The Everlasting King
THE EVERLASTING KING THE encyclical of Pope Pius XI dedicating the entire world, in the most formal and imposing fashion, to Christ, the King, is only a few weeks old, but there are already...
...Or may generation follow generation, doomed to watch the extinction of one hope after another, finding all their individual energy and freshness of outlook rendered nugatory by a force of descent as irresistible as the law of gravity...
...For lack of its observance one swift runner after another has stumbled—one strong fighter after another seen the sun sink upon a stricken field...
...The fate of the world may not hang upon the answers we can give...
...It was drunk with mechanical progress, and, as a consequence, all but a part of the substance of life today is spent in the effort to keep pace with its inventions...
...These are questions which a host of writers and thinkers are asking today...
...It was generous of political liberties, but kept no rein upon economic changes which would render such liberties a mockery...
...grows unpleasantly insistent...
...It is a mephitic atmosphere in which the lamps of faith, hope, and charity burn feebly and fitfully...
...Just as there is a degree in laicism deeper and deadlier than the most militant agnosticism, which does not trouble to fight with God, but smilingly excludes Him from its calculations, so there is an ultimate depth in disillusionment, which often wears the rosy garments of optimism and tells a world from which social injustice cries to heaven that, if it is not the best of all possible worlds, at any rate no other world is possible...
...It is addressed to the faithful, but so inherent in its phrases is a truth that all who call themselves Christian are forced to own, that it would be more exact to see in it a message addressed to the entire Christian world, with all the authority and all the assurance of the days when there was, in the western world, but one fold and one shepherd...
...But, in calling the attention of mankind to its perils, the Pontiff makes it very plain that no change in the forms under which authority is exercised will free its constituted heads from their dependence upon a higher power...
...The law of compensations, which ordains that certain desires can only be fulfilled through a retrenchment of others, that sacrifice must balance achievement, is a law that does not play favorites...
...It is quite simply the ignoring of God in government...
...Forgotten the first cause, there is no reason why one should command and another obey...
...But few reasonable men and women would deny it a distinction all its own...
...Such a feeling is not to be confused with pessimism...
...What the response will be from those who do not recognize this primacy, time alone can show...
...Indeed, what the world calls favorites of fortune, are the ones that most strikingly incur its penalties...
...But the mood and temper with which generations unborn tackle their problems—the direction which their efforts for betterment take—undoubtedly will...
...Is a civilization, by the very laws of its being, subTHE COMMONWEAL February 3, 1926 ject to the same progressive decay as a human organism...
...It is at one and the same time a statement of eternal facts and a challenge to all the tendencies of the age which refuse to these facts their vital significance...
...A great deal of the world's disillusionment derives from the fact that the changes of the past hundred years have failed to secure the happiness of those whose spirit and blood were spent in bringing them to pass...
...It is the brand of Cain upon the brows of men who muffle their ears when the cry, "what did you with your brother Abel...
...It places the condemnation of the one authority that time has left unshaken upon a host of evils deplored by thinkers and preachers of all countries and of all faiths...
...It is the stigma of the world for which Christ would not pray...
...Is there any reassurance in the fact that young men step into the shoes of old...
...It created a formidable dualism by multiplying opportunities for enjoyment at the very time it made work a joyless affair...
...In a word, the change for which the Pontiff calls in his noble encyclical, is a change of hearts and not a change of vesture...
...So deeply infused is their thought with the quality of mental fatigue, so uncertain is their gesture of groping for remedies, that, in order to institute a comparison, we are forced to carry our imagination back to a period of which scant record exists, and reconstitute, so far as sympathy and historical understanding can reconstitute it, the state of mind of civilized mankind during the most tragic epoch of the world's history known to us—the century and a half that preceded the downfall of the Roman empire...
...Monarchy fell because it was unfaithful to its trust...
...It is the laicism and disillusionment against which the raising of the banner of the Christ-King now dedicates the Christian to fight, heart and soul...
...By pointing directly to a solution it sets the issue in a form where none, however hostile to the authority of the Papacy, can affect to ignore it...
...It bequeathed a world so complicated that many thinkers doubt whether free men can continue to operate it...
...As we watch it recede into the past, we stand aghast at the heavy drafts it made upon posterity, and at the easy confidence with which it replied to the occasional warnings uttered by lonely and unimpressed thinkers...
...Authority suddenly seems to be derived, not from God, but from men, and consequently its foundations totter...
...Thrones are emptied or filled by shadows because kings, for their own safety and security, chose rather to be the monarchs of courts and classes than accept the Divine law which sees in every soul, however mean and lowly its earthly state, something that has been bought at an inestimable price, and hence is of inestimable value...
...But that it can count upon a sympathetic reception from all men of good will, is foreshadowed by the significant words of the head of the Berkeley Divinity school who, in The Witness, a national organ of the Episcopal church, pleads for a common observance of the festival of the Kingdom of Christ not only as ua move in the direction of Church unity," but as "an effective agency for spreading the Church's gospel of social righteousness...
...To such a generation the dedication of the entire world t6 Christ, the King, comes like a rift through the clouds...
...The kings who have been good kings may be counted on the fingers of two hands, and those have been the best who most frankly owned the suzerainty of Christ and most humbly regarded themselves as mere delegates of a Higher Power...
...The "laicism" against which the encyclical of Pius XI protests as the world's outstanding danger is no new thing, nor did it come into being when republics and government by consent of the governed replaced crown and orb and sceptre...
...It was a generation that insisted upon rights far more than upon duties, not seeing or not caring how ungrateful the demands of duty might one day appear in consequence...
...Are we in possession, through the acquired wisdom of centuries, of powers for renewal which the ancient world did not possess...
...No generation was so favored, materially, as the generation which came to bankruptcy twelve years ago, and of none were the demands so inordinate and so incompatible...
...THE EVERLASTING KING THE encyclical of Pope Pius XI dedicating the entire world, in the most formal and imposing fashion, to Christ, the King, is only a few weeks old, but there are already signs that it has impressed the imagination of the world to an extent commensurate with the manner of its announcement...
...In one respect individuals do not differ greatly from the mass...
...If the heads of nations wish the safety of their governments and the growth and progress of their countries, they must not refuse to give, together with their peoples, public testimony of reverence and obedience to the Empire of Christ...
...Are the same manifestations that we note in the one—energy and hopefulness during youth, weight and authority throughout maturity, languor and numbness in senescence—inherent in the other...
...A good many hard things that are being said about the age we live in are subjects for discussion...
...It lifts the entire conception of obedience above the disrepute that has overtaken it, and places supreme authority where alone it can be safely placed, in the over-lordship of Christ, Who was a conqueror by right of His own blood, and Who reigns over our wills because He reigns in our hearts...
...Either it is a disillusioned age, par excellence, or the writers, publicists, and preachers to whom we look for light and guidance, and from whose relics, in the future, its quality will be gauged, are in a conspiracy to misrepresent it...
...For both, disillusionment is generally the result of the nature of the demands made upon life...
Vol. 3 • February 1926 • No. 13
