In her decision to seize the Ruhrland, France has committed herself to a course which leaves her practically no possibility of turning back. The gravity of her decision is already appreciated throughout the country, and the Press is busy exhorting all classes of the population to pay no heed to criticism of French policy and to face the trials which she has chosen to encounter with unflinching resolution and with a determination to rely solely upon France’s own resources. This is not the place to discuss the merits or otherwise of the policy which France has adopted. But in order to make clear the extremely serious dangers which it involves for the position of the Church in France if failure in the Ruhr should lead to a violent political reaction towards the Left, it is necessary to indicate briefly the principal factors in the situation.

In the first place it must be stated quite frankly that no one who sympathises with France in the difficulties with which she has been surrounded since the war could well see how the adventure into the Ruhr was to be avoided. The occupation of the Ruhr was France’s last card against Germany, and as all else had failed, France simply had to play it or acquiesce meekly in Germany’s triumphant default. It is not fair to say that France is prepared to drive Europe into war rather than undertake to pay for her own reconstruction out of taxes.

Until about the end of the nineteenth century, a man was expected to give his reasons for joining the Catholic Church. To-day a man is really expected to give his reasons for not joining it. This may seem an exaggeration; but I believe it to stand for a subconscious truth in thousands of minds. As for the fundamental reasons for a man doing it, there are only two that are really fundamental. One is that he believes it to be the solid objective truth, which is true whether he likes it or not; and the other that he seeks liberation from his sins. If there be any man for whom these are not the main motives, it is idle to enquire what were his philosophical or historical or emotional reasons for joining the old religion; for he has not joined it at all.

But a preliminary word or two may well be said about the other matter; which may be called the challenge of the Church. I mean that the world has recently become aware of that challenge in a curiously and almost creepy fashion. I am literally one of the least, because one of the latest, of a crowd of converts who have been thinking along the same lines as I. There has been a happy increase in the number of Catholics; but there has also been, if I may so express it, a happy increase in the number of non-Catholics; in the sense of conscious non-Catholics.

By this time it must be obvious that every single thing in the Catholic Church which was condemned by the modern world has now been re-introduced by the modern world, and always in a lower form. The Puritans rejected art and symbolism, and the Decadents brought them back again, with all the old appeal to sense and an additional appeal to sensuality. The rationalists rejected supernatural healing, and it was brought back by Yankee charlatans who not only proclaimed supernatural healing, but forbade natural healing. Protestant moralists abolished the confessional and the Psycho-Analysts have re-established the confessional, with every one of its alleged dangers and not one of its admitted safeguards. The Protestant patriots resented the intervention of an international faith, and went on to evolve an empire entangled in international finance. Having complained that the family was insulted by monasticism, they have lived to see the family broken in pieces by bureaucracy; having objected to fasts being appointed for anybody during any exceptional interval, they have survived to see teetotalers and vegetarians trying to impose a fast on everybody for ever.

The only begotten Son of God, Jesus Christ, who will come at the end of time to judge the living and the dead, and to reward each according to their deeds, both the reprobate and the elect; all of whom will rise with their own proper bodies which they now bear, so that they may receive according to their deeds, whether good or evil.

We have said that the Resurrection of the Body, being a revealed mystery is not provable by reason, but is acceptable only on authority. As a preface to ‘the Witness of Reason,’ we set down the principle of St. Thomas :

With these words of wisdom, which should not be forgotten, we now pass from the Witness of Scripture to the Witness of Reason to the Resurrection of the Body.

With that curious kind of provincialism it sometimes displays in such matters—though less now than formerly—the British newspaper press seems to have passed over in silence the recent reception into the Catholic Church of one of the most distinguished of living Dutch writers, Frederik van Eeden. His submission took place on February 19th last at the Benedictine Abbey of Oosterhout, and was accepted by the Primate of the Netherlands, the Most Reverend H. van Wetering. The event naturally called forth a great deal of comment in the Dutch Press; continental newspapers generally also reported it, and American papers have not been lacking in notes on the conversion and its probable influence. So far, however, there has been in English no appreciation of the writing which preceded the conversion, and the moment seems to be opportune for an attempt to give a general sketch of Frederik van Eeden’s work and philosophy, the more so as, by one work at least, to be described shortly, he is probably the contemporary Dutch writer best known to the English public after the novelist, Louis Couperus, and as his relations with England and English literature are unusually close.

