There is one significant mark of our declining culture which deserves particular notice—the separation of the external side of religion from the internal. Just as a man in his prime finds no opposition between his body and soul, but rather lives as a single yet complex whole, so a healthy civilisation-finds its highest expression in a religion which harmonises into a single whole tire interior spirit of charity with the exterior structure of rubric, law and hierarchy. But when decay sets in these necessarily complementary elements begin to separate out into opposition and falsehood. The legalism of the pharisee is set over against the puritanism of the communist. ‘I hus at the beginning of the thirteenth century the external life of the Church was seriously encrusted with comfortable clergy, while the interior spirit seemed to be limited to groups of the laity, fermenting in a way that often resulted in schism or heresy. Hence the friars were sent to re-establish unity in religion. The rise of Puritanism in the seventeenth century reveals the separation of the two elements still more clearly. ‘When religion ceases to give life tc a people those for whom it represents a vested interest overemphasise the external rules of worship and ecclesiastical etiquette, while those who see a need for new vitality attempt a short cut to the good life by means of some sort of mysticism and fraternity which sidesteps formal religion.

Where there is no vision, the people perish; ... if those who are the salt of the earth lose their savour, there is nothing to keep’ that earth disinfected, nothing to prevent it from falling into complete decay. The mystics are channels through which a little knowledge of reality filters down into our human universe of ignorance and illusion. A totally unmystical world would be a world totally” blind and insane. From the beginnings of the eighteenth century onwards, the sources of all mystical knowledge have been steadily diminishing in number, all over the planet. We are dangerously advanced into the darkness.

For several centuries now, Europe has been the battleground for an attack upon the very existence of the spirit of man, though it was during and after the eighteenth century that the attack reached its height; and it is man who has been more or less consistently the loser till almost the whole of his heritage has been taken from him. The stature of Christian man was infinite—we speak of Christian doctrine and belief not practice quia omnes nos peccavimus : we betray what we believe but that does not invalidate the beliefs—because seeking first the kingdom of heaven he could find oneness with God and be tilled, and all the other things, the knowledge and love of created things and joy in them, and the whole of a happy human life, were added to him.

The religious development of Angelus Silesius (Johannes Scheffler is one of the most interesting chapters in the history of the religious life. Usually coupled with Meister Eckhart, he became a text-book example for the Protestant theory that the Catholic Church kills the inner life—Meister Eckhart she condemned (though, in fact, only a few of his more extreme statements), but Angelus Silesius she broke.

The time into which Johannes Scheffler was born was not unlike our own. The greater part of the continent was in a state’of material and spiritual upheaval; the Thirty Years’ War devastated Central Europe, Reformation and Counter-Reformation were fighting for the souls of men; peasants and soldiers sang that awful ballad, ‘There is a reaper called Death, Hath power from the great God’— not knowing whether they should eat and drink for to-morrow they would die, or follow the call to sackcloth and ashes of men like the great popular preacher Abraham a Santa Clara.

Outside the Catholic Church the religious life had broken up inttf two main streams : the orthodox Lutheranism (or Calvinism) of the established territorial churches on the one hand, and a number of sfnall groups and sects experimenting in a pseudo-mystic religion on the other. Two provinces of the Holy Roman Empire were especially affected by this revival : Silesia, where Scheffler was born, and Holland, where he spent part of his university years. It was, therefore, almost inevitable that the passionate young man should have made contact with these circles, ‘conventicles ‘as they were usually called, in the hope of finding in them the fulfilment of the yearnings of his deeply religious nature.

The Jewish problem has become one of the most ominous and terrible issues of contemporary consciousness, which is tested by new waves of terrifying anti-Semitism. It must, however, be said that this ppves the way to a deeper realisation of the problem itself. It is raised to a new level, receives new definition and new illumination. Beneath the surface of the elemental outburst something far more essential, significant and decisive than all this sounding storm around the ‘Jewish question ‘is taking place. Above all, it becomes clear that it is not enough to oppose moral or legal standards to antiSemitism ; that the answer to the whole tragedy of Israel must be sought in its mysterious bond with the destinies of world-history.

There are several ways of approaching the Jewish problem. For sociologists, economists, for historians of culture and for moralists, Jewry will always be a social, economic or cultural unit, or an object of moral valuation. Racial nationalism turns the whole issue into biology. At the present time anti-Semitism is primarily concerned with racial arguments; yet often these only Conceal feelings of hatred and resentment. I will not speak of the approach to the problem which has become the chief source of the delirious ideas about the ‘Jewish conspiracy,’ the ‘Wise men of Sion,’ etc.—legendary tales, or rather blood-stained slanders, which still confuse some minds, not so much in this country as on the Continent.

This is not a subject on which I would dare to dogmatise or attempt to say the last word at this stage. It would, however, be an affectation to pretend to more diffidence than I feel. Soon after I took my degree, I worked for two years in Neville Chamberlain’s Conservative Research Department; later I became a Labour City Councillor and prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Oxford. Brought up a Protestant, I was received not very long ago into the Church. I should indeed be a poor creature if the topic under discussion aroused in me no individual reactions.

The Editor of the Catholic Herald has recently computed that out of three million or so Catholics in England, 90 per cent, vote Labour. Be the figure 90 per cent or 75 per cent., as more often suggested, the fact in any case is striking. It is seldom animadverted to by those who exploit the authoritarian tendencies of a small group of gifted Catholic laymen in the service of an argument that the average British Catholic is a British (not too British) version of General Franco.

It cannot be pretended, however, that the substantia! Catholic element in the Labour vote exercises a distinctive influence on Labour principles or policy remotely proportionate to their number or to their merits as citizens. They do not vote Labour because of their Catholicism, nor yet in spite of it. For the most part poor men and women living in large towns, many of them of Irish extraction, their natural bias is towards the party of the under-dog. Individual leaders such as the late John Wheatley have done splendid work.