The history of family religious life, as a microcosm of the national religious life, seems to me to offer a virgin field for research and documentation. I offer these pages as a study of one family, my own.

At the outset I wish to admit a prejudice in favour of continuity, homogeneity and unity in family religious life. It is only through these safeguards—the fruit, by the bye, of singleness of Faith—that we enjoy the blessings of mutual understanding, concord in social relationships and the benefit of a traditional ethical and spiritual culture. Under the group system of religion the nation is committed to a system that makes for misunderstanding and estrangement between group and group, faction in family life, and prejudice and suspicion between individuals. True it is, as says a Kempis: ‘He who seeks to enjoy things alone, forfeits the advantages that are in common.’

Centenaries ecclesiastical and secular have of late years crowded so fast upon one another’s heels that they have become almost dangerously popular. Cathedrals, abbey ruins, tombs of poets and birthplaces of novelists have beckoned to the devout or the sightseer and in every case the char-a-bancs have made reply, and the newspapers have risen to the occasion. A hundred years ago the staid respectability of the Established Church of England received a shock, and though at the time very few of its members knew with certainty what it was all about, the vast majority were quite sure that it was something very shocking. Rumour had it that while courtly prelates maintained a dignified isolation in their palaces and country squires dozed peacefully in their pews an insidious band of cultured divines with Oxford as their plotting ground, were seeking to change the features of the National Church so completely that even its most intimate friends would experience no little difficulty in recognising it.

Among that select group around which the battle raged, three names stand out prominently, but while Pusey lent his name to denote the adherents of this brave endeavour and Keble blunted the enemy’s sword by gentle verse making, John Henry Newman is the man whose name leaps to the tongue and captures thought whenever mention is made of the Oxford Movement.

In 1886 the recognised leader of the Catholic laity in Italy, Giuseppe Toniolo, Professor of Political Economy at the University of Pisa, wrote as follows:

‘True civilisation, which should not be confused with mere material progress, flowed out of the wounded side of the dying Christ when he inaugurated on Mount Calvary a new era of self-denial and charity. Only an imperfect preparation for civilisation existed in the world before the Cross. Outside the shadow of the Cross can only be found either the complete negation, or the gradual decomposition of civilisation. In union with the Cross the history of the advance of civilisation is synonymous with that of the progress of Catholicity.’

The second part of this brief exposition of the language question in Malta opens with the grant of self-government to the Maltese Islands in 1921. The Charter then granted by His Majesty’s Government practically incorporated the actual use of the languages. It was not what the National Assembly had asked for, but it gave in this matter full justice to the historical traditions of the Island. His Majesty’s Government’s declaration on the subject proceeded on the assurance that the settlement arrived at had been inspired by a wish to avoid further struggles on that question. Indeed, in paragraph 7 of Mr. Amery’s despatch of April 9th, 1921, it is stated that

‘in endeavouring to arrive at a final settlement of the language question, the only object kept in view was to avoid future discussion and controversy by a solution which should take equally into account the historic and cultural traditions of the Island, its position as a member of the British Commonwealth and the every day needs of its people. There was certainly no intention of displacing or restricting the use of the Italian language.’

Further, Lord Milner in his despatch of May 28th, 1920, paragraph 13, wrote that:

‘Those (religion and language) are matters which it is obviously desirable to keep outside the field of party strife, and which should not be liable to alteration at the discretion of a purely temporary majority'.’

This attitude shows that His Majesty’s Government intended to give a final solution to the problem in the sense that any departure from the state of things sanctioned by the Constitution on this question should be made only if and when public opinion had definitely expressed itself in a stronger sense than a temporary parliamentary majority could provide.

When a hundred years ago Sivio Pellico published his Le Mie Prigioni, the description of his ten years’ imprisonment in an Austrian fortress, it was with no political purpose. Partly, one may guess, as the result of those terrible years, and partly because, before the intensity of his religious experience during those same years, all else paled and became insignificant, on his release he turned away from politics, and all his writings henceforth would be on religious and moral themes. And if he published the story of his sufferings, it was at the instance of his parish priest, with the sole aim, as he says,

When an eminent Protestant told him that he had been converted to Catholicism by an eloquent passage in praise of confession, Silvio Pellico felt he had not written it in vain. That his book should seize the imaginations of Europe and do more than any other to shake the Austrian domination in Italy, was neither in his expectations nor intentions.

