In many respects the rapid growth of the Catholic Church in the United States is the most remarkable spiritual phenomenon since apostolic times. The adequate account of that astonishing achievement has yet to be written ; but I can flash a light upon it by saying that in a little over a hundred years Catholic America has increased its dioceses from one to a hundred, and its membership from practically nothing to twenty millions of souls.

I have been staggered by what I have seen, for though I have generally small faith in the efficacy of efficiency, I was profoundly impressed by the kind of organization I found established. Catholic high schools were familiar enough ; but Catholic colleges managed by nuns were portents. Yet there are a very great number of these, and their success may be estimated from the fact that the Sacred Heart Order alone has produced in the late Louise Imogen Guiney the best woman poet America can claim, and in Agnes Repplier the best American essayist since the passing of the great New England literary group.

Moreover, the practical spirituality of American Catholicism is proved by the huge crowds flocking to the Sacraments week by week. And while the methods of a New York parish may strike an easy-going Englishman as a trifle bureaucratic, they no doubt are necessary to a people accustomed to clockwork regularity.

The spirit of an epoch or even of a civilization is often concentrated in one artistic production, be it a work of art or of literature. Such works offer us short and direct roads into the heart of that epoch or civilization. This representative character may belong to a book as the sovereign achievement of its spiritual environment, the crown of a long development of thought and feeling. Such books were the Divine Comedy and the Summa of St. Thomas. But a book may also be representative as containing and summarizing precisely the average attainment and outlook. Such is the collection of short lives of the Saints made by an Italian Bishop, Petrus de Natalibus. It is true that his Catalogus Sanctorum did not appear till 1493. My edition, a black letter folio copiously illustrated by the quaintest woodcuts, was printed by Petit and Penet of Lyons, in 1534. Nevertheless the book is entirely mediæval. No breath of the Renaissance has reached it. It is a compilation of utmost industry and equal lack of criticism from all the accepted hagiographic sources. In its pages, therefore, will be found in a manageably condensed form the legends popular with the mediæval reader. If you would know what legend made a particular saint interesting to our ancestors, the Catalogus is almost sure to contain it. It is a key to mediæval art. Its illustrations are one in spirit and treatment with the images and pictures of the northern Gothic church. Its virgins are sisters of the thin-lipped maidens, somewhat prim, but always stately, of Norfolk rood-screens.

Until the recent publication of Mr. Westlake’s interesting volume upon The Parish Gilds of Medieval England students were apt to devote far too exclusive attention to Gilds of the kind I propose to deal with in this article. There were two main reasons for this preference : firstly, there was much more copious material available concerning the Trade and Craft Gilds ; secondly, they were of a nature that appeals more readily to modern “ practical “ Englishmen. Yet it must not be forgotten that the early and normal Gilds in England were Religious Gilds, Confraternities having primarily a religious purpose, and only as a by-product any sort of social or industrial services.f The Trading and Industrial Gilds were later developments, existing side by side with, and in imitation of, the Religious Gilds. They fall into two clearly marked classes—the Gilds-merchant and the Craft Gilds.

A.—The Gilds-merchant. The Gilda Mercatoria, or Merchant-Gild, which is the earlier kind, seems in its origin to have been composed, not only of those who carried on trade from town to town and in foreign countries, but also of all the craftsmen of any sort in each town. We hear of it by name first in the end of the eleventh century. But it is very probable that some at least of the Cnighten-Gilds, of which we hear in Saxon times, were, or developed into, Merchant-Gilds. Certainly that at Canterbury was described indifferently as the Gild of Cnights at Canterbury or the Ceapmann-Gild, and Dr. Gross has shown that the word “cnight” was often used in charters as a synonym of “townsman.”

The strongest human emotion being love, it is not surprising that art should so commonly have been prompted and sustained by this emotion. And since the highest love that a creature can receive is that of his Maker for himself, and the highest he can give is that of himself for his. Maker, it is not surprising that religion should have inspired and controlled so many art works.

I am not forgetting the contributions of Paganism. But may it not be said that they were great in so far as they sprang from the human emotion of love, or were informed by great ethical ideals and aspirations towards the worship of an Infinite Being?

