bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Art and Scholasticism
Authors: Ryan Mary
Published: July 2007

The two words Art and Scholasticism, set down thus side by side, look at first sight somewhat oddly paired. A little book with this title, which is useful out of all proportion to its size, shows that Scholastic philosophy offers a very sound and far-reaching theory of art, and for anyone interested in such questions will well repay careful reading. And who is not so interested? Who but has thought and talked more or less vaguely, and perhaps all the more ardently, about Art for Art’s sake, about the antagonism of Art and Morality, or the identification of Art with Morality, or the dissociation of Art from Morality? At least, after assimilating this statement of the scholastic notion of Art, vagueness will be out of the question ; and when arguments arise they will spring from the very root of the matter, from first principles and metaphysical presuppositions.

Chapters I to V give a detailed analysis of ideas and words ; the rest of the book is a series of deductions from and a synthesis of the clear notions so obtained. If we may for a moment compare artistic production to some marvellous machine, the parts are taken asunder before our eyes and cleaned of dust and cobwebs ; when they are put together again we have the joy of understanding their functions and following their interplay.
Persia
Authors: Rice Cyprian
Published: July 2007

The Persians are the “race-lumière” of the East, just as France is the torch-bearer of the West; Persian ideas, Persian philosophy, Persian poetry and mysticism have tinged and penetrated all religious thought in the Near and in the Middle East. The charm of the roses of Shiráz, of dervishes and Sufis and the Rubáiyát, has not failed to reach even these remote, misty fastnesses of the work-a-day West. Some Fate seems to have been at work, pushing the Persians into the foreground of the world’s thought, ever since—shall we say the Babylonian captivity ?— at any rate since the day when those three royal magicians followed the star, and, in its limelight stood around the manger-throne of the Child Jesus in Bethlehem.

It is not within the scope of this slight paper to do more than hint at the religious history of Persia. Its ancient borders on the west were the Araxes, one of the four rivers of the Earthly Paradise, and the Tigris and Euphrates, from whose banks Abram set out, at the call of God, for a strange land in the West. The tradition of the four streams of Paradise lived on in the primitive religion of Irán, and with it, no doubt, no inconsiderable share of the early wisdom of our race. The captivity of the Jews in Babylon and the residence of the prophet Daniel at the court of the Persian Emperor must certainly have had their influence on Jewish thought. In fact the books of Daniel and of Tobias—to mention only two—are full of the traces of this influence, linguistic or metaphysical.
Freedom
Authors: Pepler Hilary
Published: July 2007

It is not generally known that this is a free country.

Englishmen do indeed stand up when the band plays “God save the King,” and feel emotions of pride and benevolence as they see the Union Jack suspended from the balcony of the Mansion House or draped over the Cenotaph. The clock tower at Westminster is photo-engraved upon their hearts as upon their Bradburies. Festooned with Tudor roses and ribs of beef, a cornucopia of Liberty empties itself at the feet of Nelson, Dizzy, John Peel and the Iron Duke as, in scarlet, they follow the hounds and trample our defeated foes! Rule Britannia, the men in blue, S. Paul’s Cathedral, the Derby, the M.C.C., and Aston Villa, not to mention the playing-fields of Eton, awake those emotions of freedom which no coal strike can destroy nor Ireland dim. But, in spite of these telling facts, I fear we English have forgotten that we are free. We complain, at times, that our freedom has, in some measure, been taken from us.
The Problem of Depopulation in France
Authors: Gwynn Denis
Published: July 2007

For years before the war the falling birth-rate in France was recognized as the most serious social and economic problem that threatened the future of the country. The war, with its death-roll of nearly a million and a quarter young Frenchmen, to say nothing of the tens of thousands of others who are maimed for life and rendered incapable of providing for the maintenance of families, has enormously increased the gravity of the problem. But apart from these obvious and well-known factors, the years of war and those which have intervened since the armistice have produced a further decline in the population which only a revolution in the prevailing standards of family life in France can remedy.

The statistics of the French birth-rate and death-rate, apart altogether from the awful roll of honour of the French armies in the war, are so terribly eloquent that no juggling with figures could obscure their meaning. It was not to be hoped that even in the year after the armistice, the normal birth-rate would have been restored. But in the year 1919 alone, which surely deserves to count as one of the most glorious in the history of France, there were only three out of her ninety departments in which the population did not actually decline. In all the other eighty-seven the number of deaths during the year was in excess of the number of births, and in no less than twelve—not even counting in the departments devastated by the war—the births did not equal even half the total of deaths.
The English Dominicans
Authors: Bracey F. R.
Published: July 2007

Great is the difference between old things that are dead, and old things that live. And still greater between old institutions, however glorious, that have passed away for ever, and old institutions that, adapting themselvesto new conditions and environment, have continued in vigorous life unto our own day. Crowns and orbs and sceptres when collected in some dreary museum of antiquities interest but a few, and excite a very languid curiosity ; the feudal and medieval trappings of the British monarchy (ancient indeed, but still a power that counts for something in the world) appeal to the historic imagination of multitudes, and even fill them with enthusiasm. Who cares to read of the quaint but utterly dead constitutions of Venice and Genoa and Poland? But what student does not delight to study the time-honoured customs of the “Mother of Parliaments,” faithfully and scrupulously perpetuated in the legislative assemblies of the Dominions and the Commonwealths?
Canterbury and Constantinople
Authors: V. McN
Published: July 2007

Two recent efforts towards Reunion between the Church of England and the Eastern Orthodox Church are worthy of notice.

