Ignorance is one of the greatest evils. It is often the cause of great harm in both the moral and physical spheres. Especially one can note this in the sphere of the social problems. Ignorance is an important factor in helping class hatred.

After the Paris Commune a lay brother of the Vincentians pointed this out to two members of the French aristocracy and in doing so helped to change their lives.

The three were inspecting the ruins of palaces when Brother Maurice turned to the others and said, “It is you who have amused yourselves within these palaces now in ruins: you who pass by without seeing the people, without knowing them or their thoughts or characters, or caring for their needs and their sufferings, it is you who are the real culprits.”

It is often dangerous to apply the conduct of the past as a norm to the present. Only too often a facile parallel between days gone by and the present has led to an absurdly literal equation between the two, as we may observe sometimes in the use made of precedent. At the same time fresh light may occasionally be thrown on a situation by indulging in such fancies without intending too rigid an application. It is a fanciful comparison of this sort which we set down here as a feeler, searching out a possible method of regaining the proletariat for Christ, and so of counteracting the powerful appeal which Communism makes to our age.

The facts of St. Dominic's life and vocation are generally known, and here we wish only to draw attention to certain aspects of it. When St. Dominic came to Languedoc, on his way to negotiate a marriage with a foreign princess on behalf of his Sovereign, he found the Church hard pressed by an enemy powerful because popular. One of the causes of the popularity of Albigensianism was the apparently severe interpretation of Christian life by the leaders of the movement, and the people, as always, were profoundly impressed at the sight of rigid austerity linked with a burning zeal. The Church had, of course, attempted to save her people from the ravages of the heresy, and had sent out her emissaries in the sombre yet rich state appropriate to their condition as bishops, abbots and priests. But if such attire and accoutrement was the due of these defenders of the faith, it turned out to be a hindrance to their fight for truth since it contrasted ill, in the minds of the populace, with the ostentatiously ascetic lives of the Albigensian leaders.

The sublime fact of being members of the essentially living Church, bestowed upon us in Holy Baptism, implies a task with regard to our people. The Living World-Church wills, through us her living members, to build our German people into a living Church. There is very little sense to start by drawing up magnificent plans for the re-conquering of the de-christianized populations for the Church, although it goes without saying that this re-conquest remains an important task to be accomplished by us. But in order to achieve it successfully, another task is even more important, viz., the total Christianization of those who are still living in the Living Church. Re-christianization of the estranged population is only possible by means of total Christianization of the Christian community itself. In conferring together as to the method of building up our contemporary German people into a Living Church, ways and means will have to be discussed, and in the first place, how to make each one of us into a Living Member of the Church.

By far the most important element in this personal transformation into a Living Church will be the Life-preservation and the Life-intensification by means of the Holy Eucharist.

It is the most frightful of ironies that our economic system has opened new and valid horizons to the aspiration of our work precisely by that same liberal-commercial drive which has smashed pre-capitalist systems of personal labour and family production. Man’s work and woman’s bearing—the bitter things under the domination of the balance sheet, the world-wide market, the clean-cuffed man of commerce. Because clean-cuffs does not care a damn for man’s work and woman’s bearing. A production which is primarily judged by its export balance (and that means a production which is primarily for the profit and prestige of the clean-cuffs, the telephone-manipulators of marginal prices, the destroyers) runs clean counter to the restoration of the personal in industry. But, says Marcel Melcor, liberalist commercialism at its present stage involves an impossibility and is being destroyed by it. You can’t go on developing the consuming power of a minority at the expense of the majority. You can’t go on developing the consuming power of a minority at a greater pace than that of the majority. Morals aside, you can't do it. The agricultural population of the world (three-fourths of the world's population) cannot continue to be exploited in the interests of export balance sheets. He says we’ve got to stop it before it breaks us. And he says the only way to do it is to turn the trend of economic effort away from international export balances and build up justice through recognizing the existence of our next-door neighbour. And he is speaking here primarily as an economist. The humiliating lesson is rubbed in: if you want to save your bacon you must seek first the kingdom of God and His justice. Which is a bit of a surprise if all you wanted to save was your bacon.

The English Press for some years past has consistently misjudged the Spanish people and our Press of to-day, with scanty exceptions, is not exempt from this unhappy phase of English journalism. But however complacent we may hitherto have been in accepting the views of our journalists, we must feel something of a shock in the revelations of the Spanish Hierarchy who have so effectually drawn aside the curtain concealing things deliberately hidden from us.

The document they have published is one couched in calm language uttered without either bitterness or rancour. It is a plain statement subscribed by 48 prelates ruling or administering 54 of the 60 dioceses of Spain, men on the spot speaking from personal experience. It opens with a clear account of the injustice of the 1936 elections, when through “the lawlessness of a Government, which, in defiance of the will of the people, set up a political machinery in direct opposition to the majority of the nation, the Right, with a majority of more than a million votes over the Left, was given 118 deputies less than the Popular Front. For this purpose the votes of entire provinces had been entirely cancelled.”

