bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Twixt Serre and Hebuterne
Authors: Devas Dominic
Published: July 2007

It was on a day in early March of this year, with a cloudless blue sky overhead, that I stepped carefully off the muddy track on to the little strip of ‘sown field’ —with the blades of wheat, brilliantly green, just showing above ground—which separated me from Luke Copse Cemetery. This tiny spot, ‘for ever England,’ lies just over the old German lines that for so long lay, an impassable barrier, between Hébuterne and Serre.

I had come up that morning by car from Amiens. We had bowled along the great road to Albert in smooth security. The driver—who had done this kind of work often before—began by being vastly communicative. I must see the old G.H.Q. at Querieu Château; but it had meant little to me during the war years, and meant less than ever to me now. Then there was the bold notice painted in English on a barn wall, Dangerous Corner; that, too, I must note. Reminiscences of 1870 began to brim over his practised lips; a cemetery on the left, a monument on the right. But I was dull to respond; memories were marshalling themselves anew, stirring out of their long slumbers, awakening at contact with the familiar slopes of Picardy : that road there, on the left, it recalls a march —its destination long since forgotten, not even now to be recalled—but, somehow, clear as crystal, is the memory of that moving column, and myself a tiny part of it.
Charles Kendal Bushe
Authors: Gwynn Denis
Published: July 2007

Among all the vivid characters which Ireland produced during Grattan’s Parliament and the following decades, the memory of Charles Kendal Bushe retains a singular freshness and gracious charm. His chief fame was as an orator and a pleader in the law courts. Charles Lever has paid tribute, in his Jack Hinton, to ‘the elegance of manner and classical perfection of wit that made Bushe the Cicero of his nation.’ Outside of Ireland his fame is less widely known; and the printers may well be pardoned for having altered the name Bushe to Burke in the first edition of Jack Hinton. This memoir of him, compiled as a labour of love by his great-grand-daughter, assisted by the old box of his papers bequeathed to her by her cousin and collaborator the late Martin Ross, presents a delightful picture of a very lovable man. Handsomely produced and copiously illustrated with portraits and with many amusing little sketches which recall the inimitable humour of the ‘Irish R.M.,’ the memoir would surely have delighted that elegant and courteous gentleman who was so devoted to his family life all through a career of great public distinction and success.

Students of the history of Catholic Emancipation will be familiar with Bushe as one of the generous-minded Protestants who in a period of shameless corruption and indifference to public justice was always a champion of Catholic claims to equality before the law. Miss Somerville might have added many striking tributes to him from the Catholic side.
An English Diarist and the Church
Authors: Preedy John
Published: July 2007

It has been said of the Dictionary of National Biography that its compilation has permanently put out of employment the writers of what used to be called the Miscellanies. Drudging, uninspired work it was, this labour of the writer of miscellanies, yet one may have a feeling of sympathy for the painstaking and reasonably honest workman who might have earned his bread for a day or two by quarrying in the pages of the Greville Diary.

My edition of Greville is that of Philip Whitwell Wilson, published by Heinemann in 1927. The editor informs us that nothing printable has been suppressed, and that only a rare and irrelevant vulgarity of the stables has been omitted. There is since, I believe, a more complete edition.

Within the limits of the edition before me, there are occasional passages of interest to any Catholic with a relish for the quaint or the unexpected. There are the usual reactions characteristic of the fair-minded Protestant of the period, to Catholic persons and institutions, and to what we may call Catholic aspirations, whether religious or political. We know the kind of thing a Protestant Englishman of the period would think and say about the Popes and the Temporal Power, Daniel O’Connell and the Irish, Mazzim and united Italy. We know all this, and need not trouble to reproduce what Charles Greville thought, said, or wrote on these matters. But it may be at least of passing interest to read of a few of the contacts made with the Catholic Church by a cultured man of affairs in the early Victorian age of the world, the English world.
An Illustrator of the Sixties
Authors: Jackson Edmund
Published: July 2007

It is, we believe, uncontested, though a ‘fact not generally known,’ that English illustration attained a splendour in the sixties never equalled before or since. The fifties gave little promise of such a dazzling display, and there was already a perceptible declension in the seventies. One is sure to overlook some names if one tries to enumerate great illustrators of the sixties, but here is a sample sheaf: Millais, Tenniel, Keene, Leighton, Poynter, Du Maurier, Pettie, Pinwell, F. Sandys, A. B. Houghton, Fred Walker, J. D. Watson, Arthur Hughes. Volumes of Good Words, the Cornhill, and Once a Week lie dusty and forlorn in the ‘Threepenny Box,’ although they contain illustrations that the discerning eye could contemplate long and lovingly.

