There probably never was a time in the history of the Church when it was not true to say that the great thing needed was a well-instructed laity. To say that the need to-day is for teaching is trite, yet there is a sense in which it is perhaps unprecedentedly urgent that there should be teaching, and more and better teaching of the Faith than there ever was before. For there certainly never was a time when there was so much and such unescapable teaching going on about everything but the Faith, and against the Faith. The competition for human attention is so clamorous that many minds are simply stunned by it and rush headlong into the thing that gives them the best emotional outlet without ever stopping to think at all.

It is not easy to make people think in these days, because of a habit of superficiality and unreceptiveness which is partly the result of an instinctive mental self-defence in this welter of conflicting propaganda. The sermon has largely lost its appeal and its power, not because people are hardened but because their minds are so full of the clamour and racket that they have lost the power of attention. The people with a definite need may hear in Church or on a C.E.G. pitch something that answers to their need, but the majority, who are not making any particular demand of their religion, may never develop the knowledge they acquired at school or when they were instructed.

It there is a common bond among all the non-Catholic sects it is probably their opposition to the Church; and if there is a similar bond between the various Philosophies ranged against Catholicism to-day it would seem to be their opposition to the idea of a Transcendent God. Many are willing to admit a Spirit of some kind, but Immanent in Nature, in Men, in History, or in Time. And this is true not only of those whose main concern is with life and evolution, such as Bergson and his later followers, but also of those who hold that the one reality is History or the operation of mind, such as Croce and Idealists of the extreme type. We will, therefore, examine some of these systems to see, if possible, the reasons for this condition of affairs.

Among the many causes there can be no doubt that one of them is the present-day tendency to exalt Experience at the expense of Reason. One bad effect of this is a loss of objectivity, which is well illustrated by a story of the war when a returned soldier was convicted of a glaring contradiction in relating his adventures. His retort was: ‘Oh, thought you wanted experiences, not a blooming argument.’ For while Experience may satisfy an individual of the existence of an Immanent Spirit, reason is required to demonstrate to others the reality of a Transcendent God. As Maritain says, ‘it is in virtue of that intellectual operation which is the activity most profoundly distinctive of man, namely ratiocination, that it (the existence of God) becomes evident to us.’

A great and peculiarly many-sided historic character like that of Cardinal Wiseman must always offer a number of angles of approach to the student. Speaking more particularly of his literary work, the power of retaining after death the art of making friends (to use the phrase of Hazlitt) is one which Wiseman may be said to have possessed in an exceptional degree. As a constant and ever-appreciative reader of Wiseman—nowadays, I venture to think, read far less than he deserves to be—I may perhaps in the course of years have developed some points of view which it is worth while setting out in a connected fashion: though I should perhaps warn the reader that I shall have no startling discoveries to announce, no unknown material to make public.

The peculiar importance which attaches to Rome as a key to the personality and achievement of Wiseman springs, of course, primarily from the fact that so long a period of his youth and early manhood was spent there almost without interruption: practically the whole, that is, of twenty-two years, from 1818 to 1840. And the call of Rome was one which Wiseman had felt ever since his earliest youth; in that incomparable first chapter of what is, I think, perhaps his most lovable book, the Recollections of the Last Four Popes and of Rome in their Times (1858), in which he describes in so marvellously graphic a fashion the arrival of the first party of English students, sent to re-occupy the English College at Rome—in that chapter he reveals that the history and antiquities of Rome had formed the bonds of a little college society to which he had belonged, no doubt as its moving spirit, at Ushaw; and when much later in life he received the congratulations of St. Cuthbert’s College upon his elevation to the Cardinalate, the phrase which came quite naturally to him, in explaining why he had left Ushaw so early, when barely sixteen, was that of ‘the splendid temptation of Rome,’

He is an inept apologist who urges that if the poor suffer the pangs of hunger, the rich too suffer the pangs of indigestion, that surfeit is no less painful than want. It is a mischievous casuistry that reminds us that nervous prostration is as often an attendant of prolonged satisfaction as of perennial anxiety as to where the next meal is coming from. Happiness is indeed relative to our wants, which are limited by our environment and by individual and social temperament. But it is dangerous to argue that between this class and that there is nothing to choose so far as the subjective enjoyment of life is concerned. In the brute economy, the lives of sheep-devouring wolves and wolf-devoured sheep enjoy doubtless the same average of pain and gratification; we can predicate of each vessel the same fullness according to its capacity in nature’s, scale. But Dives and Lazarus are not (I mean in the subjective order) the analogues of sheep and wolf. For Lazarus is a man: Dives too: the primate mammal, homo sapiens; though each may feel some difficulty in predicating it of the other.

These are incredulous times and we must be very careful. We are most of us as fatuous when we explicate the problem of pain as when we attempt to analyse the economy of its distribution amongst men. We remember having it explained to us in early youth that pain is primarily a prophylactic whose function is to sound the alarm of lesion and disease lest (fatally) they go unperceived.