The first is entitled Terms of Intercommunion suggested between the Church of England and the Churches in communion with her and the Eastern Orthodox Church (S.P.C.K.). “These terms were drawn up at the request of the Eastern Churches Committee appointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury and are now published at their request.”

The second is entitled The Relations of the Anglican Churches with the Eastern Orthodox, especially in regard to Anglican Orders, by the Rev. J. A. Douglas, B.D. (The Faith Press, pp. 198 ; 12s.).

As an organism is essentially defined in terms, not of what it is, but of what it will become, and as movement is essentially defined in terms, not of its term whence but of its term whereto, we are loath to criticize the present state of a movement which may one day re-unite the scattered flocks of Christendom. We are not sure that the present interchange of terms between semi-official groups on either side is a display of sincere faith. But if it is a display of sincere charity we may hope that divisions and schisms begotten and fostered by a lack of love may be undone when charity—which is the love of truth—has come unto its own. For this reason we would ask the writer of the second work to drink deeply of the spirit of the first. The recurrent anti-papalism of his work is but a dubious compliment to the Orthodox Christians with whom he wishes to intercommunicate.
Dante and St. Peter Celestine
Authors: Makepeace John Foster
Published: July 2007

The purpose of this brief article is to show cause why the traditional identification of Pope Celestine V with “him who made through cowardice the great refusal” (Inf. iii, 60) should be abandoned, and Dante’s memory cleared from an act of impiety.

The identification has no authority. It has, apparently, been repeated by commentators without any investigation, the only reason being Dante’s well-known hostility, on political grounds, to Boniface VIII, and the fact that Celestine’s abdication gave Benedetto Gaetano his opportunity.

Dante himself gives us no clue whatsoever. In its absence we can only fall back upon probability. And probability is entirely against it. There is only one certain allusion to Boniface’s predecessor in the whole of his writings. It occurs in the remarkable story told by Count Guido da Montefeltro in Malebolge (Inf. xxvii, 105). Guido had counselled the taking of Penestrino by deceit on the strength of Boniface’s promise to absolve him from it. “Heaven,” said the Pope, “can I both lock and unlock, as you know ; for twain are the keys, which my predecessor held not dear (non ebbe care).” This is Dante’s only allusion to the hermit pope, and it has not a trace of anger or contempt. It was in an uncritical age, too,—an age which preferred Petrarch to Dante—that Alban Butler wrote the extraordinary footnote to his account of St. Peter Celestine (May 19). Petrarch himself, who in his De Vita Solitaria extols the saint as “a soul very perfect and free,” and rebuts the charge of vilitas animi which he supposes Dante to have made against him, confesses that he had not taken much notice of the Commedia.
The “Summa” of St. Thomas in English
Authors: McNabb Vincent
Published: July 2007

It is now eleven years since the publication of the first volume of the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, literally translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. The contemporary book-market hardly noticed the arrival of the stranger who modestly took his place amidst the “recent books.” Few of the buyers and sellers in the market suspected the toil and hope that had prepared this translation for its place on the already overcrowded mart of books in English. Still fewer, even of those, whose toil was thus realized, could have foreseen the success which welcomed the translation almost from the first.

Daring, so great as to be akin to foolhardiness, had inspired the makers of the translation. Although the audience who might reasonably be expected to read and buy the translation was, if fit, yet few, the translators printed an edition of two thousand. The edition proved, not too great, but too small. In some three years a new edition was needed ; and was delayed only by the stress of the Great War. Since then three other volumes have been exhausted. Upwards of 20,000 copies have been sold. When it is remembered that this great sale is of a classic of the deepest philosophy and theology, our readers will see how the success of the venture has astonished even its most daring promoters.
Hannah More and Joseph Berington
Authors: Bracey F. R.
Published: July 2007

Dr. Johnson, like other great men in whose lives the domesticities played but a small part, was after his peculiar fashion a squire of dames. He looked upon himself, he tells us, as “very polite,” and if his most studied elaboration of homage was reserved for an archbishop, he could be very courtier-like with the ladies, and was at times quite eager to show himself a man of gallantry.

His attitude towards the middle-aged, blue-stocking coterie was an attractive mixture of spiritual direction, intellectual coquetry, and tender friendship. But he most completely melted and softened when in the company of one or two younger ladies with claims to intellectual distinction who were admitted into his circle. Of these youthful favourites, not the least was Hannah More—when with her, the tiger in him was quite subdued, and he became positively kittenish.

