Self-consciousness is one of the most dangerous characteristics of the modern age. The self-conscious car driver fixes his attention on himself as driving rather than on driving, the self-conscious eater thinks less of the meal than of the critical gaze of others. To be conscious of self in this way is always hazardous to the work in hand. Moreover this spirit makes itself felt particularly in the different categories of society. Class distinction has led to self-consciousness in the community. The ‘working classes’ in these days have learnt to regard themselves as ‘workers’ distinct from and even opposed to all other classes in a way different even from that known to medieval serf or classical slave. Any movement that tends to increase this consciousness must therefore lead to separation and civil strife.

For this reason many people are suspicious of a new devotion to Christ ‘the Worker.’ Instead of teaching those who labour in workshop, factory or office the objective reality of our Lord as the Saviour of all mankind, the devotion may seem to foster self-consciousness by giving them a crabbed view of Christ as one who is on their side against the rest of the world. The Christian Guilds were conteht with a special Patron Saint, they did not try to divide Christ in this way. No one has yet tried to stir up enthusiasm for Christ the Employer of the Apostles. But where are we going to draw the line in our application of different aspects of Christ to the self-conscious groupings of society?

And the Lord God had planted a paradise of pleasure from the beginning: wherein He placed man whom He had formed ... to, dress it and keep it.

God the Lover and Creator made us in his own image and likeness, to be lovers and creators in our turn.

He made us to know him and love him and serve him; and since we are made in his image it is by knowing and loving and making that we serve. Knowing and loving are not means to making; making is the effect, expression and fulfilment of knowing and loving. Knowing is not the means to loving; knowledge of the right kind begets love and love begets knowledge. These three together form the footprint of the Trinity in the soul : without knowledge and love there is no life, without making there is no fullness of life.

There is a haunting quality about the gentle irony of Arnold Lunn’s remark, ‘My father held the quaint belief that Christ meant what he said on the subject of riches.’ There is a trenchant quality about Gilbert Chesterton’s remark : ‘If there is one thing which Christ and his saints have said with a sort of savage monotony, it is that the rich are in peculiar danger of moral ruin.’ The ironic quality of the one remark and the trenchant quality of the other are both just, for there are those who seize like vultures on a carcase upon the words, ‘in spirit,’ in the First Beatitude, and have tried to eviscerate Christ’s teaching : as if forsooth the cumulative effect of so many parables, warnings and threats were not to show that it is intensely difficult to be poor in spirit, if one is rich in body. The ordinarily good rich are they who, in St. John Chrysostom’s words, bank their money in God’s bank, the bosom of the poor, getting heavenly usury thereby, and not looking upon themselves as benefactors of the poor, but as debtors to the poor. The very good rich are they who keep the trappings of riches, but discard the reality : a St. Louis of France will wear a royal robe, but next the skin will be a hair shirt; he will keep a rich table for his guests, but he will only toy with his own food.

‘It is not enough to refute errors; one must overcome them by understanding their grounds. To this venerable truth Bolshevism is no exception.’

The magnificent struggle the Russians have put up in the defence of their Fatherland has warmed millions of hearts to them. In one stroke Hitler, the self-styled scourge of Communism, has done more for the Soviet Union than years of intensive propaganda. From one end of this country to the other, money is pouring in for aid-to-Russia funds, books and pamphlets on the U.S.S.R. are in great demand, and hundreds of thousands wait for news from the Russian front as if it were the British Isles.

As might be expected, the Communist Party of Great Britain has seized the opportunity to interest the masses not so, much in the Russian peoples fighting for their own country as in the class-conscious proletariat fighting for an ideal and for a particular economic theory Anyone who keeps a watch on left-wing booksellers will have noted the flood of pamphlets and books and the rate at which they sell. In comparatively small towns the local communists have the means to hire the main halls frequently and to boost every meeting with plenty of large posters and other publicity matter.

The Apostolate of Christ the Worker, what does it convey? . . . It is a call going out from our Lord’s sacred humanity to all men, asking them to heed the lesson of the thirty years he spent in the carpenter’s home at Nazareth, supposed to be ‘the son of Joseph.’

This call goes out to a world which takes its values mainly from material criteria, forgetful of the interior preparation of the life of the soul, which alone is the safeguard of worth and stability. We are so easily caught by pride, the self-complacency of the ‘practising Catholic,’ self-seeking, and self-pity, or we are downtrodden, worn out through drudgery, forgetful of the divine instinct, by which every man longs for God in his heart.

A great number of the faithful continue to practise their devotions, while taking a thoroughly materialist view on all practical issues and clinging openly to a materialist mode of life. One part of their lives is ‘devotionalised,’ the other part ‘materialised,’ whereas the whole of their lives should be ‘spiritualised.’ This is the great lesson of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, that he as Christ the Worker has reconciled matter and spirit in his daily working life. It is this reconciliation of which the world stands in need to-day, and towards which the Apostolate of Christ the Worker strives.

It is becoming a convention to object to the Aposlolate of Christ the Worker because the name is misleading, or at any rate inadequate. The common answer, too, is becoming something of a recurrent theme. Yet if the answer is examined with an unbiassed mind it will be seen to be perfectly adequate. To quote from the Statutes : ‘The Apostolate of Christ the Worker ... is intended to be a means of bringing back to God the mass of the workers . . . It directs its energies towards the working masses throughout the world, irrespective of class and profession. It may be parochial, non-parochial or professional, according to the members who constitute the various branches. But though doubtless its work may take on a multitude of different aspects, it will remain, under this manifold activity, one indivisible body.’ An even more forcible answer lies in the actual work of the Apostolate, a work which rises from the principle embodied in the last sentence of the quotation, the spirit of unity and brotherhood. Among the works of the Apostolate the founder has put first the celebration of a monthly Mass. By this scheme, now become the Mass Calendar, all Catholics of any status, workers or otherwise, may share in the work and privileges of the Apostolate by offering Mass once a month for specified intentions. Significantly this monthly Mass intention is not included among the preludes to apostolic work, it is not insisted on only as a preparation, of soul, but it is the first and most important part of the actual apostolic work of the movement.