THE TABLET, November 5th, 1955. VOL. 206, No. 6024

THE TABLE Í

Published as a Newspaper

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER &

REVIEW

FOUNDED IN 1840

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

NO VEMBER 5th , 1955

NINEPENCE

T axation and In fla tio n : The Undiscussed Assumptions

The N ewm an D em o g rap h ic S u r v e y : Figures o f the Catholic Schoolchildren

The O u t lo ok in Greece : Report after a Visit. By Christopher Hollis

C am bridge C hristian ity : The Evangelical Tradition. By Mgr. Humphrey J. T. Johnson

Tales from th e V ienna R in g : The Reopening o f the Opera. By Bela Menczer

P o r tu gu e se A r t : The Crucifix in Burlington House B o o k s R e v i e w e d : The Expansion o f Elizabethan England, by A. L. Rowse; The West in M y

Eyes, by Annie Van de Wiele ; Moral Judgment, by D. Daiches Raphael ; The South Hams, by M argaret Willy ; The Grand Captain, by Gerald de Gaury ; The Fall o f the Sparrow, by Nigel Balchin ; Down to Earth, by Robin Place ; and Going into the Past, by G o rdon Copley. Reviewed by J. J. Dwyer, Peter Bethell, Edward Sillem, E. W. M artin and M. Bellasis.

HIGH EXAMPLE

P RINCESS MARGARET’S declaration, giving its rightful pre-eminence to the Christian teaching about marriage, accepting it as the guide for a believing and practising Christian, is a personal document, but it will have a much wider significance. The Princess will never see or know the distant fruits of her action in the number of marriages that will be successful and happy because those entering on them have done so taking a high view of their vows and of the responsible and permanent state they are entering. A swelling river flows through the divorce courts, more than 30,000 a year in this country, although the habit has not reached the great bulk of the people, who still think of marriage in the traditional way. Nothing has done more to swell it than the spread of the idea that a marriage is something to be tried and abandoned if it does not work ; marriage is then entered into with the idea always lurking at the back of the mind of each of the partners that they might be happier with somebody else. Human nature is in general so limited and so imperfect that partners must take each other for better or worse, and doing so find in the permanence of their relationship a framework which allows much greater freedom than in the American marriages where a single quarrel can be taken to court as mental cruelty. To Catholics marriage is a sacrament, because it is a new state, needing and bringing its own grace with it ; and the Christian religion is not thought of as something accidental and outside imposing severe conditions, but as itself providing the whole setting inside which marriages are most likely to be happy.

It is unhappily a measure how far this country has drifted from its Christian moorings that, while Princess Margaret’s declaration has commanded admiration, and a broad assent that she has taken the right and proper and, indeed, the only decision, there is also very widespread surprise ; although perhaps in this matter the world of popular journalism is not truly representative of public opinion. There is a good practice of respecting religious convictions, and the Princess has now made it impossible for those who would like to stage a great campaign for the “Right to Love” to do so on her behalf.

What they are likely to do, in their mortification at finding that having so much of the population as their readership does not cause them to be regarded as natural moral guides, is to attack the Church of England. Little of the comment by the disappointed shows any realization that the grounds stated by Princess Margaret for her decision remain exactly the same whether the Church of England is established or not, and independently of its special relation to the Crown. She obeys the Church of England because she believes in the faith it teaches, not because it is the State Church.

The critics are, indeed, given an opening. Sir Alan Herbert can find in his files quotations from past Anglican Bishops, like Mandell Creighton, in favour of the remarriage of the injured parties in legal divorces. They can say that the attitude of the Church of England has hardened ; that when men like Mandell Creighton were alive divorces were a very small trickle, confined to the upper walks of society, and not a broadening river ; and that this social change for the worse is not a justification for a change of doctrine. But the answer to this is that the laxer school were the temporary aberration, and the Church of England has realigned itself with traditional Christian teaching.

Behind the criticism there can be sensed the feeling that in a democracy, where the real sovereign is the electorate, it is the the real sovereign, the people, who ought to be seen as the final authority over a national or established Church ; that this would be seen at once if this country were a Republic, preferably with a left-wing atheist as President, as would be congenial to those who would part very happily with both the monarchy and the established Church, as incompatible with their conception of enlightened democracy. These people have received a check, and they cannot be expected to like it. They have been made to realize that both these institutions, animated by a spirit far removed from their own, retain a great deal of vitality, and do not propose to go forward with the people towards a form of society which would combine the private latitude of America with the public discipline of Russia.