Hannah More is hardly even a name to-day. We look vaguely at her prim, demure picture in the National Portrait Gallery, and we somehow connect her with the early pioneers of education, and with crude efforts in the field of philanthropy, and that is about all. “Her works are dust, and her words dim with unconquerable rust.” Yet there was a time when the book-shops were filled with battling crowds intent on procuring the four volumes of her memoirs. And but a few years before this, her shrewdly worded, sensible tracts on moral and religious subjects were circulating at the rate of a couple of million copies yearly ; while, earlier still, her tragedy of “Percy” was played by the immortal Garrick to overflowing houses, amid bursts of applause and general approbation and enthusiasm.
The Position in Palestine
Authors: Ginns Reginald
Published: July 2007

It is reassuring to Christians in Palestine—especially to Englishmen—to see that public opinion in England is being stirred up with regard to the affairs and fate of the Holy Land. It is high time. As you have already had opportunity to learn, we are getting to be in very bad odour ; or, as an English official here at Jerusalem said the other day, we are now thoroughly detested by everybody—French, Arabs, Christians, and Moslems. What love the Jew bears to us is scarcely disinterested.

Up to the present there has been little sign of enthusiasm called forth by the fact that England is mandatory power over a land that stands for so much as does Palestine. In fact the chief impression one receives is that this position is looked on at home rather as a burden than as an honour ; and certainly, if we maintain the position, and go on as we have begun, it promises to prove a very great burden indeed. However, the news we receive of the campaign against the Palestinian policy gives us hope that a change will take place.

At the same time it must be said that recent articles in the home papers on this question have caused great surprise and not a little anger here. There is certainly an attack to be made on Zionist aspirations and plans with regard to Palestine ; but it is not along the lines of these articles. Exaggeration, and what appears in some cases downright untruth, can serve no purpose except to defeat the very end in view. Indeed, one has been tempted to ask what is the end proposed by the writers of certain of these articles against the Jews ; in other words, on which side are they fighting? In the present case they appear to have put good ammunition into the hands of the Zionists.
Our Lord Jesus Christ's Knowledge of his Divinity
Authors: McNabb Vincent
Published: July 2007

By the modern non-catholic mind the problem of Our Lord Jesus Christ’s knowledge of His Divinity is stated in terms of Consciousness. In other words, the mass of non-catholic writers on the nature and work of Jesus Christ ask, and in various ways answer, such a question as this : “Was Jesus Christ conscious of His Divinity?” For example, this statement of the great problem of the Jesus Christ of the Gospels was dominant in the recent conference of Modern Churchmen at Cambridge.

The Dean of Carlisle, whose historical scholarship is not necessarily akin to theology, said “that Jesus did not claim divinity for Himself. He may have called Himself, or more probably allowed Himself to be called, the Messiah or Son of God ; but never in any critically, well-attested sayings was there anything suggesting that His conscious relation to God was other than that of a man towards God” (Daily Telegraph, 13 Aug.). Here the phrase “conscious relation to God” seems to mean that Jesus Christ did not know and did not believe Himself to be God. He knew and believed Himself to be merely a man. In Dean Rashdall’s recent explanations he seems to assert that Jesus was God. We await his explanation of how Jesus could be God and not claim Divinity.
We English
Authors: Jarrett Bede
Published: July 2007

It is rather a tragic moment when a man suddenly discovers that he is disliked by all his neighbours, particularly tragic if he happens to have been under the impression that to his own terrible cost and undoing he has gone out of his way to help them. To be denounced as greedy when you have emptied your pockets to finance those who now cry out against you, or accused of being selfish when at the risk of his life you have sent your boy to save your accusers, or to be called a tyrant by the people who have learnt from your teaching all they know of freedom, is heartrendingly tragic. It is the tragedy of England to-day.

There certainly is no good denying it. We are at the present moment the nation most disliked by foreign politicians and the Press, not least among our late allies. Perhaps our enemies alone have any sympathy with us, any respect, any understanding of our difficulties or of our ideals. But this only bewilders us the more. To judge from what is said of us in France and Belgium and the United States and even in Italy, one might suppose we had spent the last seven years in bullying the world. All our sacrifices are forgotten. The pretty compliments paid us when we were rather better off, and, at some loss to our family-circles, were standing by our neighbours in their peril, are shouted back to us now only in derision.
Browning and the Catholic Church
Authors: Praga Anthony
Published: July 2007

Of Robert Browning, considered purely as poet, in a sense at once technical and virtual, it is not here proposed to dispute.

Although he often rhymed as by brute force, wresting the music though he broke the lyre, there is yet in most of his writing that aptness, vigour and finality of language that are the marks of true poetic literature. In passing, it may be remarked that one other great quality of poetry, Vision, was not often enough the instrument and source of his poems. In place of that power, he had thought, insight and a singular grasp of the complexities of mind. In the main, he rationalized emotions, did not create them. He could conjure them up, by felicitous analysis and portrayal, by sudden turns of the text, but only occasionally do they arise immediately, by the power of an unique concept and expression. For instance the line, “The air broke into a mist with bells,” gives a very perfect mental sensation.

