It is remarkable in how many of these lives the Hand of God works a complete change, and peace is gained at last after long and devious wandering of the spirit. In the forty-four subjects selected for the present book, "the converts are conspicuous, It suffices to mention Newman, Hopkins, Beardsley, Chesterton; or, to go back to the very dawn of Christianity, the most illustrious of all converts, the Sau of Tarsus who became Paul Among the English-speaking races the influence of Newman, who died in 1890, remains immeasurable. Writes Mr. Shane Leslie at the end of his ten-page sketch of the great English cardinal The sorrows, frustrations and disappointments of his life are forgotten. They make the material of biography and they point the moralizations of ihe judicious. But Newman's monument is in himself. The religious mind is not likely to have easier paths in the future than those which he followed. The memory of his intellectual wanderings and stabilities is always at hand to guide and enlighten the chosen thinkers who act as the scouts to the main body of Christian thought. But Newman was more than a scout although much of his life was spent in lonely pioneering. How far was it possible to allow the Catholic mind to explore? Where exactly could the front lines be safest drawn between sympathetic orthodoxy and honest doubt?
To those in need today of illuminate ing belief, or mystical refreshment his name stands for more than a guide or scout. To posterity he has become again what was to Oxford a hundred years ago—an apostle the One radiant, discerning, unfailing, unageing apostle to all who seek Catholic truths in English speech.
The last biography in "Great Catholics" is that of a man still living, Canon Cardijn, a Belgian miner's son who became the champion of the working-class whose wretched condition he knew so well. This energetic priest is more than an ordinary social worker, he is an organizer of labour on an essentially religious basis under the guidance of the Carpenter of Nazareth Himself. He founded, in 1915 when Belgium was in the throes of war, a group which grew tremendously after the war and in 1924 received official recognition from the Church. It is known as the J.O.C., "Jeunesse Ouvrière Chretienne." The movement soon spread to France and many other countries, and now Belgium has 85000 J.O.C. members, France 50000. Before the hostilities in Spain, a start had been made by the organization in [hat country. The movement has beer called a modern crusade in which the proletariat is brought within the ever-open portals of the Church, and the worker looks upon Christ as "Brother" While material improvement is not considered as an end in itself, the betterment of industrial and living conditions is nevertheless held essential and the dignity of the worker is insisted upon. "The truth which is so blunderingly expressed by Communism.in its insistence on class-consciousness has here its true, Christian version," as the biographer, Mr. Stanley B. James, puts it in summing up Canon Cardijn's claims to be considered in his own generation a great Catholic—v.m.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.