Each generation seeks its own Sign. Our generation seeks its Sign, not out of curiosity, but out of perplexity. It has been startled out of the last remnant of its surprise. It asks us if we have any guidance to bring from the well-springs of the Spirit for this our complex visible life. That, I think, is the attitude. It is not the attitude of unbelief, or of scorn, or of hatred. It is the more disturbing and disquieting attitude of interrogation. The world takes us at our sacramental word. It asks to see in the affairs of national economic and social life the outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace. Miss Underhall says that "Man does not truly love the Perfect until he is driven to seek its incarnation in the world of time." And the world is looking for the incarnation of the Spirit of God in the relationships which obtain between men. If you read again Dr. Talbot's contribution to "Lux Mundi" you will be struck with the parallel between the deeper movements which prepared the world for the coming of Christ and those which lie below the surface to-day. There is the dread of national segregations; there is the yearning for an universal Church; there is the sense of human insufficiency; there is despair with this and with that exterior attempt at a final solution. Mankind is disappointed in man. All these operate upon a questioning age, upon an age which has begun to doubt-itself. No one would build a Crystal Palace in Hyde Park to-day to celebrate the achievements of man, for man has passed to the ultimate achievement and has learned the precious truth of his own insufficiency.

But it is something more than a vague restless doubting. It is a positive and a penetrating doubt. It knows that it lacks not something merely but the one thing. It knows that somewhere there is this "one thing" which it lacks. It flies from one extreme to the other; from materialism to credulity, from the liberty of individualism with its self-seeking to State regulation with its tyranny, from dictatorship to democracy, and to the dictatorship of democracy; and all the time, in Father Tyrrell's words "that strange Man from his Cross will not let it go." It sees us, too, similarly allowing ourselves to be the pawns of opposing tendencies. At one time we are exteriorists, finding our religious sanction in social service, the Marthas of to-day, the new representatives of the old and false antithesis between Faith and Works; at another time we are interiorists, finding a religious union with God which lives preciously but isolatedly within the chambers of our own souls, Mary's better part-if there are only two parts. And it knows all the time that the Kingdom of God cannot be separated from the vast and complex economic world. In Mr. Tawney's words, we cannot believe that religion should abdicate "one whole department of life, that of social and political conduct, as the sphere of the powers of the world and of them alone." Surely to think this, as it has been thought for two hundred years, is "one of the capital revolutions through which the human spirit has passed."

We know little of the economic and social life of the time before the Industrial Revolution, but we do know that it was wrapped in religious sanctions, or at any rate that religious sanctions were regarded as the ultimate sanctions. The Report of the Archbishops' fifth Committee gives two pictures. There is the picture of social conditions as we find them described in the histories with which students are familiar, a grim picture, but a picture which is to be regarded as the indication of man's failure to realise his faith in his life, even in the ages of faith. There is the picture on the other hand, of the church as standing for social righteousness, always in theory-and that is of more value than we suppose-and generally in practice. The Church offered resistance and some security "against the downward thrust of economic pressure." She warned the rich; she attempted to "spiritualise industry by relating it to the central purpose of man's life, his preparation for the Kingdom of God." In time the crash came-somewhere about the middle of the seventeenth century. In England there was some overlapping. But the breakdown of Catholic unity side by side with the rapid development of impersonal methods of organisation, the discovery of new countries, the greater range of economic operations, all focussed themselves in one tendency, and that was to move religious sanctions altogether from social and economic life. It is foolish to attribute it to one cause; it was the fusion of many causes. Then we came to a sequence of exterior attempts to find a solution and a sanction. The mercantile period "arose out of the decomposition of feudalism and mediævalism." It looked to the possession of wealth in fluid and visible form as the indication of well-being. Than Adam Smith made his protest, and economic laws and the operation of freedom came to be trusted-without the moral safeguards and the altruism upon which he laid stress. It is a shock to us to read of Daniel Defoe rejoicing because the introduction of machinery enabled children to share in bread-winning and finding in that fact the greatest hope for the future. From that day to this, all sorts of theories have been urged, and there have been all sorts of rejoicing at the discovery of the final solution. All of the solutions have been exterior. some of them have raised materialistic interpretations to the point of dogma. To say all this is not to be a mediævalist. It is not to decry progress, not is it to tail to appreciate elements of good in each of the theories. It is to ask if the downfall of Catholic unity did not involve more than we suppose. It was a two-fold break, extensively and intensively. It broke in respect of organisation. It broke in respect of content. It broke in respect of the countries which recognised its authority. It broke in respect of the realm of life itself which it covered. The spiritual unity broke on both sides of the ecclesiastical fissure. On both sides of the fissure anxieties as to social righteousness remained. Calvin, though he pronounced in favour of interest on loans, yet laid down conditions which shewed that he was disquieted. Wycliffe felt keenly the dangers which would follow from opening the door to self-interest. Luther, at the close of his life, in words which haunt us by their sadness, described the vicarious conception of wealth in a day when there were corruptions in plenty,-"Men gave with both hands, joyfully and with great devotion. It snowed of alms, foundations, and testaments. Our forefathers, lords and kingly princes and other folk, gave richly and compassionately, yea, to overflowing,-to churches, parishes, schools, burses and hospitals." These three all realised tremblingly that the spiritual dynamic which lay behind economic and social action was losing its force. It is as Dr. O'Brien says,-"There is one element in economic activity that remains a fixed immutable factor throughout the ages and that element is man. The desires and the conscience of man remain the same, whatever the mechanical environment with which he is encompassed." This fundamental truth is frequently profaned by well-meaning Christians who argue from it that the Christian is indifferent to the environment which surrounds others and hostile to any attempt so to improve social environment as to help men and women to the possibility of fuller realisation of what God means them to be. The life of the Spirit needs its expression in social organisation and it is to the best means of this social and economic expression that revived Catholic thought and quickened Catholic responsibility must turn, for it is only the Christian religion which is capable of dealing with the "fixed and immutable factor," which is the true corrective for the false optimism which is just being found out.