It is then, of Browning in relation to the Catholic Church that I consider a theme sufficiently interesting to warrant an analysis. For it is valuable, illuminative, sometimes to discover the small thoughts of large minds ; to trace out, along the thin lines of little, acetose angers, the effects of misinformation, of blindness, or of bias. To discover a great soul in places curiously “shrivelled like a little pea.”
What is Right with the World
Authors: Walker Luke
Published: July 2007

“Heavy volumes of commentary and exegesis,” we are told of Lord Melbourne in a fascinating book, “he examined with scrupulous diligence; and at any odd moment he might be found turning over the pages of the Bible. To the ladies whom he most liked he would lend some learned work on the Revelation, crammed with marginal notes in his own hand.” The Revelation of Saint John, with introduction and notes by William Lamb, Viscount Melbourne, would not be lacking in interest; it would at least be curious to see what one whom Mr. Strachey describes as a man of perpetual compromises, an autumn rose, a sceptical believer, ambiguous in everything, could make of a book of such intense faith, flaming certitudes, and crashing decisions. The seeming chaos of the Apocalypse has left many a man floundering for his reason. No book in the world has been more commented on than this last of the books of the Bible, and none has had a greater variety of commentators. And we may add the remark—due, I think, to Mr. Chesterton—that, despite all the wild and weird things John saw in his visions, he saw nothing so wild and weird as some of his own commentators. The insanely fantastic interpretations of Abbot Joachim (1202) and of the Franciscan Nicholas of Lyra (1329) furnished the Reformers with arms in their anti-papal campaign. (It is at least in Calvin’s favour, as some one has remarked, that he had the sense to leave the book alone.)
Lourdes and Art
Authors: Rope H. E. G.
Published: July 2007

The sacred buildings of Lourdes are not good. Lovers of architecture will find little in Lourdes except the rugged castle walls and tower, best seen from the roof of the Rosary Church, and a few houses in the old town such as the humble but truly picturesque dwelling of Bernadette, now buried between a raised causeway on the castle hill and a tall commercial building facing the street and belonging to her living kinsfolk. Few, if any, will dispute Huysmans’ contention that the wanton destruction of Bernadette’s parish church, a most valuable example of very early Romanesque, and the substitution of a blatant modern parody, was a disastrous folly. It is difficult to understand the mind of those who needlessly destroy a tenth-century parish church, yet further endeared by the prayers of the humble child whom Our Blessed Lady chose for her handmaiden. How rich is fair France in these most humble servants of God, so specially fitted to give confidence and kindle hope in our feeble, sinful souls ! St. Genevieve, St. Joan of Arc, St. Margaret Mary, the Blessed Curé of Ars, and now within living memory the meek, shy Bernadette Soubirous ! As St. Bernard said of Our Blessed Lady, there is in these her servants “nothing austere, nothing terrible.” The loss of the building where she received her Maker and made unnumbered visits to the Blessed Sacrament is one of the irreparable losses due to perverse human wilfulness.
St. Bernard's Sermons in English
Authors: Delany Bernard
Published: July 2007

“Gladly will I listen to that preacher who seeks not to gain applause for himself, but compunction for me.”—St. Bernard’s Sermons, Vol. II, p. 174.

It is one of the paradoxes of St. Bernard’s life that he, contemplative monk consecrated to silence, has left us more of his reported speech than most of his contemporaries. In his case speech was more golden than silence because he spoke the word of God. He was, if not a man of the world, at least a man of his century who saw clearly that men were drifting from God through ignorance. At a time when preaching was considered the peculiar duty of bishops and not the business of mere monks and priests, Bernard, monk and recluse, became a foremost preacher. It is true the bulk of his sermons that have survived the lapse of time were preached within the walls of his monastery, but we know that he was one of the first monks to bring preaching out of the cloister—witness his campaign in France and the Rhineland when he preached the Second Crusade. He was, indeed, a true precursor of the age that ushered in the Preaching Friar.
On Cary's Dante and Some Others
Authors: King R. W.
Published: July 2007

If the arduous and too often ungrateful task of translation be one of the sincerest tributes which can be paid to a great literary artist, the supreme poet of Catholic Christendom has no cause to complain of his treatment in this country, at any rate during the last century. With the exception of Homer, no poet has been so often and so painstakingly interpreted in English as Dante. Curiously enough, however, all the English versions of the Divina Commedia in its entirety, or of any one of the Canticles, have appeared in comparatively recent times. Until the close of the eighteenth century Dante was unduly neglected by most Englishmen, though Chaucer, Milton, and Gray were notable exceptions. However, his first translator worthy of the name, Henry Francis Cary, was, though virtually a pioneer, a very late one, born (in 1772) more than five centuries later than his “master and author.” Cary was the contemporary of Scott and Wordsworth and the friend of Charles Lamb and Coleridge; he was a quiet, scholarly clergyman, whom Lamb compared to Goldsmith’s Parson Primrose and honoured with his affection to the extent of getting harmlessly tipsy at his table.
The Rejoicing Desert
Authors: Eden Helen Parry
Published: July 2007