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.

‘The desire for order is a primary need of our nature, of our minds and bodies .... In the sphere of society man desires primarily a clear order, the deep satisfaction of knowing himself bound up with that which is moving to some defined end.’

There is nowadays no dearth of writers whose theme is the condemnation of our modern chaos. They fall, usually, into one of two distinct classes: there is the pure satirist, mildly mocking or disgustedly slashing but with no positive advice as to how our Humpty Dumpty should be put together again; there is the perhaps more placid person whose solution is ready to hand and whose only difficulty lies in the apparent hopelessness of getting the world to accept that solution. Miss Storm Jameson belongs to neither camp. She does not mock, and though she hits hard it is, one feels, in real sorrow and not in righteous anger; and, on the other hand, while she sees in what direction the solution must lie, it is by no means cut and dried for her. Our trouble is that ‘there is no end solution, no Good, no value greater than all the others, to which we can relate and subordinate our separate lesser values’; we know the evil of that disruption, that ‘division between man’s outer and inner life, which starts with the Renaissance.’ But the modern world cannot ‘turn back .... to the medieval supremacy of the Church’; ‘formal religion’ has collapsed. And meanwhile, we bow the knee to the ‘bitch-goddess, Success,’ and at the same time seem all too likely to turn renegade even to that religion by suicidally plunging into another war.

After a short trip to Russia Lord Passfield has published a few articles dealing with Russia and Communism. Russia, according to him, ‘has a will and a plan,’ whether it is the will of the people themselves, or one which has been forcibly imposed upon them, the writer does not tell us, and yet this is precisely what the average reader is anxious to know. Nevertheless, despite this reticence, Lord Passfield conveys a sufficiently clear idea of the only state which has adopted in its totality the teaching of Communism.

To begin with, the population of this Socialist State is strictly divided into classes. At the summit stands a very small minority—the Communist Party. The writer estimates it at one and an half million strong, which represents less than one per cent, of the total population of one hundred and sixty millions. This Communist Party, which does not wish to increase its membership but remains numerically stationary by a process of continuous weeding-out, is, as the writer puts it, the ‘governing class’ holding all power in the State. Next to it stand the candidates for membership. These are selected from another half million whose fidelity to the régime has been tested. Then come various other classes of the population graded according to their economic importance to the State, and lastly the people who have no right to exist in the Socialist State and must be ‘liquidated’ or destroyed not only as classes but as individuals also. These Socialist ‘untouchables’ do not interest Lord Passfield: he knew of their existence, for in one of his articles he has a passing reference to one of such classes, namely the kulaki.

The word is dead, but the thing is alive and growing. According to an American observer, Technocracy has made an impression; it went straight down through the layers of society to the very bottom. It may be dead at the top, but at the bottom it will live on. The organisation named Technocracy has been discredited, almost entirely on a question of personalities and and errors in incidental statistics. The popular press has turned to other stunts. Nevertheless there is a growing tendency among intelligent people to enquire if the consequence of plenty is really starvation, to what extent the present ‘economic crisis’ is natural and how much of it arises from stupidity. As the rising tide of bankruptcies reaches the professional classes, so an increased interest in economics is aroused in a section of society which has long been remarkable in England for ‘this gift of moving in a region other than that of logic.’ The broadcast emotion of a Prime Minister specially elected to put things right, is ceasing to reassure or even to interest a nation, which for a year and a half was instructed to save what it had not got and is now being urged to spend the proceeds of this thrift. In sheer desperation the nation is beginning to think for perhaps the first time since the Reform Bill.

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.

Undue importance is perhaps given to the present antiCatholic campaign in Spain by those English Catholics who are ignorant of the nation’s history and unaware that the present measures are for the most part a repetition of the events of the last century. The problem tends to lose its alarming proportions and is narrowed down when seen in its true historical perspective. The problem, however, still remains, and in view of the present state of our world civilisation we may be justified in concluding that it has reached or will reach a decisive stage in Spain’s history. The problem of how such a Catholic nation could so unexpectedly become the home of persecution and hatred of religion is found to be deeper when it is realised that Mexico is also a Spanish country, and that anti-clericalism and violent opposition to the Church are rampant in all the Republics of Spanish America and have always formed an integral part of their stormy politics. We should also keep in mind the sufferings of the Church in Portugal and her daughter country, Brazil.