Recently there came into my possession a faded copy of the Gloucestershire Chronicle of October 28th, 1876. Its immediate interest for me was an account of the death, truly described as melancholy, of a member of my family. Whilst shooting wild fowl on the banks of the Severn with two friends, he had swum out to reclaim a widgeon winged by one of them, and was drowned in spite of his friends’ efforts at rescue. In the obvious way peculiar to the period the coroner is reported as having addressed the jury thus: We seem to have all the evidence. It is a most melancholy case; certainly one of the most melancholy that I have had to sit upon for some time. It is a very sad thing—a young fellow, whom most of us knew, went out for amusement and lost his life. I suppose the water was cold? .... It is a melancholy and sad case. . . . No doubt the poor gentleman met his death accidentally and that will be your verdict.’

After indulging in what I must call a certain vicarious concern in this grief that was, I turned my attention to the remainder of the paper, so unfamiliar in its size, its closely printed columns, and its lack of pictorial illustration. There is a certain measured tread in the style of newspaper writing, even in the advertisements, of those days. We observe the same characteristic in the old bound Tablets and Punches of the ‘70’s. To us who are accustomed to find our persiflage light and airy, there is an inverted comicality in the older ways.

A modern proverb has arisen as a star to guide the erring artist: ‘Look after Truth and Goodness, and Beauty will look after herself.’ But let the artist beware. Such a star may prove to be a will-o’-the-wisp. At first sight the proverb appears to contain the complete ethic for aesthetics, reducing the tough problem of beauty to a simple and practical formula. How attractive to unite the Good and the True in holy wedlock and then turning discover Beauty the bridesmaid carrying the train behind. Simplifications, however, have their dangers. To bring them in touch with reality requires such care that in practice they become most complex, disclosing many an attractive but misleading view. A simplification should only be the completion of thought, never the commencement. For Mr. Gill this proverb has come as the answer to a long process of reasoning, as appears from this volume. He thus avoids the only serious pitfall. But other artists who begin with this motto may not be so fortunate.

Truth belongs to the mind, goodness to the will, and beauty is the fruit of both the mind and the will. Any being in its perfection will be true in its correspondence to God’s idea of it; it will be good in its dependency on God’s will; and will be beautiful in its reflection of the harmony of God’s mind and will, which have produced the first two effects. Therefore beauty follows necessarily from the truth and goodness of a thing. Concentration on the first and the second produces the third automatically, since it is nothing less than the harmony between those two.

The life of Mr. Middleton Murry as told by himself in the early part of his book on God is moving and tragic; tragic, not only because of the temperamental difficulties which made his relations with his wife, Katherine Mansfield, so painful both to him and to her, not only because of her sudden though not unexpected death, but because his own character is such that he seems to have spent most of his life in a state of spiritual darkness, struggling to find a gleam of light, and yet, by some strange psychological perversity, shutting his eyes when the light appeared. He has studied the Gospels. The sayings of Christ fall from his pen as easily as from the lips of a fervent Christian. But he is not a Christian (though he has said in the Scots Observer that he counts himself one), for he rejects Christ’s claim to be divine. He is not even a theist, for he has written in so many words ‘God does not exist’ (God, p. 233). Yet he looks upon himself as a mystic. ‘We mystics, we fanatics! Yes, that is true .... Out of our serene impartiality, out of our final loss of all illusion, arises mysticism, arises fanaticism.’ (The Necessity of Communism, pp. 113-4).

It’s an unusual experience for a community to awake one morning to find the only tangible medium of exchange is the cash in the pockets of its citizens, especially when the citizens had no warning that it would be a good idea to have enough cash in their pockets to provide for the situation. That’s what happened in New York six months ago and that’s the state of affairs that obtained there, the financial centre of the world, according to some, for more than a week.

It’s a little difficult to convey the sensation derived from reading the announcement of a banking moratorium. Most people take their banks pretty much for granted. But imagine yourself of a morning entering your own dining room, ready to sit down to a nice hot breakfast. You open your morning paper. Large headlines inform you that, not only your own bank, but every bank in the country is closed for an indefinite period. Quickly you make a mental calculation of whatever small amount of money you have on your person. There’s that ten-bob note, and then there’s about three-and-six—no, that’s right, you spent ninepence on the way home—that’s two-and-ninepence in small change.

In a long narrow gallery of Versailles seldom opened to the public hangs a picture by Nocret of Louise Duchesse de la Vallière in court dress of the late seventeenth century. There is something strangely haunting about the beautiful aristocratic face with its great sad eyes ringed by dark circles. For all her fine parure she has the air of one whose nights are spent in weeping. And now her life has been written by one who seems to have crept into her very heart and learnt its whispered secret; a work so different from the usual ones on Louis XIV’s mistresses, and justly crowned by the Académie Française.

Here is the story. In 1661, the sixteen-year-old Madame Henriette d’Angleterre married Louis XIV’s brother. Among her ladies-in-waiting was Mlle. Louise de la Baume le Blanc, of Blois, aged seventeen. She had fair hair and innocent almond-shaped blue eyes, ‘ses yeux longs,’ and though she limped slightly, she was very exquisite. Madame herself said she was ‘douce, précieuse, admirable’ . . . ‘dans ses beaux yeux une douce langueur.’ As a little girl in Tours and at Blois, she had been greatly neglected by her mother and allowed to run wild. She had seen the King for the first time on his way to marry the Spanish Infanta. It was strange that on the high chimney of her chateau was the device: Ad principem ut ad ignes amor indissolubilis which by a strained translation is interpreted as foretelling her love for Louis and then its sacrifice to the fires of a greater love.