Blessed Albertus Magnus was one of those unfortunate saints who get covered up with odd stories like an old castle with ivy. The castle is as solid as the rock on which it is built, but what with the thickness of the ivy and the chattering of the jackdaws that live in it, you hardly get a chance of seeing it or speaking about it sensibly, and it runs the risk of getting forgotten altogether. There was an amazing quantity of such overgrowth and bickering about Blessed Albertus, even in his own lifetime. People even said he was a wizard. As if a Blessed could be a wizard ! They painted a white horse on the side of a tower in the market-place of his native town and said that as a little boy Albert, and Albert alone, could lead that horse about. They made out that he had a magic cup in which he had but to pour wine or water and the sick man who sipped it was cured. They pretended that beside his own cell, in the Convent of Cologne, he had a little room hidden away and full of strange animals and fantastic instruments and uncanny vessels of glass. They said there was a scarlet curtain in one corner of it behind which stood a Talking Figure which could say “Salve ! Salve ! Salve !” and had taken Blessed Albertus thirty years to make. They boasted that the Four Crowned Martyrs, the patron saints of masons, had traced him out the plans of Cologne Cathedral—though all the world knows that it was Gerard of Riel, who travelled in France first and worked in a timber-yard afterwards—to whom the plans of Cologne Cathedral are owing.
The Last of the Artists
Authors: Tegetmeier Denis
Published: July 2007

Timothy Raeburn was the last of the Artists.

He lived in a garret in London, the very last of the garrets. Both he and the garret seemed to exist only by some oversight, in the present almost perfect state of things. A lingering echo of those now distant times when artists had been content to starve to death in such places, just for the mere glory of the thing.

Here he lived entirely alone and unfriended. He was a mystery. Nobody knew how he lived, or what secret force sustained him in his isolation from the world—not even Timothy himself : or by what

mysterious power he alone had managed to survive into the new and happier era. How did he maintain this detachment, where one by one the others failed?

Gradually the little band of Timothy’s fellow-artists had dwindled into nothing. The last survivors of the Post neo-Primitives. who had struggled so valiantly with the banner of reaction, had all capitulated in one way or another. For instance, during the past five years no fewer than one hundred and seventy-four cases of suicide had been announced among them. Only a month ago the Trumpet Blast had wasted three lines of a column on the death of Mr. J. A. Yeeke, the leader of the group and believed to be the last of the free-lances, who had last been seen reading a copy of this same Trumpet Blast, and had immediately done away with himself in a fit of sheer boredom.
Under the Bar
Authors: Bracey F. R.
Published: July 2007

The English Catholic squire of the eighteenth century, when he came to decide on the future of his sons, found his choice a very restricted one. His first-born would, no doubt, succeed to the patrimonial acres; and carry on the old traditions. Another, perhaps, might develop a vocation to the priesthood, and be satisfied with that then very humble, very obscure, and often dangerous calling. But what to do with the rest? and those were the days of large families.

Trade might claim one, and (during the first half of the century, though not so later on) without any loss of prestige, or any injury to family pride. Thus a fourth son of Sir Francis Jerningham, of Cossey, became a well-known goldsmith in Covent Garden; while the younger brother of Alban Butler, although born of an old Northern family of gentle stock, set up in business as a linen-draper in the City. But the cruel penal laws against Catholics altogether excluded them from the public services, the Universities, and the Army. The oaths of supremacy and abjuration put parliamentary life out of the question, and the Test and Corporation Acts closed the municipalities. Finally, the statute of William III forbade Catholics to exercise the professions of barrister, attorney, and notary. Hence the usual career of a younger son was found in foreign lands, and many were the English Catholics who fought for or served the Kings of France and Spain, the Emperor at Vienna, or the princes of the small Italian states.
A Famous Dutch Convert
Authors: Randall A. W. G.
Published: July 2007

With that curious kind of provincialism it sometimes displays in such matters—though less now than formerly—the British newspaper press seems to have passed over in silence the recent reception into the Catholic Church of one of the most distinguished of living Dutch writers, Frederik van Eeden. His submission took place on February 19th last at the Benedictine Abbey of Oosterhout, and was accepted by the Primate of the Netherlands, the Most Reverend H. van Wetering. The event naturally called forth a great deal of comment in the Dutch Press; continental newspapers generally also reported it, and American papers have not been lacking in notes on the conversion and its probable influence. So far, however, there has been in English no appreciation of the writing which preceded the conversion, and the moment seems to be opportune for an attempt to give a general sketch of Frederik van Eeden’s work and philosophy, the more so as, by one work at least, to be described shortly, he is probably the contemporary Dutch writer best known to the English public after the novelist, Louis Couperus, and as his relations with England and English literature are unusually close.

Frederik van Eeden was born at Haarlem in 1860. Like most of the Dutch writers of his generation whose work is likely to survive, he was early identified with that literary movement of the ‘eighties which revolved round the review, De Nienwe Gids, established in 1885 in opposition to the more academic Gids.
Impressions of North-East Ulster
Authors: Delany Bernard
Published: July 2007

There is something impertinent and objectionable in the action of one who sits down to write of Ireland on the strength of a week’s visit. The Irish people are becoming used to trippers from England and elsewhere who come in order to collect impressions and hand out ready-made solutions to problems that have baffled the Irish themselves for ages. These impressions of mine then are set down in a mood of diffidence, with full apologies to the hospitable people who treated me with so much patient kindness and with a confident assurance that they will know how to measure the worth of my words and to winnow the grain of wisdom from a mass of folly.