A thorough discussion of the content of Newman’s University Sermons would exceed the proper length of an article in a review. It would involve a study of his thought as a whole, for they are essentially incomplete, and deal with problems that exercised him throughout his life. In particular, a careful comparison would have to be made between them and the Grammar of Assent. By incomplete, however, we must not be understood to mean that they are sketchy or immature or unimportant. We mean simply that they represent the first stage, the initial orientation, of a synthesis which being organic and alive, naturally in the course of time developed. Far from being unimportant they are an impressive statement of the relations between faith and reason and mark a turning point in the history of modern religious thought. Newman himself, re-reading them in Rome after his conversion, wrote in a letter to Dalgairns: ‘I must say I think they are as a whole, the best things I have written, and I cannot believe that they are not Catholic, and will not be useful’ and writing to James Hope he characterises the volume as ‘the best, not the most perfect, book I have done. I mean there is more to develop in it though it is imperfect.’ Clearly he felt that they treated of fundamental issues and were personally significant as expressions of his thought.

We have listened for so long to sentimental words, to slushy tunes, and are so tired of them, that our range grows narrower and narrower, and finally is reduced to a mere handful of hymns which are sung because ‘everybody knows them.’ Surely this is the dead end of all hymn-singing! Whereas the real art is still alive and practised daily in the Liturgy of the Church, with glorious words and noble tunes. Why must our vernacular hymns fall to the other extreme? For, though vernacular hymn-singing is necessarily an extra-liturgical practice, yet there are many occasions when it can be exercised to the increase of devotion in the faithful, and when it supplies a need possibly more felt now than in the days when the Liturgy itself fulfilled that purpose.

A Daily Hymn Book aroused our expectation. It is a large book, planned on a generous scale, intended to provide hymns for most big feasts in the Church’s Calendar, and arranged according to the liturgical year. It is well and clearly printed, the organist’s copy is a handsome volume, the smaller copies have the advantage of including the tunes to each hymn, which, is a great improvement on the usual book of words. It is prefaced by the Cardinal Archbishop, and has a formidable array of names of authors, composers, and sources. This is the impression of its makeup, after a cursory glance.

In the eleventh chapter of St. Matthew, Our Lord says (v. 29):

‘Take up my yoke upon you, and learn of me, because I am meek, and humble of heart: And you will find rest for your souls.’

These words are patient of a threefold interpretation:

First, Christ might be pointing to himself as the exemplar, and mean: Learn meekness and humility of me. This is the usual and popular interpretation of the text; though there can be little doubt that so understood it was not intended by Christ and is an accommodated sense. The correct translation of the conjunction, in the Greek original of St. Matthew, is ‘because’ or ‘by reason of.’ Père Lagrange renders the passage: ‘Recevez mes leçons par ce que je suis doux et humble de cceur.’ ‘Embrace my teaching, because I am meek and humble of heart.’

AN ASPECT OF RUSSIAN COMMUNISM

Sir,

A correct understanding of Communism, both in theory and in practice, is perhaps at this moment the most important of all questions facing the civilised world. Therefore at the risk of tiring your readers I revert to it again. In a letter published two months ago your contributor, Fr. J. F. T. Prince, expressed the opinion that only personal knowledge of the situation could discredit the views expressed by him in a series of articles. As personal knowledge may always be questioned, whatever the qualifications of the writer, I prefer to give the translation of an official document, reference to which has already appeared in the daily Press. It is the report of Comrade Steinhart, head of the Politsector mtc (political section?), North Caucasus, to the Central Committee of the (Communist) Party, published in the official daily Pravda, Moscow, August 8th. A copy of this paper has been secured at the Soviet Bookshop, Bush House, and can be produced, if necessary. I believe it is now unobtainable. The translator has aimed at preserving the style and language of the original, though a few paragraphs have been curtailed.

‘REPORT

of Comrade Steinhart to the C.C. of the R.C.P. upon the safeguarding of the collective crops.

‘According to the initiative of the Political Section of North Caucasus a number of measures have been taken for the enlisting of the children of the collective farms (Kolkhosy) for the safeguarding of the harvest. On July 2nd the Kraikom (Regional Committee) of the Russian Communist Party agreed with the suggestion of the Political Section upon this question. Units of “light cavalry” formed from children of the collective farms and “pioneers” (soviet scouts) have already been organized.