Father Gerald Vann’s broadcast talks here reproduced strike a topical note in view of the Albert Hall meeting of the Industrial Christian Fellowship at the end of September and of the discussion it aroused. Religion has an intimate relation to politics and prayer is the heart of religion. A man’s social and political action should, in fact, flow from his relations with God in prayer. But the primary question brought to the fore by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s speech is whether one’s prayer and religion are to play an essential part in particular practical judgments about society and politics.

The attack on the Archbishop, in the letters to the Times for instance, did not lack an element of truth. There were times when he left the principles he rightly declared to be the province of religion for applications which were far from being the only ones acceptable to the conscience of the Christian.. But the fundamental problem raised was that of the very mission of the Church. Is the Church to turn from preaching eternal salvation through the Cross to concentrate all her energies on providing for the social well-being and happiness of the citizen on earth? In constantly driving home the social teaching implied in the Sermon on the Mount, as well as in the relation between man and his Creator, we are in danger of presenting that teaching upside-down. We may find ourselves standing on a platform shoulder to shoulder with Socialist and Communist, trying to raise our voices above theirs and to sell our wares by making them more attractive than those of our ‘rivals.’

Nobody wants to live in a world that is blind and insane; and if that is what we are heading for, then we had better try to do something about it. Aldous Huxley makes this very plain in his latest book, Grey Eminence. One of the main points he makes there is this : that a world totally without prayer would be a world ‘totally blind and insane.’ His actual phrase is a ‘totally unmystical world ‘; but I am going to keep to the simpler and less misunderstood word ‘prayer,’ because people sometimes think that mysticism means either a tendency to swoon away at odd moments, or else a sort of permanent woolly-headedness. I am going to use the word ‘prayer,’ but I don’t mean just ‘asking for things,’ and as I am going to define it, it wili agree with what Huxley has in mind. A world totally without prayer would be a world totally blind and insane. ‘Where there is no vision the people perish ‘; and Huxley’s judgment of our own world is tjhat we are dangerously far advanced into the darkness.

Now, the first thing to notice about this is that it is not an odd or uncommon view. It is not only Huxley’s view; it is the Christian view. It is also the view of all the great religious teachers of the world ; and more than that, learned men of all kinds are telling us that this society of ours, the modern Western world, is the only civilisation in the whole of the “world's history which has not held that view and based its life upon it.

The Catholic Church in the United States of America is a very impressive institution ; especially if one comes to it as a v'isitor from England. For then one usually lands on the eastern seaboard where Catholicism will be found to be at its strongest. Moreover such an one must bring to it the memory of the Church in England, where Catholicism is, by comparison, small, poor, and overshadowed by the much more impressive Establishment. Anyone who undertakes to give his impressions of America must ask for it to be remembered that it is a vast country, with not only many but with extreme diver, sities ; so that what is true enough of certain areas or strata could be off-set by something just as true, but very different, elsewhere. It is in the eastern States, and, with the exception of a few middle State cities such as Chicago, only again in California, that the Church is well represented, not to say dominant; whereas it is hardly visible in such States ‘as the two Carolinas and Georgia, for it. has made very small conquests among the coloured people, while in what is called ‘the Bible belt’ a still existing, though gradually disappearing, open hostility may be apparent.

Numbers have some meaning, and the latest census gives the professing Catholics as over twenty-two millions : perhaps nearly ten times as many as we can really count upon. Moreover, what tells even more, this record has within ten years beaten the number counted as Methodists, which was for long the leading denomination, and perhaps the most influential, at least politically, for it had much to do with enforcing Prohibition.

The first monastery of the Carmelite Friars of St. Teresa’s Reform consisted of a small house with a porch for church, one single room for dorrnitory, a kitchen which also served as the refectory, and, a garret for choir. Its roof leaked, and in winter the snow would fall on the coarse habit of Fray Juan, who had changed his name of St. Mathias to John of the Cross, for it was the Cross with which he was in love, and the mystic teaching he gave to the Church is sealed with the sign of our salvation.

Mystics, alas, seem to be en vogue again among writers Christian and otherwise — alas, because mysticism by its very name seems to suggest mystery, dark and wonderful experiences, losing oneself in the One or the All (it does not matter which), tempting men to spiritual experiments which can only end in disaster. But mysticism is nothing of the kind, and anyone who longs for mystic experiences or who would understand Christian mystics with such notions in . his head is grievously deceived. ‘Do not seek Christ except on the Cross,’ St. John once said to one of his friars, and the Christian mystic who always seeks God through Christ, will also be found only on the Cross.

There is, perhaps, no other Saint whose life as well as whose doctrine bear the imprint of the Cross so openly, so challengingly even, as the life and the writings of St. John, whom the Church calls in the Collect of his Feast ‘Perfectae sui abnegationis et Crucis amatorem.’