Making my way from the train to the boat in a somewhat dazed condition after an all-night journey, it came as a surprise to see people turning out their portmanteaux under the irreverent gaze of a Customs official. I did not realize the reason for this until a Customs officer asked me if I had any arms and ammunition. ‘Two arms, but no ammunition,’ was a truthful reply; but 5 a.m. is an unseasonable time for feeble jokes, and I was obliged to display the contents of my bag, and enjoyed the mild wonder of the official while he examined my Dominican habit and a conspicuously large pair of rosary beads. These were considered innocuous, and I was allowed to go on my way—not exactly rejoicing, for this little drama had reminded me that I was going to a disturbed area in Ireland.
A Few Thoughts on Liturgy
Authors: McDougall Alan G.
Published: July 2007

Since the Renaissance, the world has gained many sciences: but it has, in the process, lost not a few arts. All lost arts are to be regretted; but the loss of one of them should be a subject of special sorrow on the part of Catholics. It is the art of compiling Breviary Offices.

All flesh is not the same flesh: star differeth from star in glory. Each of our Breviaries—the Roman, the Monastic, the Dominican, the Ambrosian—contains offices of very varying degrees of beauty. Even the oldest offices, such as most of those in the Proprium de Tempore and the Commune Sanctorum, mark very different stages of the road to perfection; but speaking generally, it is in the Proper of Saints that the differences are most marked, and the modern offices which are the ugliest and least fitting.

The principal elements of the Breviary Office are five : antiphons, responsories, lessons, hymns and collects. The general custom of liturgists has always been to take the antiphons and responsories from Holy Scripture: although many locally-used offices exist in which these elements are rimed compositions of the form familiar to us from a number of the proper offices of saints in the Dominican use. The lessons, of course, are always taken from existing sources, the Bible or the writings of the Fathers. The compiler’s opportunity for free composition, therefore, is normally restricted to the hymns and collects. Equally, bad hymns and collects frequently spoil an office.
A French School in the Eighteenth Century
Authors: Maitland E. J. W.
Published: July 2007

Jean Francois Marmontel remotely recalls our Pepys. It is true that his memoirs, from which the following account of his school days are culled, are not a diary, and were written late in life for his children’s benefit. But they give a vivid picture of his times, from his peasant home life (after all, not so wretched as might be expected from Victorian literature), through school, college, a brief and ‘distasteful’ ecclesiastical career as a tonsured abbè, and the intrigues, amorous and otherwise, of Parisian life. He writes charmingly as a man of letters, but his confessions are no less candid than those of our Samuel. The spirit of the times made any watering down for his children’s eyes quite superfluous. He was the friend of Voltaire and Madame de Pompadour, and his office of Perpetual Secretary to the French Academy brought him into contact with all who were worth knowing. He was never in the first rank of literature, but was ‘successful in all styles.’ He attained to European celebrity chiefly through his Belisaire, a work deprecating the use of carnal weapons in spiritual warfare. The book was fortunate enough to incur the wrath of the Doctors of the Sorbonne, who drew up an ‘indiculus’ of twenty-seven condemned propositions. Voltaire christened the list ‘indiculus ridiculus,’ and, in conjunction with others, succeeded in making the learned Doctors appear exceedingly foolish.

In spite of his moral obliquity, Marmontel stands out as a likeable, and in some ways, admirable character.
William Cobbett
Authors: Richards A. M.
Published: July 2007

This is an age of revivals, and many of the minor writers of the past were never more appreciated than they are to-day. The Restoration dramatists are read in preference to the Elizabethans, and Mr. John Gay walks, where Wordsworth fears to tread. It is not merely a revolt against accepted standards that we are witnessing, it is rather a fresh outbreak of the adventurous spirit and that insatiable curiosity and methodic doubt, which serve to distinguish man from the beasts.

So much is, perhaps, needed as an apology for voicing the desire for a fuller measure of recognition for the works and, above all, for the personality of William Cobbett. Those who know his name are not iare, but those who have read him are probably very few.

Cobbett was a self-made man, by which I do not mean that he was a blackguard, but that, being born the son of the innkeeper of the ‘Jolly Farmer’ at Famham, he became an educated country gentleman a member of Parliament, and a prolific journalist. At the age of sixteen he enlisted as a private on the pay of sixpence a day, and, as he himself tells us, taught himself English grammar in spite of every adverse circumstance.

‘To buy a pen or a sheet of paper I was compelled to forego some portion of food, though in a state of half-starvation ; I had no moment of time that I could call my own; and I had to read and write amidst the talking, laughing, singing, whistling and brawl-'ng of at least half a score of the most thoughtless of men, and that, too, in the hours of their freedom from all control ...
Judas the Betrayer
Authors: Fahy D. F.
Published: July 2007

This is a remarkable play by a young poet who is, undeservedly, little known. As the title indicates, it deals with the character of Judas, but it finds very unusual motives for his betrayal. Judas is not the mean and miserable wretch of tradition, nor does he betray his Master through greed of gold. The play is built on the conviction that he betrayed Him solely with the idea of forcing Him, through the stress of danger, to show that He was the all-powerful God, and of precipitating, in this manner, his triumphant vindication.