Of the utmost importance is their reply to the objection that “Whatever were the Reds’ excesses, the fact remains that, had Franco not rebelled, the hundreds and thousands of priests who were assassinated would have been saved for their spiritual work.” The Bishops’ answer is: “As witnesses of the position at the moment when the conflict arose, we are unable to agree with the statement. The exact opposite is the truth.

Research made in connection with the impending canonisation of Pauline Jaricot, the French girl who is perhaps best known as the foundress of the Association for the Propagation of the Faith, has brought to light an interesting chapter in the history of the practice of saying the rosary. A little more than a century ago the seventeen-year-old daughter of a Lyons silk-merchant was inspired to start an association which would promote prayer and almsgiving for the conversion of the heathen. The humble effort which begun among her father’s work-girls spread rapidly thanks to the zeal and organizing ability of this would-be missionary. Her system was simplicity itself: a short prayer each day and alms of a sou a week, the members to be grouped in dizaines, centaines and milles; and the widespread success did much to rehabilitate the fortunes of the French missionary societies who had been reduced to inactivity by the upheavals of the revolution and the Empire.

In a preface to a recent and up-to-date treatise on modem scientific psychology, based upon the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Viennese psychiatrist, Dr. Rudolf Allers, emphasizes the importance of such a foundation for modem psychology and maintains that no system of philosophy is better suited to this purpose than that of the Angelic Doctor. The peculiar position occupied by psychology, standing as it does between biology and philosophy proper, demands just such a basis. Man is a psycho-physical organism, composed of mind and body, spirit and matter, the ultimate nature and correlation of which cannot be discovered by experience alone. As other psychologists are beginning to realize, the detachment of empirical and experimental psychology from speculative psychology leads to uncertainty and confusion; and the failure to adopt a definite and common-sense philosophy has resulted in a number of divergent schools, each with some vague and uncertain philosophical background.

Russian religious thought is experiencing an acute crisis. The mysticism which, in pre-revolutionary days, greatly interested certain Russian intellectual circles has now reached its full development among thinkers grouped around the Russian Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris; a “new school of theology” is even being spoken of. Occasionally this group has used the term neo-gnosis, or orthodox gnosis, to describe their particular mystical tendencies. There is no question of a rupture with the Orthodox Church, but of a broadening of her doctrinal teaching, by the introduction of conceptions purported to belong to her traditions, though discarded by the official Church. So, in the name of these traditions, Fr. Bulgakov, head of the Institute, expounds a so-called sophiological doctrine based upon the conception of a hypostatized divine Wisdom, idea (in the Platonic sense) of the creation co-etemal with the Creator.

This doctrine is taught in several important works of which The Light Undimmed was written before the author's ordination. Fr. Bulgakov has subsequently developed his thought in a number of books, mostly published in Paris: The Burning Bush, The Friend of the Bridegroom, The Ladder of Jacob, Icons and their Veneration, and especially The Lamb of God, which forms the first part of a work upon theandrism intended to epitomize the writer’s sophiological teaching. We must add an essay on Hypostasis and Hypostatisation published in Prague, also a series of articles in Putj, Russian philosophical periodical isued in Paris, some of which are noteworthy as they explain the writer’s intellectual evolution.

John Henry Newman stood alone among the leaders of the Oxford Movement; he possessed that elevation of mind which helps men to acquire those rare attributes of spiritual cultivation making for the fulfilment of life in Divine terms. Spiritual cultivation demands many qualities, and among the more prominent may be discerned courage, strength of will, sensitiveness, courtesy, kindliness, refinement and enlightened reticence. The last the rarest of all and the crown of the edifice. It is no rhetorical exaggeration to urge that all of these reposed in the character of Newman.

Newman was logical in matters of Religion; he combined the qualities of the scholar and the saint; he was an intellect and a master of the spiritual life. A gentleman deeply read in English literature and with whom I have had the privilege of written discussion on the character of Newman, noted in one of my papers that he regarded it as singular that Newman, more than the other outstanding figures of the Oxford Movement, should have possessed the logical faculty in a degree unusual among men of definitely artistic temperament, as his perfect literary style shews him to have been. My literary acquaintance went on to say that although the criticism and comparisons Froude makes in Volume IV, “Short-Studies,” have encountered much hostile criticism he still thought that Newman was shewn in his proper magnitude as against Keble’s wistful sentiment and Pusey’s hesitation. Newman’s mastery of spiritual values shewed that he was well versed in the management of conduct.