But in the decade of which we are speaking, it was common opinion in the artist-world of London that a young man had already produced such admirable work and was giving such promise of still better, that he seemed certain to make a great name for himself. So ‘man proposes.’ But Deo aliter visum. Matthew James Lawless was born in 1837. In 1864 he was lying in his grave in St. Mary’s, Kensal Green. He died in Pembridge Crescent, Bayswater.
The Catholic Church in Denmark
Authors: Lund Ingeborg
Published: July 2007

The last few years have been marked by events which bring to light the new growth of the Church since she regained her liberty in countries in which she had suffered, first persecution, then suppression, and finally an obstinate, lingering prejudice, kept alive by a false tradition. Three years ago Catholics in England celebrated the centenary of their emancipation, and the few thousand Catholics of Sweden kept with great rejoicing the eleven hundredth anniversary of St. Ansgar’s coming to their shores with the gospel of peace, which Danes had celebrated three years earlier, at the same time commemorating the seventy-fifth anniversary of the religious freedom granted to them by the Constitutional Law of 1849. With great fitness the day chosen for these festivities was August 1st, the feast of St. Peter’s Chains. Seven centuries after the coming of Ansgar, Denmark was torn away from the unity of the Church, and lost that contact with the world outside which had been like the freshness of the open sea and which she has only begun to regain in other ways during the last forty or fifty years. The doctrines of the Reformers came at a convenient time for the king and his ministers, and it was really by a coup d’etat that the new regime was established in 1539. After a generation or two very little was left of the old Faith; it was carefully and thoroughly stifled in the minds and hearts of the people, though it must not be forgotten that there was still so much love for what it had given them, that it could influence their lives.
Nowhere Land
Authors: Ince Richard
Published: July 2007

Plato has long since taken his place in company with Shakespeare, Rabelais, Cervantes, and other Olympians of literature among authors who are more talked about than read. It may be true that none but a scholar in the exact and classical sense is in a position to appreciate to the full the beauty of Plato’s style and the clarity of his thought, but those of us, and they tend to become an ever-increasing number, who can only read him in translation should not be deterred by that consideration. Plato’s nearness to the present age is remarkable. Though Athens of the fifth century B.C. bears little enough resemblance to London of the early twentieth century, there is this broad comparison to be drawn between, them: each looks to the future with hope out of a time of distress and the uncertainty that accompanies change; each feels itself to be politically bankrupt and puts little confidence in its accredited leaders; each feels that the trouble arises, not so much from the institutions in vogue as from the weakness, folly and incompetence inherent in human nature. It is for these reasons that Plato has much of value to say not merely to the poet and the philosopher in all ages, but also to the men and women immersed in practical affairs.

To-day we are apt to feel impatient of doctrinaire dreamers who draw up systems of government that look well on paper. The. very word ‘utopian’ has come to bear a meaning that is suspect, if not downright sinister.
Sens: The Home of a Treasure
Authors: Robinson Gertrude
Published: July 2007

There are a few perfect settings still to be found in this world. They are the ‘apples of gold in pictures of silver’ of the Wise Man.

Most golden things have quite another setting— like the jewel of gold in a pig’s snout to which the same Wise Man likens the beauty of a foolish woman.

A perfect picture in a perfect shrine, or a beautiful Cathedral in a beautiful City would find a fitting symbol in the first. For the second . . . . ! Quite lately when I saw for the first time one of the most famous historic French Cathedrals of the Middle Ages—a thing of rare beauty—it was this which came unsought to my mind.

The Cathedral, from its jewelled windows to its priceless Treasure, is a gem, but its setting is a mean and sordid town—so mean that it does not seem to know how great a treasure it possesses in its Cathedral. Its eyes have been blinded by a petty and venomous anti-clericalism. It has met with its reward. The historic and aesthetic significance which once made it great in Europe has disappeared, and its only value now in the eyes of the world (with the exception of a few savants and beauty-lovers who are not of this world) is as a place of passage where motors halt for the night and the owners sleep, eating and drinking abundantly, if not choicely.
Japan Puts Her Case to the League
Authors: Anstice E.H.
Published: July 2007

With the recognition of Mianchukuo as an independent state by Japan, matters in the Far East have taken a definite turn. The rest of the world have now to decide what stand they are going to take. China is indefatigable in protest and complaint, but ‘mark now,’ said Prince Henry to Falstaff, ‘and see how a plain tale shall put you down.’ It is in this spirit that the Japanese assessor to the League of Nations Commission has gone about his task. By the process of dispassionately piling known fact on known fact he has presented the world with a case which is unanswerable. China is revealed in all her incompetence, and the justice of Japan’s actions and claims made clear.

