CATHOLIC HERALD

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 1938 HEAD OFFICE: 67, Fleet St., London, E.C.4. (Central 6264-5) BRANCH OFFICES: 11, Albert Square, Manchester. (Blackfriars 1067) 30, Manchester St., Liverpool.
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C.T.S. And Freedom
WHAT is the task lying before Christians today? The answer to this question was given, either directly or indirectly, in almost every paper read during the Brighton Catholic Truth Society Conference.
It is the task of proving to the world that freedom and Christianity go together and that without a real belief in God there can he no genuine human freedom here on earth.
Our country lost the springs of true freedom at the Reformation, and the process of history since that tragic break has been the gradual but steady enslaving of the spirit, mind and body of man.
These may sound paradoxical con clusions in contradiction with the surface lesson of history and, of course, the deeply-rooted views of most of our countrymen. A few years ago they would have been laughed to scorn. Today, however, the fact of the enslavement of man in every great country cannot be denied, and we have our great opportunity of proving that the causes of that enslavement are to be found precisely in the turning away from faith in the God of Christianity which began at the Reformation.
The steps from disbelief in God to the enslavement of man are not difficult to understand or to follow.
Either there is a God who is the meaning of the world and of our short human lives; or there is not. If there is no God, then neither the world as we know it, nor the lives of men, can have any ultimate significance. If there is no ultimate significance, no ultimate eternal value in anything, there can be no ultimate standards of good and bad or right and wrong. The only standards acceptable to us would be derived from our own private tastes as to what we happen to like and what we happen to dislike. That, in fact, is the sort of standard in reference to which the word " freedom " is now commonly used: freedom to do what I please. Such a conception of freedom must lead at once to its own contradiction, for if everyone is free to do what he pleases chaos will result, a chaos preventing anyone from achieving the ends he proposes to himself. This chaos can only be avoided by men either agreeing to limit their freedom to the extent necessary for the purposes of being able to live together or by submitting them selves to one selected leader who shall choose for them. In either event the tendency must be one of increasing enslavement of the individual to an arbitrary power in which he can have no ultimate rational faith.
The process in history by which this enslavement is reached may be a slow one and it may give the appearance at certain stages of increased liberty, but it has but one inevitable ending.
We are forced therefore to admit that without God there can be no human freedom.
And it can be equally clearly shown that as the knowledge of God develops so does the conception and practice of human freedom deepen.
With the highest understanding of God which man has been allowed to reach, the revelation of God in Catholic Christianity, man has acquired two kinds of freedom: the spiritual freedom to be able to choose and live for those ultimate unchanging values the True, the Good and the Beautiful, the attainment of which lies along the path of the Christian religious, moral and social system, and the temporal freedom (necessary for imperfect and ignorant man) of suiting his earthly circumstances, as best he thinks, for the purpose of living according to these values in this world and realising them in the next. The first is the liberty to do the right; the second is the liberty to choose for himself any of the many possible roads that can lead to the right. The first is the liberty which the Church gives; the second is the liberty resulting from the separation of Church from society, State, association, family, and individual judgment and taste.
Such are the only possible founda
tions of human freedom, and the disasters to which the world is succumbing can each he traced to the loss of freedom resulting from the collapse of those foundations.
Liberty to choose right rather than wrong. good rather than bad has disappeared with the loss of belief in objective and eternal standards, and men are reduced to choosing between courses, of the value of which they cannot judge except in so far as they may think that one suits them here and now today better than another.
Liberty to order their society, State, or their own lives for the purpose of best suiting these temporal things to the ultimate meaning of the universe has disappeared because in the chaos resulting from the above conflict of meaningless private choices salvation can only he temporarily found in societies or States, based upon force or guile, claiming absolute dominion over the men and women who form them. But these States, the one the rival to the others, must themselves lead to inter-State chaos in the shape of war or revolution.
It is therefore literally true that freedom which is rightly conceived by all Englishmen as the mark of true civilisation, is absolutely dependent upon belief in and profession of Christianity. And in fact it can be shown that freedom has never existed outside Christianity and that for every weakening of faith in God's revelation there has been an equivalent weakening in the enjoyment of human freedom.
That is the truth which Christians must bring home to their fellow-men, if civilisa tion is to be preserved. It is the truth which underlay the conferences of the Catholic Truth Society and which therefore made that Brighton meeting an event of supreme importance to England and the world.
So far was the world from realising this that the Brighton meeting achieved only some few inches of space in the whole of our national press taken together.
Moral Rearmament
0 the surprise perhaps of some of his audience, one of the speakers during the mass meeting of the C.T.S. Conference appealed for a " moral rearmament." One imagines that there was some surprise because it is rather rare when a phrase of the sort, coined by others and given the wide publicity Catholics are never accorded, is taken up on our own platforms.
One of the reasons for this is that such phrases rarely hit Catholics in the eye as they do others. All that can be contained in the happy phrase has indeed been long the substance of the teaching of the Popes on the subject of war and peace. From Benedict XV until the latest speeches of our present Holy Father the lesson that nothing can prevent war but the restoration of religious and moral self-control and direction among nations and men has been driven home.
It is well therefore that Catholics should make use of the phrase, but if they are to do so with more success than others can obtain they must give it a much more concrete meaning than it has hitherto currently acquired. They might even improve on it. An emotional excitement is not sufficient, nor even the deepening of good intentions. The moral rearmament which can limit physical rearmament is that one which will gradually strengthen the minds as well as the wills of the leaders of mankind.
Moral rearmament is a good phrase, but we should prefer to see it enlarged to " intellectual and moral rearmament."
Modes
THE Japanese, bombing Chinese towns, are concentrating on public modesty, and have ordered a statue of Venus de Milo to be draped.
Thus once again is the virtue of modesty misunderstood.
It is true that an old priest, not long dead, used to paint clothes on even the infant figures of holy pictures in his college library.
But the Vatican Galleries give us our lead.