The Unending Conflict

The Church and Socialism dates originally from 1908, when Belloc was Liberal MP for Salford (where Herbert Vaughan, CTS’s founder, had been bishop before going to Westminster). It was revised in 1921, and again in 1931. It is a robust and eloquent defence of private property against collectivist solutions. Becket takes the familiar story of the martyred Archbishop of Canterbury, and explains its wider significance: how the Church resists the state’s efforts to abridge her authority. World Conflict was first published in 1951, two years before Belloc’s death; it was his last published work. It may stand as a colophon to his life’s work, at least as a historian: to place before the reader, with all the forcible eloquence of which he was an unparalleled master, the reality of the Church as the only truly sane and wholesome way of making sense of the world and all its joys and sorrows.