The Judas of tradition would naturally not suit that motive. He is abandoned in favour of a Judas who is a dreamer and a thinker, a man far removed from the rest of the disciples.

‘Judas is not of us,’ says Simon the Leper,

‘For he is learned, wise in many tongues,

And dwells apart from men;.’

He is a man who has thought over the problems of existence in a profound manner, and who is deeply concerned with the obvious physical suffering of mankind. In his thinking he is constantly seeking a remedy to this state of affairs. He is an idealist, for he has always in his mind the vision of what man could make of the world, but his state when the action of the play commences is one of despair at man’s impotence and indifference. He has abandoned hope in

God because he sees that no amount of religion has lessened the physical sufferings of the world.
The Exploration of Carthage
Authors: Pope Hugh
Published: July 2007

Carthage should be a name to conjure with.

Yet ‘delenda est Carthago’ has received more than literal fulfilment. Even the Punic wars of which we heard so much as schoolboys have faded from men’s memories, and perhaps few of us would care to have to date them from memory.

Some few weeks ago there appeared in the papers a notice to the effect that a F ranco-American archaeological expedition was being fitted out for the fuller, excavation of the great city of Hannibal and Scipio, of Tertullian, Cyprian and Augustine, ‘celsa Carthago,’ ‘civitas ampla et illustris.’ One newspaper report before us speaks of the ‘ruins of Carthage which have for so long been at the mercy of casual souvenir-hunters, speculative builders and Arab tribesmen.’ It might be gathered from this that little or no systematic excavation of the site had been carried out of late. Archaeologists, of course, know better. They are well aware of the wonderful work done by Père Delattre who for many years has toiled among the ruins, and who, despite scanty funds and little support, has enriched our knowledge as well as the museums of Carthage. It would be idle to summarise his work here. Suffice it to say that he has laid bare various Punic cemeteries, which have afforded us a glimpse of early Phoenician civilization such as would never else have been suspected. He has also done much to extend our knowledge of Christian Carthage. Now, it is of Christian Carthage that we want to learn more. An archaeologist, perhaps inevitably, wants to get back as far as he can; it is a human instinct. But we should like to urge the present expedition to concentrate its efforts on Christian rather than Punic Carthage.
The Bride
Authors: Dayrell Vivienne M.
Published: July 2007

‘I am waiting “for the evening”,’ said the Bride,

‘When the reaping shall be done and the sheaves every one, Stacked apart and harvested from the Acres of the Dead, When im sweet and starred array I go on my way,

On my way to meet my Lover,’ said the Bride.

‘Shall it be that He comes,’ asked the Bride,

‘In His living diadem, with the moon as a gem,

Robed with the sunlight and cloaked with the rain,

With His glorious gold Head, and His Hands torn and red, And His Side wounded wide? ‘said the Bride.

‘With) the treasure of my wheat and white pearls for my feet— And wine-stones and opals for my crown,

How fleet my heart shall beat as I hasten forth to meet

My Lord and my Lover who steps down

From; His Everlasting Throne, and claims me His own,

In His Kingdom to rest and to abide ....

For at moonrise shall I come and mine enemies be dumb That He stands me at His side,’ said the Bride.

‘I have praise of harp and pen but my home is not with men, I have trod where my God was denied—

Red lilies of the martyrs and the prophets of my days,

Moon; of guidance in the night—these my children! gave me praise;

My lands they are wide—where my Love lived and died, Slept within His Sepulchre, veiled in shrouds and wrapped with myrrh,

And then rose to the Height, spanned with splendour, throned in light,

From our sight, and enskied—

O then, come to me soon—Lord and King, Sun and Moon! ‘cried the Bride.

Vivienne, M. Dayrell.
St. Luke's Witness to St. Peter
Authors: McNabb Vincent
Published: July 2007

It is a little disconcerting that Catholic apologetics and Biblical exegesis, on the whole, have not yet grasped the full value of the organic treatment of the Gospels; especially in the matter of the Petrine privilege. Apologists and Biblical exegetes still largely appraise the gospel data by what may almost be called ‘a show of hands.’ We have no wish to discourage this method of valuation; which, indeed, is often demanded by the literary character of the exegesis. But if there is a higher and truer method it will be found that ‘the best is the foe of the good.’

Let us exemplify this by studying some of the lesser ways in which the Gospel of St. Luke witnesses to the primacy of St. Peter. We will pass over the classical passage (Lk. xxii, 25-32) with its clear assertion of St. Peter’s power over the other apostles. To the present writer this passage has always seemed to be of even greater importance than St. Matthew’s witness ‘Thou art Peter, etc.’ (Mt. xvi, 18-19).

In order to appreciate St. Luke’s witness to St. Peter it should be borne in mind and used as an exegetical principle that roughly speaking what St. Mark was to St. Peter—that was St. Luke to St. Paul. His devotion to a master who made many demands on his tact and patience seems never to have flagged. It is seen in many details of his two great works, his Gospel of Jesus Christ and his Acts of the Apostles. Even in such a supreme matter as the institution of the Blessed Sacrament he left the tradition of St. Matthew and St. Mark for the tradition of St. Paul.