But we may state this truth in another way. The social and industrial organism needs the religious dynamic. Without the restraints of religious discipline and religious motive men are not to be trusted with the operation of self interest as the predominant criterion. they have immortal souls while the economic man was only a shell. We might quote from John Stuart Mill to shew his apprehensions and indeed we might go back to Adam Smith to find misgivings. Economics theories of all kinds since the Middle Ages, whatever justification they may have found in the injustices of the preceding theory, at any rate all combine in a synthesis that economic theory alone is insufficient as a ruling principle for the full life of man.

Both for individual lives, as Christians who examine ourselves according to the standard of the historic Church, and for our corporate social life, we need some new examination of the fundamentals, such fundamentals, for example, as are contained in the conceptions of usury and of just price. We need to get back to the Middle Ages in this sense at least that we must be troubled and anxious in respect of our souls in the economic relationships of life, and that we are not prepared to take it for granted that abundance of realisable wealth, however ill-distributed and ill-used, is in itself the criterion of progress. Mr. H.G. Wells stated a fundamental truth when he pointed out that both Karl Marx and Herbert Spencer "justified the characteristic class-impulses of the people they flattered, and both discouraged that generosity which alone can save the world." We are not prepared to believe, even on Adam Smith's authority, that the culmination of self-interests are "led by an invisible hand" into ultimate righteousness. Not so can we believe that God accepts the oblation of sin. It may be that this correlation of fundamental Christian principles with the social and economic aspects of our daily life can be attempted corporately by some such means as Bishop Gore has suggested, "a new Christian casuistry, a formulating in details of Christian moral duty, with a view to seeing, not how little a Christian need do in order to remain in Church communion, but how a Christian ought to act." Such a formulating process is manifestly difficult. Impersonal ownership and impersonal responsibility have so developed, the warp and woof of economic dependence are so involved, the problems of unearned and irresponsible income are such a network, the operations of that corporate unity, the State, are so wide-reaching, that fresh difficulties are constantly unfolded. But the deepening of the sense of the spiritual responsibility of the individual Churchman is the first essential. The Churchman should be the true social reformer for he believe in the basic reform of the human heart. To him the cry "Repent ye," is the herald of the Kingdom. We partake of our Communions, but the cry must reach us sometimes from the whole of a distressed world,-"Leave there thy gift before the altar and first be reconciled to thy brother." Even, says Ruskin, the crullest man on earth could not partake of his feast unless blindfold. This acceptance of a spiritual responsibility will put economic and social responsibilities far more evidently in the foreground. It bids us be a bold Daniel, not in the heroics of the market-place, but in the far more difficult heroics of our commonplace relationship with other men. It will dread a righteousness which is merely a superior goodness and it will seek a righteousness which is trembling and exquisite justness, even at its own cost of loss and of pain, the true righteousness which every social grade so easily overlooks.

