necessary guarantee of authenticity, the very word of God Himself. At the same time, however, and precisely in virtue of the divine inspiration communicated to the human writers, it is no less integrally human by reason of its production by a human instrument who is both intelligent and free under the movement of God, the primary cause. Profound consideration of this co-ordination of the two causes had led Père Lagrange to a principle finely balanced, it is true, but as inevitable as it was freedom-giving: the distinction between what is characteristically divine—where there is no room for any defective element—and what is characteristically human—where there is room for limitations and imperfections. Whilst reserving always and most explicitly to the Church, the only living authority qualified by God for this purpose, the determination of the characteristically divine teaching or statement contained in a biblical passage, it then became possible to envisage the Bible in the human perspective of its inspired authors, to study it, that is to say, according to the rules of the most positive historic method.
The Unity of Faith
Authors: Chenu M.-D.
Published: July 2007

If there be a typical trait of faith—an attitude of spirit or an act characteristic of it—this is certainly its simplicity. It is already observable in that indeterminate thing which we term the “religious sense’ ‘; whatever may be its context, its forms, the act of the cleaving of man to the Divine is eminently simple. In the most complex souls, in those most burdened by analysis, who seem to us irremediably torn by passions, problems and agonies of inward conflict and distress, when once this shock has come out of nowhere to compel the proclamation of God . . . , a sort of polarisation comes into action. Under all the excesses, many-sidedness, and beyond superficial deployments, a directness, a spiritual purity, is cutting its way through in the search for freedom: a certain primitive and simple thing at the very root of our being has been touched.

How much more so in faith! The religious factors which create this attitude of basic adhesion are transposed and “planted” in God Himself Who is the source and consummation of the entire change. No longer adoration grounded in the shivering dread of an annihilated creature, but communion in the life of a personal God by active “outpouring” of divine light interiorly.

What paradox, then, to wish to analyse it, analyse this faith which, like life beneath the surgeon's scalpel, escapes us in proportion as analysis goes deeper!

Must we leave it alone?—Let ourselves be involved in a sort of spiritual wave where, assent once given, we have to renounce every control, every recall to terra firma, under pain of falling into any kind of “rationalism”? Attractive, enduring temptation for the believer!
World Conference, World Domination or World Government?
Authors: Zacharias H.C.E.
Published: July 2007

“World Conference, World Domination or World Government?” is the title I have chosen for the consideration of a problem which I venture to think is the most burning question of our age: but which, as a student of history, I shall approach historically.

What do we mean by “World” in this context? Evidently Humanity, the totality of human beings who at any one time inhabit our planet. This humanity is one, both biologically and historically. It has radiated from one centre in primitive times and gradually, in wave upon wave, spread over the whole earth. Primitive man was a food-collector, i.e., one who had not yet learnt the art of food-production; incidentally, and this is of special interest to us here, he did not know nor practise homicide; whether singly or en masse. Survivals of such primitives we still find on the fringes of the inhabited world, as for instance, the Eskimos of Greenland, the Firelanders of Patagonia, the Semangs of the Malay Peninsula, the Pygmies of the Central African Ituri forest: all people, who still have not even formed the conception of war.

With the threefold invention, in widely separated areas, of food-production by Hunters, Herdsmen and Farmers, there arose the three basic civilizations of mankind, which later on and in diverse manner mingled and produced secondary civilizations. Many of these again fused, and thus for instance there issued that great Archaeic Civilization, which we can trace back to the VII millennium B.C. and to which belonged the earliest—and essentially peaceable!—civilizations of the Mesopotamian, the Indus and the Nile valleys.
Ideal Education
Authors: Elrington Aidan
Published: July 2007

The ideal education as here set forth is that which gives the first place in its consideration to the building up of integrated personalities. The aim of humane education must be directed towards something more complete in the- humanist sense than mere professional and vocational efficiency, however necessary this may be.

Dr. Castiello approaches the subject from the standpoint of empirical psychology and makes full use of all that is most valuable in this science. Educational psychology, however, is more concerned with problems of efficiency and skill than with cultural values. Its aim is strictly utilitarian, and so, to a great extent, materialistic. Nevertheless the various tests and devices invented for measuring intelligence and other abilities have their use, and are not to be despised.

A humane psychology of education reaches out to something beyond mere skill and ability and endeavours to penetrate more deeply into the constitution of personality.
Christian Humanism
Authors: Deman Thomas
Published: July 2007

Christianity has ever been faced with the challenge of that conception of life which we call humanism, originated and elaborated by the philosophy of the Greeks, It would be possible and interesting to trace the long history of the adventures of Christianity’s encounters with humanistic conceptions. It did not begin with the Renaissance, nor have the encounters been concerned solely with problems of aesthetic. Indeed, they call in question an attitude of life which concerns the very foundations of our intellectual life and our moral conduct.

What is to be the distinctively Christian attitude to humanism? Is there a Christian humanism, and if so what principles must govern it? These are questions which the science of theology alone can decide with competence and finality. With its aid, we shall here set out some of the more important principles which must be taken into account in any definition of authentic Christian humanism.
Cinema in Society
Authors: Turnell Martin
Published: July 2007

“May not Wisdom and the English people,” runs the closing sentence of Mr. Huntly Carter’s book, The New Spirit in the Cinema, “build a splendid Theatre-Cinema, temple to initiate all into a new philosophy and a new religion?”

This sentence, which is curiously symptomatic of the age in which we live, provides a useful starting point for a discussion of the cinema. For the cinema must not be regarded as an isolated phenomenon. It must be seen against the social background of our time and as the latest phase in the development of modem art.

There has been a pronounced tendency in recent critical theory to make art serve some purpose beyond itself, often to turn it into a substitute for religion. Instead of looking to religion to provide them with their philosophy, it is to art that educated people are more and more inclined to turn. It is poetry or the novel or, according to Mr. Carter, the cinema that will initiate us into that new philosophy and that new religion which remain significantly so vague and ill-defined.

For the origins of this attitude we must go back to the upheavals of the sixteenth century which destroyed European unity and divided culture into a vast number of tiny independent cells—some religious, others not—each basing its life on a different and usually contradictory philosophy.