He is an unfortunate man that cannot feel proud of his nationality; but it has to be confessed that it is difficult to be English during these days in Palestine. Thanks to the religious habit which I wear, the Palestinian native frequently looks on me as a Faransāwi, or Frenchman—a fact which bears tribute to the influence French Catholics have exerted here in times past; and it is not always that I correct his mistake.

Indeed, one has to confess at times to feelings of downright shame and a desire to hide one’s head; to-day, for example, when the streets of Jerusalem are being paraded by armoured cars, and when groups of those known to you at home as the ‘Black and Tans’ are scattered about in the company of Hindoo troops. Because yesterday, to-day and to-morrow, the 13th, 14th and 15th of July, have been chosen by the Christian and Mahommedan Arabs as a sort of ‘down tools’ protest against the inclusion of the Balfour Declaration favouring the establishment of a Jewish national home, in the British mandate of Palestine. Shops are closed : bazaars are idle : one waits in some trepidation for the events of the next few days. There are rumours that some who are in the know have left the country. The authorities, fearing a repetition of the troubles of May and November, 1921, and of Easter, 1920, have issued proclamations and brought up armoured cars and soldiers.

I Began with the power of the Church to grow young suddenly, when she is expected to grow old slowly, and remarked that this power in a creed was one which I could only conceive as thus regularly recurrent under two conditions : first, that it was really true; and second, that the power in it was more than mortal. In the ultimate sense, these are undoubtedly the reasons for what is a revolution that really returns like the revolution of a wheel. But among the secondary and superficial causes of this rejuvenation may be specially noted, I fancy, the very fact of which religious reformers have so constantly complained; I mean the complexity of the creeds. There is a sense in which the Faith is the simplest of religions; but there is another sense in which it really is by far the most complicated. And what I am emphasising here is that, contrary to many modern notions, it owes its victory over modern minds to its complexity and not its simplicity. It owes its most recent revivals to the very fact that it is the one creed that is still not ashamed of being complicated.

In fundamentals the Church rejoices in being unchangeable; but she is sometimes charged with being too stiff and stationary, even in those externals that are the legitimate sphere of change. And in one sense I think this is indeed true; if we mean by the Church its mortal machinery. The Church cannot change quite so fast as the charges against her do. She is sometimes caught napping and still disproving what was said about her on Monday, to the neglect of the completely contrary thing that is said about her on Tuesday. She does sometimes live pathetically in the past, to the extent of innocently supposing that the modern thinker may think to-day what he thought yesterday. Modern thought does outstrip her, in the sense that it disappears of itself before she has done disproving it. She is slow and belated, in the sense that she studies a heresy more seriously than the heresiarch does. Most of us could point out examples of this error, if it be an error, so far as the external controversial machinery of Catholicism is concerned. There are Catholics who are still answering Calvinists, though there are no Calvinists to answer. There are admirable apologists assuming that the average Englishman blames the Church for distrusting the Bible; though nowadays he is much more likely to blame her for trusting it. There are those who have to apologise, in the Greek if not in the English sense, for the exalted place which our theology gives to a woman; as if our fashionable feminists still held the views of John Knox about the monstrous regiment of women.

We have always felt and expressed the opinion that the de facto separation between the Church of England and the Church of Rome came about by process of law; not, indeed, primarily ecclesiastical, but civil. In this it did but follow the character of our people, over whom the majesty of law has always had such sway that for a time the country accepted with almost Oriental fanaticism the Divine Right of Kings.

This fixed opinion of ours on the legal and civil origin of the breach with Rome led us to expect that the formal, official and collective separation would be ended by the same process which had been its cause. It became part of our service of Jesus Christ, the Truth, to look for any signs, however slender and struggling, of an official will or wish to have speech, if not yet inter-communion, with the Holy See. Perhaps our hopes gave sight to our eyes when we discerned in the official acts of the ‘Conference of Bishops of the Anglican Communion,’ held at Lambeth in 1920, some beginning of that official action by the Church of England which three centuries had awaited in vain.

