is worthy of more consideration than another. The interest of the numerical majority of her children is therefore the Church's chief interest; that is to say, the interest of the laboring classes. She, like her Divine Master, views the multitudes that follow her so faithfully through all ages, and is moved with compassion because they have nothing to eat.

Again, if it is hard for the rich to enter into the kingdom of God, it is in some ways still harder, not for the poor, but for the destitute and degraded, and perhaps for the same reason, namely, that both are concentrated on the things of the body; the rich on luxuries and superfluities, the destitute on the bare necessities of subsistence. Of course, the error of the latter is eminently excusable, especially where destitution is the child of misfortune, not of sin. "Having food and raiment, let us be therewith content," says the Apostle; but he lays no such duty of contentment on those who have neither. Destitution and vice play into each other's hands. So far as vice takes the lead there will always be a sediment of misery in spite of the most ideal social economy. But if there is anything in present social or political institutions which forces the weaker classes into destitution, and thereby into vice and degradation, it is imperatively the duty of the priesthood to investigate the evil, to see if it be remediable, and then to use all its influence to effect the remedy. Of course, destitution never forces free-will into vice in any individual case, if, by force, we understand that which produces psychological necessity; but the fact remains that the temptations and pressures due to destitution, as a general rule, do inevitably lead to moral corruption. Although civilization need not go on to sanctification, yet it is (at least a certain degree of it) a prerequisite for the establishment of anything like a stable Christian community. No doubt there is something in Christianity for the lowest intelligence and crudest morality to lay hold of and strengthen itself by; but every mental darkness and moral obliquity is an obstacle to its full development and a potential source of danger to its purity and persistence. The cause of civilization, truly conceived, is the cause of God and religion. Both tend to the fullest possible perfection, mental and moral, of the greatest possible number, and though religion carries on the work where secular civilization drops it, yet up to that point they are co-operant for one and the same end. It is, then, in the interest of religion that all should co-operate cordially for the removal of the cause of destitution and degradation. It may be denied that such inculpable destitution exists, or that it does so to any notable degree. It may be said that the evil exists of necessity, and that no political or social reform can be devised which does not involve the like or greater evils. Yet none of

these statements must be taken for granted, but they demand the serious consideration of the clergy, whose interest it so closely

concerns.

Another reason why the clergy are bound to interest themselves in the social problem is that the question is really, at root, an ethical question. This is coming into clearer recognition every day, even in the writings of non-Christian sociologists. We hear the older economists very deservedly reproached for their abstract and unreal treatment of man as a money-getting animal, with a complete ignoring of his many other and infinitely complex springs of action. We are told that what is really wanted is a yet unborn "science of human nature," which, of course, involves ethics as one of its subordinate sciences. We find candid avowals from the most hostile quarters that, rightly or wrongly, man has always been, must always be, a religious animal, and that religion is one of the prime movers in social life. And when we examine the problem for ourselves we see how it all hinges on notions which belong to ethics and to natural religion, such as desert, justice, remuneration, selfishness, altruism, equality, property, liberty, fraternity, personality, the State, its origin, constitution, functions; the end of man, here and hereafter, his true perfection, development, and many other questions all more or less ethical, and, therefore, indirectly religious. Much as "ChairSocialism" may be despised as theoretical and impractical by short-sighted "men of action," yet those who read history know how, in the long run, there is nothing so practical as theory, and that many a revolution was first conceived by an idle theorist dreaming in his easy-chair. The social question is one to which, as guardians and disseminators of religious and philosophical truth, the Catholic clergy, at all events, are bound to give their full attention. It is no small matter to decide whether, under the existing system of competition, the laborers are or are not suffering an injustice; and if they are, whether it is a material or a formal injustice. Yet this is only one of the grave doubts suggested by what is called the "Social Problem." The fact that socialism has made its appearance only in countries imbued with the aroma of departing Christianity is due to its being, according to some, a perversion; according to others a development of certain Christian principles touching equality, fraternity, property, riches and poverty. To whom does the true exposition and defence of Christian principles belong except to the clergy of the Catholic Church?

Laveleye, ("Socialisme Contemporaire") takes it for granted that the present interest displayed by the Catholic clergy in Germany in the social question has for its sole motive the triumph of the

Church. Seeing that political power is passing into the hands of the masses, seeing that little is to be hoped for at the hands of monarchs and nobles, seeing that by apathy in the past they have to some extent alienated the trust and loyalty of the millions, the Black International hopes to retrieve its lost influence by some sort of an alliance with the Red. It is not in any hostile spirit that this criticism is made. Laveleye freely allows that the triumph of the Church is a spiritual cause, an unselfish end. There is none of that vulgar narrowness which views the Roman Church as a commercial speculation. Yet there is a latent insinuation. that the triumph of the Church is a distinct cause from that of the popular temporal welfare; that it is simply as means to this higher but wholly distinct end that the clergy want to identify themselves with the prominent movement of the day, which in our time happens to be socialism. Such critics have no adequate notion of the Church's mission, and fail to see that her cause includes that of civilization as the greater includes the less.

