Great Hearts and Thoughts
February 2, 1927 T H E C O M M O N W E AL 343 GREAT HEARTS AND THOUGHTS A DDRESSING the students gathered for the New- man Club convention in New York City, Mr. William D. Guthrie observed...
...What these men did for their country is by no means deducible from the sum total of political victory...
...Those whom Mr...
...Therein lies your future task...
...To them is due, in a large measure, the restoration of the spirit now so evident in the social and artistic life of their nation...
...it has torn them to bits or flung them away...
...But the presence of nobleness in literature, the background of good poetry or prose that is a good man--this is as unmistakable and as cherished now as ever...
...A written paragraph, whether cre- ative or critical, is always a mirror of personality...
...Guthrie again, these young people can "let the world see in your lives high moral standards, high culture and high patriotism," there is little to fear even from the gusts of prejudice which rock the present from the waste spaces of the past...
...But possibly we may be on the eve of new riches and a greater artistic "courtesy" than has been seen since the beheading of Thomas More...
...And if this in turn be spiritualized and valiant, orderly and urbane, it matters very little whether the topic dealt with is as far removed as the pole from problems of apologetic or doctrine...
...Guthrie was addressing were, for the most part, young men and women...
...and it is not apt to look around for a fresh supply...
...That is, at least, a hope which may pleasantly be entertained even while the random struggling of the present is en-couraged...
...That they feel no urge to engage in polemics or unctuous discussion, that they are moved rather by swift, strange notions of beauty, is not a fault, but a characteristic of their age...
...and because the morning is always with them, youth which loves loveliness is sure to find its path...
...Indeed, there is nothing to which the modern world is likely to listen so little as to tracts...
...and yet every one of them had probably encountered the same state of mind, the same hostile mental and social barrier, which the man talking to them had come to know during long, busy years of con-tact with the American scene...
...But the distance between personal testimony and literary testimony is not so great as Mr...
...It is perhaps good that this is so...
...I am thinking only of the intolerance, prejudice and antipathy in regard to the Catholic Church and Catholics, enter-tained by so many of those whom we meet daily in our lives, to whom we are attached, whom we respect and esteem, and yet who have inherited the point of view of ancestors who conscientiously and from deep conviction persecuted all whom differed with them on questions of religion and to whom everything Roman Catholic was anathema...
...Perhaps this concept of the literary life--which in its own way "sublimely witnesseth"--needs to be drawn more emphatically to the attention of young men and women now trying out their gifts in the craft of prose and verse...
...February 2, 1927 T H E C O M M O N W E AL 343 GREAT HEARTS AND THOUGHTS A DDRESSING the students gathered for the New- man Club convention in New York City, Mr...
...Going out from the centralized spiritual coun-try of the Church into a world always more or less foreign and antipathetic, every Catholic is an ambassa- dor whose motto must be noblesse oblige and whose habits those of a gentleman...
...And beyond any question, his remarks have a great, abiding significance for Newman Club members who, like their fellow young men and women in Catholic colleges, represent in America that youth upon which all the spiritual forces active in the world are relying...
...It is well for them to recall from the period of carnage which they barely missed taking a stern share in, and which has markedly influenced the world they inhabit, the daily illustration of example supplied by French clerics serving in the trenches and enduring the multiform attacks of martial routine with no damage to their radiant personal morality and faith...
...I am not at all think- ing of or contemplating conversions...
...Guthrie seemed to believe...
...But he was forced to add that "whilst the Constitu- tion guarantees religious liberty and the equal protec- tion of the laws of all faiths alike in every state of the Union, there lies a great field beyond the reach of statutes, and that is the field of public opinion among our fellow-citizens of other faiths than Catholic...
...They were advised to remember Newman's "never-to-be-forgotten words --'Let the world see by your lives.' Hostile public opinion can be affected and ultimately removed only by example...
...William D. Guthrie observed that a spiritual historian of the United States could record with satisfaction "the establishment and protection of religious liberty by constitutional guaranty, and the slow but as yet in- complete development of religious tolerance...
...Guthrie outlined in some detail the truth that this method of influencing public opinion has never failed, though every other method has...
...If, to quote the words of Mr...
...It has its marvelous, beautiful effect, not merely upon the moral life of an individual whom it moves, but also upon that residue of intolerance which many of us retain as a cradle re- membrance...
...All of loveliness, Jacques Maritain reminds us in different words, is the green- sward before the House of God...
...The cir- cumstance that this has been, apparently, so little real- ized is one matter which The Commonweal, hospi- table on principle to the young, has viewed with some concern...
...It was brought up on them...
...For in the end, nation, humanity, church, and God, abide...
...And so, we say with some feeling, there is no manner in which the young educated man or woman can so successfully be an ex- emplar, a witness, to his faith, urbanity and tradition as in the honest practice of the literary art...
Vol. 5 • February 1927 • No. 13
