The significant date, October 9th, 1845, recalls a crisis in the religious development of an individual, and through him in the religious history of England. But it has also a significance in quite another sphere, since it marks the end of an epoch in university history: with the repression of the Tractarian Movement Laudian Oxford finally ceased to be. Newman realised his defeat in his campaign on behalf of dogmatic religion, and recognised his conquerors. ‘The men who had driven me from Oxford,’ he admits in the Apologia, ‘ were distinctly the Liberals.’ And again: ‘I found no fault with the Liberals; they had beaten me in a fair field.’ With this Matthew Arnold agrees; but he, while admitting that other and more intelligent forces were arrayed against the Movement, less politely characterises the liberalism on which it broke as ‘middle-class liberalism.’ The effects of the Movement persisted in the country at large; but the Movement itself could no longer be properly regarded as peculiarly the Oxford Movement. As for Oxford itself, Mark Pattison observed that, if he had gone to sleep in 1845, and been awakened in 1850, he would have found himself in a new world. For the time being the University abandoned its previous interest in theological controversies, and directed its attention upon itself and its specific function, upon the educational demands of the age and its own response to them. The inevitable liberal reaction, as soon as it gathered force, and this soon happened, rudely thrust aside as irrelevant all the debatable issues that had made life uncomfortable during the past decade, and forced to the front the solitary question of University reform. Theology gave place to education, as the absorbing topic of the day.

In a general picture of world bewilderment before problems which have grown beyond the grasp of responsible statesmen, the bewilderment of Britain concerning India is peculiarly tragic, peculiarly ludicrous. Picture an aged burglar who, many years ago, on entering a house by force and stealth, found it occupied solely by naughty children at continual blows, with no one to control or smack them; picture him reformed and, Smee-like, turned governess, guiding the young into more orderly ways; picture him finally debating his position with the elder children, fully grown, eager now to control their own prosperity, rebellious against his dominion; picture his anxieties; are they really old enough, are not these tantrums proof of youthful lack of balance, are there not other burglars abroad? What will happen when, as still occurs, the young ones start to pull each others’ hair?

Dr. Zacharias’ book is a fairly detailed account of the growing up—socially and politically—of modern India— with special attention paid to the agitation of Congress against British domination. As a Jew by birth and a Catholic by belief Dr. Zacharias claims impartiality, but he makes no secret of his whole-hearted preference for Congress and is certainly not impartial in his account of events such as the Partition of Bengal or the Amritsar Massacre.

Catholic political action in Germany dates from the period after the Congress of Vienna. Three main questions influenced its growth; the spread of Liberalism; the Austro-Prussian struggle for leadership among the German states; and the Kulturkampf. The question of Austria or Prussia was really settled in 1866 in favour of the latter, but the problem lingered on until recently under the name of Particularism (Rights of Federal States), though it had comparatively little influence upon the thought of the Catholic party. Liberalism and the Kulturkampf had a more determinate effect. Liberalism and, later, its counterpart Socialism resulted in the separation of Catholic political theory from the commonly held political theory of the period; a result of the Kulturkampf was to form this theory into a political party.

It was natural that Catholic politics and thought should be opposed to the Liberal conceptions of society and the State. Were not most of the mcontrary to the Church’s doctrine of natural design? Thus in 1838 the mighty genius of Goerres already foreshadowed the rise of German Catholicism against the current political creed.

A point that frequently strikes the outsider about psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts is its inaccessibility to logical argument. This is not said by way of reproach, but as a statement of fact. Whenever a person raises a difficulty about psychoanalysis he is countered with the remark ‘you are putting up a resistance,’ and treated as the analyst treats the patient (making difficulties).

Now, it struck me, that something similar occurs in regard to Catholicism, by which I mean, not only or merely the official teaching of the Church, but also all those currents of thought, feeling, and emotion which go to make up the life of Catholicism, a life which at times becomes so exuberant as to be considered detrimental to the truth and unity of the Church, and so has to be pruned. (As, for instance, in the outbursts of religious enthusiasm, devotions, cults, etc., which, only after careful examination are tolerated or permitted, and finally perhaps incorporated officially .... others get suppressed, but often linger on).

Amidst the welter of memoirs of the Napoleonic era De Vigny’s Servitude et Grandeur Militaires always seems to me to hold a peculiar charm and attraction. The very opening sentence of the book strikes that keynote of gentle melancholy and disillusion which is so characteristic of the high-souled Captain Renaud with his famous Canne de Jonc. ‘ If it is true, according to the Catholic poet, that there is nothing so painful as remembering happy days in the midst of misery, it is also true that the heart finds a certain happiness in recalling times of hardship and slavery, in a period of freedom and calm.’ This same air of philosophic detachment and experienced judgment pervades all the author’s reflections on the rottenness of the military system of the age and the hollowness of military glory. Incidentally the book contains also in the story of Laurette ou le Cachet Rouge, one of the tenderest and most poignant love-stories ever written.

In the course of the Captain’s memoirs there stand out in clear detachment the portraits of two of the leading protagonists in the great struggle for supremacy, one of the Emperor himself, the other of the most chivalrous and high-souled of all England’s naval commanders, the illustrious Admiral Collingwood.

Though in the domain of Dogma much has been done in recent years towards re-establishing the conformity between Faith and Reason, in the domain of Morals this is not so. On the contrary, we are confronted at the present time with a rupture between Catholic moral teaching and secular ethical thought which is far more disastrous than the nineteenth-century quarrel between Religion and Science. In no sphere is this rupture more manifest than in that of the ethics of sexual relationship and in the conceptions of society and of individual conduct dependent upon it. The problem does not, indeed, present itself to the average Catholic in these general terms, but in the more pressing form of the concrete case—in the opposition between the teaching of the Church and of the world around him on marriage, on the family, on chastity, on divorce, on birth-control and the rest. The devout Catholic will loyally accept the teaching of the Church on these several heads, but not many, perhaps, are able to give that teaching an intelligent assent; few are conscious of a consistent, coherent policy or doctrine underlying the Church’s precepts, which consequently are apt to appear as so many disconnected, arbitrary and unintelligible hardships; fewer still realise the essential conformity, not to say identity, between Christian moral law and right reason or common sense. Not seldom must the Church’s uncompromising teaching regarding, for example, ‘hard cases’ which seem to indicate divorce, sterilisation or contraception appear to the thinking Catholic as incomprehensibly harsh and irrational, and only by a blind act of faith can he accept it and stifle the protests of his own reasoning.