Critics are not agreed about the exact date of the publication of his gospel.
‘BY REASON OF THY LAW’
Authors: Thompson Francis
Published: July 2007

Here I make oath—

Although the heart that knows its bitterness Hear loath,

And credit less—

That he who kens to meet Pain’s kisses fierce Which hiss against his tears,

Dread, loss, nor love frustrate,

Nor all iniquity of the froward years Shall his inured wing make idly bate,

Nor of the appointed quarry his staunch sight To lose observance quite;

Seal from half-sad and half-elate Sagacious eyes Ultimate Paradise;

Nor shake his certitude of haughty fate.

Pacing the burning shares of many dooms,

I with stern tread do the clear-witting stars To judgement cite,

If I have borne aright

The proving of their pure-willed ordeal.

From food of all delight

The heavenly Falconer my heart debars,

And tames with fearful glooms The haggard to His call;

Yet sometimes comes a hand, sometimes a voice withal,

And she sits meek now, and expects the light.

In this Avernian sky,

This sultry and incumbent canopy Of dull and doomed regret;

Where on the unseen verges yet, O yet,

At intervals,

Trembles, and falls,

Faint lightning of remembered transient sweet—

Ah, far too sweet

But to be sweet a little, a little sweet, and fleet; Leaving this pallid trace,

This loitering and most fitful light, a space,

Still some sad space,

For Grief to see her own poor face :—

Here where I keep my stand With all o’er-anguished feet,

And no live comfort near on any hand;

Lo, I proclaim the unavoided term,

When this morass of tears, then drained and firm, Shall be a land—

Unshaken I affirm—

Where seven-quired psalterings meet;

And all the gods move with calm hand in hand, And eyes that know not trouble and the worm.

Francis Thompson.
Propter Legem Tuam
Authors: Cl Geo. Amb.
Published: July 2007

Etsi is qui curis angi cor sentit amaris Verba mea invitus planeque incredulus audit, Firmus in haec juro : quisquis saeva oscula fati, Oscula prae lacrimis madido stridentia vultu, Fortiter excipiet, non ilium damna, metusve,

Non spe lapsus amor, nec iniqui temporis ictus, Cogent, ceu volucrem, validas demittere pennas, Nec sua quaesita deflectent lumina praeda:—

Lumina maesta quidem, sed toto acerrima nisu Erecta in metam, caelestia regna, supremam.

I Hi non nutat celsi fiducia fati.

En humus ardenti strata est mihi vomere multo Qua spatior lente reus; at vestigia figens Fortia, me caelo speculantia, sidera testor Sancti judicii me rite subisse rigorem.

En, velut accipitri, gratam mihi denegat escam,

Et diris mentem tenebris domat in sua jussa, Vincla recusantem, summi Venator Olympi:

At manus interdum palpat delapsa per umbram, Seu vox auditur veluti mulcentis, et ipsa Nunc mansueta sedet, venturae praescia lucis. Etsi igitur, desideriis damnatus acerbis,

Hie sub Avernali traducam tempora caelo,

Fervet ubi obscuro sub tegmine languidus aer; Quamvis nil videam, nisi cum procul ultima rura Fulgure forte micant, spissis obducta tenebris;— (Haud secus extremas propter caliginis oras Incertam trepidare videt mens excita lucem, Succurrit quoties olim mihi nota voluptas Ilia, voluptatis veniens de fonte perenni;

Suavis enim fuerat, sed velocissima fugit;

At non quantumvis velox, ita transiit ut me Paulisper tantum, nunquam reditura, juvaret; Pallida cunctantis linquens vestigia lucis,

Quae menti tristi sua tristia redderet ora;)—

At sic lassatis consistens hie ego plantis,

Hie ubi nullum animal vivit, quo cuncta trahantur Vaticinor, rebus quis ineluctabilis ordo.

Scilicet adveniet tempus cum squalida tellus,

Haec invisa palus, lacrimis mortalibus uda, Praebebit siccata solum (certissima pando),

Ilia ubi caelicolum psallent simul agmina septem, Dlque omnes placide, manibus per mutua nexis, Incedent, victis et cura et morte sereni.

+ Geo. Amb. Cl.
Japan September, 1923
Authors: Mary Benvenuta Sister
Published: July 2007

September, 1923

Because we cannot guage the deeps of pain,

They are not therefore bottomless. God’s love Is ground thereof; though, drawing sudden rein, Our coward faith is fain

To fall back reeling from the brink above.

Since not a stricken sparrow falls to earth

But God stands by for comfort, who shall guess His hidden help to man whose soul is worth God’s life, who span the girth Of His immeasurable tenderness?

He laughed, that small boy martyr, long ago,

To feel his wounds a-brim with seething oil,— As once to see his sand pits all a-row Filled by the green tide’s flow.

So was pain mocked upon this very soil.

Who knows what vision cleft the driving flame Or ravenous waves, what angels winged with fire, Luring the tranced soul from shattered frame Even before death came—

Kind sponsor for a baptism of desire?

Sister Mary Benvenuta, O.P.