It is only in keeping with the history of the Church's development by natural events under the guidance of Providence, that the initiative in many causes which she has subsequently made her own, should be taken from without. Thus heresies have been instrumental in the evolution of her dogma. They have roused her to condemn explicitly what before she had condemned only implicitly, or perhaps had in no way ever touched upon. They have drawn her out and revealed to her her own mind. We ourselves individually often are ignorant as to what we believe, or what we like, or what we do, until some opposition exposes us to ourselves. So it may freely be conceded that the social question was raised, not by the Church, but by those outside her, perhaps by her opponents. Yet, the question being raised, she is bound to consider it, and formulate her mind on the subject. She is bound to protest against any false or immoral solution of it; to sift the true from the untrue, the wheat from the chaff, and to adopt it and make it her own. That the Church never interested herself about this precise form of the social problem in past ages only means that it did not then exist. About the cause of the slave, and the poor, and the oppressed, she has interested herself in every age and country where she has had liberty and scope, and has not been made the tool of selfish factions and private ambition. Whatever her misfortunes and afflictions have been in that line, her principles, her faith, her aspirations are eternal, irrepressible, and ready to break out and assert themselves unchanged as soon as the contingent restraint is relaxed. Therefore the charge of self-interest made against the Church's recent activity in the matter is narrow and unmeaning. Even were she using the

movement as a means to her highest end, that end is eminently an unselfish and benevolent one. No doubt it is an end which, in the eyes of many anti-religious socialists, is wholly vain and delusive; or even mischievous and obstructive to material progress; and so far their hostility to what is called "Catholic Socialism" is logical enough. But if they accuse clerics of feigning sympathy with the social question in the interests of religion, may we not retort very justly against those who are so obviously using it in the interests of irreligion and immorality? Can we credit those with a disinterested zeal for benevolence, justice, right, equality, fraternity, liberty whose first principles or negations are fatal to every one of these much-abused and perverted notions? It is to save the ignorant and undiscerning masses from these would-be "angels of light" that the Church has roused herself in these days, if not to the solution of the problem, at least to the scrutiny aud detection of false solutions, which would result in a state of things worse than the first" seven times over. We hope, then, we have said enough to justify abundantly the activity shown by the Catholic clergy in Germany and elsewhere with regard to the great question of this day and of the immediate future. If, as Professor Nitti hints (" Catholic Socialism "), in certain countries they seem to be lethargic and inactive, it may be that there the question is not so burning, or that the clergy are few and overworked, or not sufficiently educated to deal with the question. Be this as it may, wherever the question does come to the front it is one which intimately concerns the interests of religion, and even if it did not, it is one which concerns the higher interests of humanity, and as such it cannot fail to enlist the keenest attention and sympathy of every priest who recognizes himself to be the representative of the Healer of the Nations. GEORGE TYRRELL, S.J.

Stonyhurst, Eng.

THE PROTEST OF COMMON SENSE AGAINST SOME COMMON NONSENSE.

IT

opportunities

T is undoubtedly a fact that a great many Catholic laymen, to whom there have never been afforded opportunities of receiving systematic and comprehensive instruction on the subjects of Catholic faith and its ancillary philosophy, are disposed to seriously mistrust the ability of common sense to vindicate itself in the matter of religion and sustain its dignity before the eyes of the skeptic, the unbeliever and the scoffer. The insinuations of the first, the denials of the second, or the ridicule of the third may cause not the shadow of an alteration in the personal attitude of such a Catholic towards the teachings of Holy Church, but he stands abashed, silent and embarrassed before his antagonist, impotent to voice the blessed convictions which possess his soul, and so retires in confusion from the contest, pursued by the cheap derision of the seeming victor, who unduly felicitates himself on the superior readiness of his tongue.

Some Catholics of this sort are even inclined to regard as rash and presumptuous the conduct of those of their brethren in faith who are not so ready to yield to the clamor of opposition in matters of religion, opining that the deliverances of a layman on such subjects are, to say the least, hazardous and superfluous, when there are so many men who have pledged their lives to God's service, for the spread of the saving truth and the frustration and extermination of ubiquitous error. But the priest cannot always be at hand to confute, with his learning, the errors and heresies with which the Catholic layman is daily confronted, and the stand for truth must largely be maintained by men of mere common sense, with no actual and technical acquaintance with Catholic theology and philosophy. It is indeed rash in the inadequately instructed layman to venture a defence of certain points of detailed Catholic doctrine, ability to discuss which implies the possession of information acquired only by long and laborious study; but the anti-religious thought of the day is not attacking such doctrines, for the good reason that its assaults are directed against the very fundamental beliefs upon which those doctrines rest. And these fundamental, primary beliefs are within the mental possession of the plain, common-sense man, and can readily be developed into explicit consciousness when one questions his inner self, not in that spirit of arrogance which flings the gratuitous lie into the very face of mild-speaking truth, and, like "jest