Various answers are given to the question, ‘What are we fighting for?’ but it now seems to be commonly accepted that wTe are fighting for something greater than our national independence, for something vastly more important than the British Empire. It is not precisely democracy; we use the word indeed, but with a certain hesitation as we remember how signally we failed in another war ‘to make the world safe for democracy.’ Freedom is now more often the slogan. We are fighting against totalitarian powers which restrict the use of freedom and claim a quasi-religious authority over their subjects, and ire know that we cannot conquer them merely by an appeal to national feeling, and still less by the aid of material resources. We too need a religious impulse to enable us to meet unflinchingly the armies of fanaticism. And as we cannot all appreciate the Catholic spirit which alone can extirpate the newest heresies, we have to appeal to something which is the result of the Catholic influence on Europe, but which is understood by all. And that is freedom.

There are many puzzling features about this war. For instance: how is it that the Germans appear to have accomplished all they wanted so far in double-quick time? How is it that there is a powerful fifth column not only in every allied country, but also in every neutral country?

To provide an answer to questions of this kind, one must try and establish the true nature of the war.

In spite of what the communists say, this is not a war of rival imperialisms. It is not even a war of Great Britain versus Germany—a war of rival nations. It is a religious war—anyhow on the part of Germany. The reason why the Germans are prepared to sacrifice everything for victory, and were willing to dispense with most of the amenities and comforts of civilisation for years before they actually launched their attack on the world, is that they were buoyed up by great spiritual force and religious fanaticism. Spiritual force can only be met with spiritual force. Even if we possessed parity in numbers and equipment and were deficient in spiritual force, we could not beat the Germans. Islam, in the days when it was a young, militant, missionary religion, nearly succeeded in conquering the whole of Europe and destroying its civilization. There were moments when it seemed that nothing short of a miracle could succeed in holding the invading hordes at bay and preventing them from capturing the whole Mediterranean basin and most of Central Europe. But the miracle happened, and like all miracles it was in the first and last instance a change in the spiritual order of events.

Because it expresses the ideal at which all must aim, the idea of perfection has always found its place in Christian thought. In the first centuries of vigorous faith strengthened in persecution there was less need for the intellectual systematization that was to come much later. Our Saviour did not present His disciples with a complete and coherent body of abstract truths. His doctrinal discourses and discussions had the practical purpose of teaching the way to salvation, and it was the first preoccupation of the Church to preach Jesus crucified. In the course of the centuries the living Church, faced with controversies and doctrinal extravagances, would find it necessary—relying on the promise of divine assistance—to define the implications of the teaching of Christ, and this in turn would make a fuller synthesis possible and even necessary. In the meantime the different obstacles to the Christian life encountered by men of different ages and cultures inevitably led them to stress different elements in the fullness of the Christian life. The Fathers of the Desert had escaped from a profoundly corrupt society, and as a consequence they emphasized the need for penance, and purity of heart, and avoidance of sin, so that the conception of perfection which can be disengaged from their lives and writings is of a more negative character; the positive side of Christian life is not absent, but it is less in relief.

This well-known treatise of St. Thomas Aquinas on the principles of good government was addressed, there seems little doubt, to Hugh II, de Lusignan, king of Cyprus, who died in 1267 at the untimely age of seventeen years. On the death of the promising youth the Saint discontinued his work, when he had reached the fourth chapter of the second book; but the task was completed, not altogether unsuccessfully, by one of his pupils, Ptolemy de Lucca, a Dominican who lived to become bishop of Torcello and died in 1327. St. Thomas included fifteen chapters in his first book, and Ptolemy added twelve more to the second, and completed the whole work by adding two more books, one of twenty-two chapters, the other of twenty-eight, so that of the whole work De Regimine Principum as it appears in the collected works of St. Thomas, Ptolemy’s share is sixty-two chapters out of a total of eighty-one.

I have no intention of giving here a resume of the book whose principles are so well known to students of St. Thomas; I merely wish to indicate the broad historical background in which it was composed.

St. Thomas, we have to remember, was an Italian, and by birth a subject of his distant kinsman, the Emperor Frederic II; being born in the kingdom of Naples, then an appanage of the Imperial a-own. Under Frederic’s harsh rule the Saint lived out his youth, but after joining the Dominicans found peace under the just and therefore tranquil government of St. Lewis IX of France.

Let us consider this hymn of the Church as a beautiful summary of the Holy Spirit’s mission in the New Law, according to the promise of Our Lord, by Whom He was sent. His mission is to complete not only the work of Redemption, but all creation, though concerned chiefly with the sanctification of the individual soul; and thus the Veni Creator is a petition for direction of our mind in the way of truth, and our affections in the way of charity:

. . . Mentes tuorum visita
Imple superna gratia
Quae tu creasti pectora.

Yet important as this is, we do not stop there; but are led on to still greater truth, the most sublime Mystery of faith —the very life of God. For the procession of the Third Divine Person is the necessary life of God (creation is the not-necessary life from God).

‘Under this simple baptismal name have appeared the documents of a short life which might have been that of a Saint or of a man of genius, perhaps both.’

It was no less caustic a critic than André Therive who made the statement and wrote six columns in Le Temps to prove it.

François really needs no such tribute; the facts are self-evident. Even our national temper which view's with shrinking, if not with actual dislike, additions to the category of precocious prodigies of sanctity, or even of genius, might be vanquished by this record—in letters and rough notes—of the boy whom Auguste Valensin presents to his contemporaries.

François, to begin with, was not a child-saint. He had the ill-health which often helps towards sanctity but so gaily and carelessly borne as scarcely to appear. Obviously he had the seeds in him of a profound spirituality, but Andre Therive only uses the word holiness—‘a little strong ’ as he thinks it—in the most tentative way.

Then François is anonymous. We know scarcely anything concrete about him beyond his name, his profile in an admirable portrait-study as a boy of about twelve, and a later one; we know that his people were rich and we may guess that his home town was Lyons. This anonymity adds to the story a quality of elusiveness, and one might almost use the debased word glamour, from the lack of those data on which normal English biography is founded.