The business of the Church in the world is twofold : to teach and to aid. She has to set out the divine truths, issue moral warnings, rebuke and exhort in season and out of season; further, she has the custody of those sacred signs which carry with them the grace of God, and through the communication of which the souls receiving them are enabled to carry out these divine precepts and exhortations. She teaches to the world about her the ideals of Christ, and she gives to the world the power of Christ whereby these ideals can be realised. In short, to use words which have become familiar to this generation, we can say that the Church has to perform the functions both of a priest and a prophet.

Now, if in view of these two functions we were to try to judge the Church of our own time in as detached a fashion as we could, we should probably agree that the priestly side of the Church’s office is being performed with a zeal and a response such as no other age of her history can have surpassed. To dogmatise on historical parallels between one age and another would be foolish, because impossible of verification or proof : yet the closest student of history would, I believe, be hard put to discover a period of Christian development when the sacramental system was so much frequented as it is to-day. Merely to consult any of the popular spiritual manuals of the last four centuries and to contrast them with those of to-day is to make one realise the enormous increase of sacramental devotion that has been made in these last years.

Timothy Raeburn was the last of the Artists. He lived in a garret in London, the very last of the garrets. Both he and the garret seemed to exist only by some oversight, in the present almost perfect state of things. A lingering echo of those now distant times when artists had been content to starve to death in such places, just for the mere glory of the thing.

Here he lived entirely alone and unfriended. He was a mystery. Nobody knew how he lived, or what secret force sustained him in his isolation from the world—not even Timothy himself : or by what mysterious power he alone had managed to survive into the new and happier era. How did he maintain this detachment, where one by one the others failed?

Gradually the little band of Timothy’s fellow-artists had dwindled into nothing. The last survivors of the Post neo-Primitives. who had struggled so valiantly with the banner of reaction, had all capitulated in one way or another. For instance, during the past five years no fewer than one hundred and seventy-four cases of suicide had been announced among them. Only a month ago the Trumpet Blast had wasted three lines of a column on the death of Mr. J. A. Yeeke, the leader of the group and believed to be the last of the free-lances, who had last been seen reading a copy of this same Trumpet Blast, and had immediately done away with himself in a fit of sheer boredom.

We had been talking about the recent exhibitions and everybody agreed that it was a melancholy thing to see how men who had begun as real and sincere artists had, for obvious reasons, become purveyors of popular pictures. Another spoke of the work of a gifted and restless politician who was known to be in his spare moments a slashing painter of landscape. From this we came by a natural transition to amateurs generally and their ways.

Alison, the poet, contended strongly for the essential superiority of the amateur as a sort of aristocrat who was entitled to special consideration because he worked from inspiration while others worked by routine. Look at the daily articles, the weekly reviews, the annual novels. Look at the painters. ‘Look’ he said, ‘at the average production here and abroad, at the Academy, the galleries, the Salons. Routine work without inspiration. Potboilers. Things done, not because they had to be done, but because something must be done. Fellows always at it—starve if they didn’t, I am afraid, some of them. (Alison has a substantial income of his own). How can you have freshness of vision, spontaneity, sincerity the things that make Art vital? How does the fun of the thing come in? No fun at all, drudgery. You know, Howard, what Schiller said about the element of play in Art—a sort of sublime—or at any rate charming—play in which we escape from the trammels of everyday life. . .

Since the Renaissance, the world has gained many sciences: but it has, in the process, lost not a few arts. All lost arts are to be regretted; but the loss of one of them should be a subject of special sorrow on the part of Catholics. It is the art of compiling Breviary Offices.

All flesh is not the same flesh: star differeth from star in glory. Each of our Breviaries—the Roman, the Monastic, the Dominican, the Ambrosian—contains offices of very varying degrees of beauty. Even the oldest offices, such as most of those in the Proprium de Tempore and the Commune Sanctorum, mark very different stages of the road to perfection; but speaking generally, it is in the Proper of Saints that the differences are most marked, and the modern offices which are the ugliest and least fitting.

The story of the city is that of England, for indeed it had its beginning before England was a name. Its history follows familiar lines. To a Roman frontier post succeeded a Saxon cathedral, a Benedictine abbey, and a Norman castle. Round this pile of buildings on the bank of a placid river gathered a busy community of traders and craftsmen. Walls and gates protected their growing wealth. Royal charters gave local self-government and a long succession of privileges. Fairs and markets attracted the produce of the fertile lands along the river valley, and the merchants of Europe carried far and wide the fame of the city looms. The records of a score of flourishing guilds and the numerous charitable foundations which survive to this day prove the wealth and dignity of this place in mediaeval days.