In an essay, “Paganism, Old and New,” Francis Thompson shows that the poetry and beauty of Paganism arise merely from an “idealising retrospective.” “Pagan Paganism,” he says, “was not poetical . . . the poetry of Paganism is chiefly a modern creation.” And as to beauty, he says, “When Heine, addressing the Venus of Melos called her ‘Our Lady of Beauty’ the idea no less than the expression, was centrally modern. I will go further— it was centrally Christian.”

Gentlemen,—You wish, I understand, to get some advice as to how you should set about studying the Social Question. I do not know how to meet your wishes better than by telling how I have myself proceeded ; though this, of course, exposes me to the risk of seeming to pose not only as an expert but as a model. Hence I must begin by saying that I know very little of the question on its economic side. There is, however, another side, the ethical, to which I have given some attention ; and as it is this alone which you are called on to study, perhaps it may help you to know how one who lays no claim to very special knowledge has proceeded in his investigations.

I began, like yourselves, with the treatise on Justice, as set forth in the class-book of this College ; which, in my time, was Gury. I do not know of any better way of beginning, except, perhaps, to devote more attention than we did to the title of Occupation ; which I now regard as the key to much of the question at issue between extreme Socialists and ourselves.

Well, three years after the close of my College course, the Land League was started ; and it was not very long till we heard it argued that there could be no private property in land, as “the exertion of labour in production is the only title to exclusive possession.”

At the close of a paper read in Oxford by a very successful psycho-therapeutist, experienced largely in shell-shock cases, a critic exclaimed : “So what we must all do is to go to Harley Street and buy a new soul!” The doctor laughed, but half agreed. Afterwards, a Church of England dignitary said to me : “We shall all have to set up confessionals, else everyone will be going to these doctors !” The doctor had, in fact, alluded with envy to the Catholic Confessional, as responsible for happiness else unattainable, and as saving thousands from fear of, or indeed actual, madness. Psycho-analysis is indeed the fashion; almost a fad. Freudian plays are written ; Punch makes limericks on Jung. Hence it will be useful to disengage a few principles. I deliberately eliminate all I can, without, I hope, sacrificing anything essential. Especially I cannot print, without adaptation, the anecdotes I should wish to ; save in a technical paper, I could not well relate what would be most illustrative, at all.

Economists tell us that the selling-value or price of any commodity is a function of its scarcity ; and we need no telling that artists and authors pay little attention to the economics of their work. They are lazy about it, because the marketing of their wares does not seem an attractive subject. How attractive are its principles, a little reflection will show. Samuel Butler had some interesting things to say on the relation of Art to Art Schools in Alps and Sanctuaries, and he suggested elsewhere that part of the education offered in these schools, if they were to be tolerated, should be a course of study in the prices of pictures at recent sales. There is something to be said for his view. Every collector studies sales ; and Robert Ross had instructive things to say about the value of attendance in the sale-room. Since, however, the course proposed by Butler, the example set by collectors, is not likely to be generally followed, criticism may seek briefly to define the conditions under which a maker, whether of pictures or of books, has to sell his wares, so that, by understanding these conditions, he may fulfil them to the best advantage.

The modem theory of the supremacy of the State in all departments of life disposes of the fundamental principle of the Family as an independent unit of society. Prominent Socialists have pointed out the logical conclusion that State Ownership of Property is State Ownership of the Family. H. G. Wells has publicly said that the State would have no more scruples about taking over the Family than it would in taking over the private gasworks. Hence we have an altogether new conception of Society based on the idea of the State Family. As to how this will work out in practice remains to be seen. The Family is a natural institution, and mankind must inevitably return to it or perish. Meanwhile we can see the beginnings of the new system at work.

It is everywhere presumed in modem legislation that the State and not the parent is the final arbiter of the welfare and upbringing of the child. Nowhere, for instance, in our elementary educational system is there any reference to the parent’s wish as to what his children are to be taught. Attendance of children is compulsory and the law is stretched beyond its limits in forcing such attendance contrary even to the parents’ will. Thus frequently a mother may keep a child away from school because it is delicate or because there is some domestic emergency making it necessary for it to be at home.

