Hence the Catholic outlook on life has these two characteristics. In the first place it is easy and light-hearted in its attitude towards the troubles of everyday life, and has a serene detachment. Our Lord’s saying concerning the lilies of the field, which labor not neither do they spin, and yet are arrayed in greater beauty than Solomon in all his glory, is deeply imprinted on the Catholic mind. And indeed Catholicism has for that very reason been charged with being culturally retrograde. If it be meant by this that the genuine Catholic does not regard culture as the supreme and ultimate value, or as an end in itself, then the charge is a true one. For the Catholic believes too firmly and really in the heaven of the next world, to be able to believe in a heaven on earth. There have even been Catholics—it is true—and there will always be such, who have lived so completely for the eternal hope, that they have despised and spurned the earthly and natural, and have forgotten the divine injunction to cultivate the earth. That was and is an exaggeration of the Catholic ideal. We have already shown how the Church fought the Gnostic sects of the early centuries and of the Middle Ages, defended natural and bodily values and asserted man’s right to the goods and joys of life. The Catholic ideal teaches us not to destroy nature but to transfigure it. It is an ideal which embraces both nature and supernature, both this world and the next, for both nature and supernature belong to the life of the Catholic. If he disown either of these, he is a heretic; whereas the true Catholic is one who sets them in their right relation to each other. Every natural thing, every natural passion, including the sexual impulse, is a gift of God and therefore good. But it is a transitory good, a good that points beyond itself, a secondary and subordinate good. It does not acquire eternal value until it is affirmed in God. So the true Catholic loves the earthly good, but does not love it like a hungry slave who would eat himself to death on it, but rather like the wandering minstrel from whom the gift elicits a glad song of gratitude to the giver. Wherever Catholicism is a living force, the poisonous plant of materialism cannot grow. Moreover the exclusive service of this world, devotion to work for work’s sake, to gain for gain’s sake, and all arid utilitarianism are alien to the Catholic spirit. According to Max Weber and Troltsch the native soil of capitalism is Calvinism, and it was born in Puritan England and Scotland. Every unprejudiced social psychologist who compares the manifestations of the popular soul in Catholic Bavaria or the Catholic Rhineland with those say of Saxony or Thuringia will recognize a characteristic difference in temper and outlook. The life of this world seems to the Catholic too unimportant for him to take it very seriously. He is really serious only in regard to God and His Kingdom. So he has kept a certain serenity, and a certain childlike indifference. And it is mainly from this child-like quality that he gets his feeling for and understanding of serene and unstudied art, and especially popular art. Along with this child-like character he has humility of spirit and is reverent towards holiness and excellence. The Catholic has no sort of passion for autonomy and self-glorification. From this point of view, as well as from others, Kant’s “moral autonomy” is a product of Protestantism. And the Catholic has not lost his interest in life or his faculty of admiration, and therefore he is still able to believe and to pray. Joyful trust in God, child-like simplicity, humility: these are the elements of the Catholic character. There is no need to point out how closely this spirit corresponds with the temper which our Lord requires for His Kingdom.