petence, and a revolutionary progress is made into anarchy by way of a theoretical "republic," as in Portugal, China, Russia, and the tottering states of the dismembered "Central Empires." So, as modernism shatters, the cry goes up for increased production, greater "efficiency," more mechanical inventions; for publicity, mass-action, more laws, and increased activity of every kind, with Mr Ford and Mr Edison and Dr Steinmetz and the "efficiency expert" as the prophets of regeneration.
Here is the significance of Mr Sedgwick's book, that it should come at this time, when few indeed will understand, fewer still accept it; yet it is written, and this means that here and there light is showing in darkness, and when after storm the clouds once break, even for the moment, the break presages fairer weather, and the clearing for a new day.
The truth that shines through the Vita Monastica (be it printed book or way of life) is implicit in Christianity and still not inactive in the Catholic part thereof. There are signs that it is revealing itself once more, and when it is given full emphasis where it is retained, and recovered where it has been lost, then the world may go on well for another period. Every development of formal monasticism (of which there are so many to-day) is welcome, but far more so such an evidence as this that reveals the recovery of this truth where it had been altogether lost.
There is nothing more interesting to-day than the watching of that process whereby one man and another finds his way back to ultimate truth through study of some manifestation of the life of the Middle Ages. It may be philosophy, economics, sociology, politics, literature, architecture, or some other of a dozen different things, the end is the same; the realization that here was a sane and rounded and beautiful life in comparison with which ours is barbarous, or worse. One fancies that in the present case the path to enlightenment has been Dante, as with another it may have been St Thomas Aquinas, or Chartres Cathedral, or the Statutes of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. It is all curious and unexpected, but heartening to a degree; moreover it is cumulative, and in the end it may mean redemption.
There is a danger in the process, and that is the chance that the method may result in a certain over-intellectualizing of truths, the building up of a theory that may be right and yet not closely