Yet it will aspire to some conception of corporate life in industry which will be a tangible presentation of the spirit of justness and charity, not of charity in the sense, as Professor Chenon puts it in his admirable book, "Le Rôle Social de l'Eglise," the charity which is a mere palliative of injustice, but the charity which is complementary to justice, the shrinking from taking advantage of the weak, the charity which is "glorified justice," as the Archbishops' report puts it. Such corporations may take various shapes from Whitley Councils to voluntary guilds, from mediatorial devices between organised workers on the one hand and organised capital on the other hand to actual organisations including both parties. Much research remains to be undertaken on this aspect of the question; there is a wealth of material yet to be unearthed in England and in France and in Germany, and there are lessons of precious mutuality yet to be learned from organisations in the three countries in the Middles Ages-"We do not need," says Professor Chenon, "to restore the society of the Middle Ages but we do need to realise the ideal of the Middle Ages." For these corporations, whatever forms economic wisdom may dictate for them, a religious basis will be essential and it is in respect of this need that Catholic Christians will find their opportunity. The history of religion in relation to social affairs has been the story of unrealised ideals-Deuteronomy, Isaiah, the Captivity. It is only in the last two centuries that men have despaired and have sought a secular remedy, a merely secular organisation, a clumsy balance of rival self-interests. The world debates the rights and the wrongs of these rival secular organisations, while we know all the time that both sides omit the one thing needed.

If we are to find the Christian Commonwealth and to infuse the spirit of Christianity into our social and economic relations, into those complex relations which make up national life, there is the immediate duty of seeking a revaluation of those things which we esteem and desire. In a day when example is especially potent there is a duty of spiritualising the public taste. Such a revaluation will beware primarily of that subtlety of possession which is based upon the subconscious denial to others. It will be fearful lest it should come about that the man is lost in the machine and the saint is lost in the shareholder. Into all the complexities of life, the social relations, the economic relations, the politics, the interchanges of service, into the polling-booth and the shareholding, into work and the direction and organisation of work, it will bring the full romantic and adventurous search for the Kingdom of Heaven to which all things will certainly be added. It will look afresh at the hard and cunning bargain; it will seek to share with others all privileges, including the privilege of the ownership of capital and the responsibility for that ownership; it will safeguard leisure and especially Sunday leisure; it will translate unearned income into the terms of glad and voluntary service; it will have regard to the high ethic of expenditure, the true economics. It will encourage the penitence of those who have rather than the insistence of those who have not. Here is place for no proud benevolence, for no barriers of conventional respectability, for no traditions of servitude, for no vulgar flaunting of wealth, for no presumption at the altar of a chosen or favoured class. Rather here is place for the super-service of the super-man and for reverence for apparently humble work and for apparently humble workers, and reverence is the safeguard against revolt, for in turn it attracts reverence. Here is place, too, for humble study and for a plain examination of the facts. Thus shall we seek that golden strand of religious sanction which the cord of visible progress seems to have lost. We shall not despise progress or contemn the new discoveries; rather we shall consecrate them as fresh visions into the wonderful world in which we have been placed for the benefit of all the sons of God. Thus we shall work for the two-fold re-union of Catholic Christianity-the extensive re-union; but prior in time, I think, will come the intensive re-union in which, in answer to human yearning, every sphere of human life will be sacramental. Then we may find it possible to institute that spiritual organisation to which Bishop Gore has directed us, the "circles of representative men in each district, or within the area of special professions, to draw up a statement of what is wrong in current practice, and of the principles on which Christians ought to act." We may come, with such a re-united intensive and extensive Catholicity, to that central body which "would be formulating with adequate knowledge the general maxims of Christian living." And we should come to that realisation, not merely for those who have in abundance but for all men, or moral responsibility in possession which, in Mr. Nettleship's words, is to be found, "not by leaving behind what are usually called earthly things, but by loving more what is really loveable in them." It is the sacramentalism of possession.

So we are aroused at this moment of time to a new and a deeper conception of personal duty. It is a formidable task for each of us, and the Christian needs to be reminded that it is no light or easy thing to present in his own relationships to his fellows the full implication of Christ's truth. It is no light or easy thing either for leader or for worker-and the duty lies upon both. The Victorian age of conscious superiority has passed into the healthier feeling almost of despair. To apply to all our relationships what the Bishop of Pretoria has called "the dynamic of cardinal motives" is far away from the well-conducted exterior respectability which has passed for Christian ethic. It may be that we are about to face a period very different from the advancing wealth to which we have grown accustomed, a period in which finer qualities of austere self-sacrifice will be demanded and great ventures of romantic faith will be needed. I might call it venturesome and daring--the faith which will remove those most mountainous of mountains, the vision of ourselves as privileged or as separated members of the brotherhood of mankind. Our Lord washed the disciples' feet in those last solemn hours and thus gave us two lessons-his humility and their title to the honour. True spiritual humility in God's sight contains the germs of the only Economic Revolution which is likely to be ultimately constructive. It is in this way that Ruskin's culminating prophecy, in a way which he never could have conjectured, will be fulfilled,--"Raise the veil boldly; face the light; and if, as yet, the light of the eye can only be through tears, and the light of the body through sackcloth, go thou forth weeping, bearing precious seed, until the time come and the Kingdom, when Christ's gift of bread and bequest of peace shall be Unto this last as unto thee."

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