If there is anything pleasant in life, it is doing what we aren’t meant to do. If there is anything pleasant in criticism, it is finding out what we aren’t meant to find out. It is the method by which we treat as significant what the author did not mean to be significant, by which we single out as essential what the author regarded as incidental. Thus, if one brings out a book on turnips, the modern scholar tries to discover from it whether the author was on good terms with his wife ; if a poet writes on buttercups, every word he says may be used as evidence against him at an inquest of his views on a future existence. On this fascinating principle we delight to extort economic evidence from Aristophanes, because Aristophanes knew nothing of economics ; we try to extract cryptograms from Shakespeare, because we are inwardly certain that Shakespeare never put them there ; we sift and winnow the Gospel of S. Luke, in order to produce a Synoptic problem, because S. Luke, poor man, never knew the Synoptic problem to exist.

There is, however, a special fascination in applying this method to Sherlock Holmes, because it is in a sense Holmes’s own method. “It has long been an axiom of mine,” he says, “that the little things are infinitely the most important.” It might be the motto of his life’s work. And it is (is it not?), as the clergymen say, by the little things, the apparently unimportant things, that we judge of a man’s character.

By the design of Divine Providence vanity has been from the beginning the virtue of male creatures. That he should take a pride in his physical condition and appearance is a necessity of the male, and vanity is designed for his advancement. This fact is sufficiently obvious throughout the whole of the animal creation, and the peacock, though a flagrant exemplar of the principle, is by no means an exceptionally fine bird. On the other hand, we are not aware of the existence of any female creature which so much as vies with her male, and certainly of none that rivals him. And this fact is as remarkable as it is obvious. There is more in it than meets the eye ! Surely it is of Divine origin, and surely a female peacock would be a monstrosity.

But however it may be among the animals, among human beings the case is to-day reversed. Drab clothing is so generally the apparel of the male that the vision of the peacock in his finery suggests to us a female thing and, were it not for his name, we should actually suppose him to be a she.

In sundry European countries, but more especially in Britain, because Britain is the most completely Capitalist of all, there has arisen a practical demand for the “ Nationalization “ of certain great industries.

This demand is certain to be pressed in the case of several industries—notably railways and mines—to an issue ; and the effort will probably be a victory for those who demand Nationalization. For these have the power of forcing the victory, and their opponents have no effective defence in action. It behoves us, therefore, to examine the origin, motive, object, and— what is most important of all—probable result of this policy.

At this juncture, St. Patrick’s-tide, 1920, being the hundred and twentieth anniversary of a Union which without uniting Ireland to England has come near to disuniting totally the whole English-speaking world, it is best to consider the Irish question not as theory or sentiment, but in the light of cold dynamics.

There is no certainty in political forces ; but the economical approach the status of an exact science. Enthusiasms, hatreds, friendships, agreements, disagreements may be transmuted or evaporated between nations over-night. Journalism can play a great part in creating friendliness or arousing hatred, but, as its name implies, its influence must be ephemeral unless some material event or economic tendency pin it down. A good instance of this was William Hearst’s power to fill the United States with a hatred for Spain, but which required the sinking of a warship to materialize. Idealisms may blaze up for the moment. They may even flicker for centuries like will-o’-the-wisps on the fringe of the world’s thought, but they can never be reduced to practice without the conjunction of economical laws which are as blind and ruthless as those of Nature herself.

A Great controversy must always leave its aftermath. Hence it is to be feared that recent discussions in and out of Parliament and Convocation will be found to have left in the minds of many the impression that somehow or other there is room for doubt as to what Christ really did teach on the subject of divorce. Indeed this is hardly to be wondered at when even the Archbishop of York declared that while “he personally was of opinion that marriage was dissoluble only by death” he yet acknowledged that others thought that adultery was a legitimate reason for divorce. And who can help feeling like Alice in Wonderland when he hears Lord Phillimore saying that “the Christian Church had taught that marriage was almost indissoluble until death”? The “almost” is piquant and delightful ! One would “almost” prefer the cynical frankness of the Lord Chancellor, who does not mince his words but says out plainly that “the arguments of those who oppose divorce are the whisperings of the abandoned superstitions of the Middle Ages.” One is even tempted to a sneaking admiration of the Archbishop of Canterbury who—when challenged by the same Lord Chancellor to say whether the innocent party in a divorce committed adultery by re-marrying—answered with an emphatic “No !” At least we have here definite and consistent views.

Still from all this a man logically concludes that there must be some reason why some hold that the innocent party should be free to re-marry and that adultery should be regarded by some as a legitimate ground for divorce.