The religious changes of the sixteenth century had some effect upon the material prosperity of the city. The cloth trade dwindled and finally vanished. During the Civil Wars all classes suffered severely, but the destruction of the walls and of many of the timber houses allowed expansion and rebuilding. Wealth and prosperity returned, largely owing to new industries, to favourable situation on two important trunk roads, and to the position of the city as a provincial metropolis of a wide agricultural area.

‘The first, that with any effectual success attempted a diversion of this foul and overflowing stream,’ wrote Henry Vaughan in the preface to Silex Scintillans, ‘was the blessed man, Mr. George Herbert, whose holy life and verse . . . gave the first check to a most flourishing and admired Wit of his time.’

Perhaps this attempt to divert the ‘foul stream’ and check an ‘admired Wit of his time’ may explain why, as he tells us, he at first ‘sought out quaint words and trim invention, curling with metaphors a plain intention/ since in the Sonnet sent to his mother as a New Year’s gift from Cambridge in 1608, he asks :

for undoubtedly some of his poems in their allegorical obscureness and subtlety of expression rival those of the wearers of ‘Venus’ liverie.’ The subtlety, however, Is only in the form in which he has chosen to express familiar religious truths in order to allure those who would be attracted by it.

But, indeed, as Vaughan’s words suggest, it was his own ‘holy life’ that was the first and most powerful element in the remarkable influence he exercised over his contemporaries, and it was this that gave meaning and charm to his poetry.

His mother, the gracious lady whom Donne regarded with such affectionate admiration and used to address as ‘The Lady Magdalen Herbert, of St. Mary Magdalen,’ was a notable woman in her devotion to the education of her seven sons. Her husband had died when Edward, the eldest, was sixteen years old, and George, the fifth son, was four.

Little people get pleasure and also pain from quite little things, and I have not any respect for supermen who pretend that small things do not count. Yet one has to suffer from a majority or a vogue in favour of sham greatness, from the never-decreasing number of those who muddle greatness into bigness, and at last are found practising grossness, carelessness, recklessness, on the plea that their lives at least are too precious to waste in minding minutiae. Professional writers are constantly saying ‘not as big as,’ instead of ‘not so big as,’ and the subjunctive is a thing of the past even when the meaning is in peril. For instance, on a screw-stoppered beer-bottle one sees the injunction: ‘Observe that this label is unbroken.’ To keep this grammatical, one should never break the label. And does one really conjugate the past indicative of the verb To Be: I was, Thou wert? In France, imperfectly educated persons avoid like poison the past subjunctive, and even more commonly in Italy do the natives shirk the preterite, even in writing. I am always puzzled to know if Leo XIII wrote : ‘He has given thee to us that we may hope still more,’ or ‘He gave thee to us that we might’ &c. The English version leaves us in doubt, for it says: ‘He has given thee to us that we might’ &c., which is just wrong enough and careless enough to be the very opposite of style.

Though many books and articles are written round every decennial performance of the Passion Play at Oberammergau, and the drama has so many points of deep interest that it requires altogether exceptional control in any writer who sees it not to record his impressions, I think that there is still something to be said. With the conviction that the play could not be performed in any other theatre or by any other actors, abides the assurance that its chief virtues, its atmosphere of uniqueness, can yet be shared by the majority necessarily unable to make the pilgrimage. If I can persuade the reader to this paradoxical conclusion, perhaps I shall have deserved my own good fortune. Let me, then, try to show him the simple means whereby he can make a spectator’s experience his own. It is doubtful if The Ring can be enjoyed adequately anywhere but at Munich or at Bayreuth. It is certain that, in England, Shakespeare is himself only at the Old Vic. Ibsen demands to be played in cycles. But the Passion Play, which could not be transplanted, can be experienced in the study by anyone who studies its traditions, its history, and (above all) its text, with the aid of the magnificent sets of photographs that are available. Of course, some supreme effects will be lost. The music, which has never been published, will be wanting. The peculiar virtue of an open-air theatre, to realise which the Greek model at Bradfield should be visited, remains to seek.