In the past ten years there have been two hundred and forty-five outrages committed on foreigners. Thirty-nine persons have been murdered, over one hundred and fifty abducted, of whom the fate is still uncertain. For some the bandit-communists, whom the so-called Government is unable to put down, are responsible. A large proportion, however, can be directly attributed to the anti-foreign spirit which has been deliberately fostered by the authorities ever since the Kuomintang obtained control. Hatred of the foreigner is one of the lessons regularly taught in the schools. It is done mainly through text-books teaching the ‘Three Principles’ of Dr. Sun Yat Sen—a compulsory subject in all schools under the jurisdiction of the Chinese Government.
The Unsentimental Journey
Authors: Mathew David
Published: July 2007

In an age of shifting values, even those who reject most deliberately all Christian standards are unable to free themselves from the complex and pervasive influence of a recent profoundly Christocentric past. The Jewish race alone escapes such influence. With a combination of a practical grasp of detail and a high imaginative vision it is given to the representatives of the Semitic culture to view that Christendom in which they never merged. To those so vitally concerned it is of interest to observe the Christian structure as seen through the alien eyes beneath the caftan, patient and suffering. Among those groups familiar with the Western European peoples, two standpoints remain defined and clear, the Catholic and pre-Christian. How deep is the contrast between these long inherited traditions and the wavering affirmations made in the gaunt mental shadows of that great, wrecked, Lutheran Theology which still cumbers the mind and the prepossessions? Freed from such burden the pre-Christian tradition now reveals a curiously integral quality : Lion Feuchtwanger in this points the example. He can describe, in some ways more clearly than a less remote writer, the external apparatus of the Christian life and the flavour, for no other word can so well express it, of certain individual Christian lives. Still he has the defects of his great qualities, and in dealing with the Goyim he is limited, as far as successful portraiture is concerned, to those in whom all trace of the Christian spirit has vanished. He has, in fact, an admirable gallery of portraits of those who only wear the Christian mask.
The Kingdom of Heaven is Like Unto . . . . . ?
Authors: Clayton Joseph
Published: July 2007

A desire to identify the Kingdom of God with the dominion of good taste, to give the authority of divine inspiration to an honest prejudice, can plainly be recognised. Whether or no the strong distaste for the products of vineyard, brewery and distillery is the cause or effect of the prejudice against fermented liquor, it is clear that the prejudice is a compelling force in the ‘free churches’ to-day. Hardly will a minister be called to the pulpit unless he be a trusted professor of total abstinence. The layman who takes his ‘modest quencher’ cannot hope to become a deacon or local preacher when the Kingdom of Heaven is likened to a society of total abstainers in full and constant session. Much liberty of departure from the old paths of creed and catechism is allowed to nonconformist ministers, always provided they hold stiffly and expound eloquently this prejudice against intoxicating drink. True religion, in fact, in the minds of many is merged with the personal distastes of the believer, so that ‘prohibition’ is proclaimed the hope of this world and the glory of the Kingdom. A prejudice unchecked, smiled upon rather than discouraged, is contagious. There is no telling in what fanaticism it may end.

We recognise also that it crops up periodically in the history of Christianity, this conviction that an enlightened few alone possess the truth of the Kingdom. The esoteric doctrine is held by the few, and they are God’s elect.
Lenin
Authors: Prince J. F. T.
Published: July 2007

Set up to commemorate the social principles of Leo XIII, there stands in Rome a statue of a modern worker. Its significance is, I take it, unequivocal. Quite definitely it is not what a number of people would like it to be—an expression in stone of those picturesque stories with which the affluent are wont to edify their children about the accommodating fortitude and longanimity of the Destitute. Nor is it merely a comfortable eulogy of labour, an index to the spiritual desirability of mean circumstance (a gift dispensed with suspicious altruism by the prosperous). There is danger to the soul in destitution as well as in opulence. There is a fair distinction between poverty and pauperism. (Blessed are the poor, but in servility there is no virtue.) There is no libel on the Church so gross, yet apparently so ably substantiated from within, as that she encourages an attitude of laissez-faire towards the exploited, or presents economic misery solely to theotechnic treatment and compensation hereafter. A certain type of Christian is inspired by a convenient fatalism in respect of the disinheritance of half the world. Him alone have we to thank for the grossest falsehood of all—that religion is the opium of the masses.

The assertion of a heroic principle is intransigent and eternal. That is why, in speaking of Lenin, I speak first of the .Worker’s statue by the Church of St. John Lateran. Outside Russia there was none in November, 1917, that believed that the reign of Lenin would exceed, in duration, that of Kerensky.
Blessed Albert the Great
Authors: Reeves John Baptist
Published: July 2007

Albert the Great is chiefly entitled to fame as having been for seven years the teacher of St. Thomas Aquinas, and to the end of his life the devoted admirer of his pupil and staunch defender of his doctrine.

To say this is not to belittle Albert personally; it is to place him very high indeed in the hierarchy of great men.

The excellences by which St. Thomas was most distinguished were not mere reproductions of the greatness that was his master’s; they were either peculiar to St. Thomas himself, or possibly, in some points at least, derived from other masters who influenced St. Thomas before he first came under Albert’s notice. Albert’s principal title to greatness is the detachment with which he enabled Thomas to develop seeds of greatness independent of anything he had to give, and to advance to heights that he himself could never reach.
Isabella of Spain
Authors: Parker Alexander
Published: July 2007

The history of the world has its great people and its great periods which one can isolate for the purpose of more detailed study as representing turning-points in the march of civilization, epochs which seem to sum up all the movements and cultural forces of the preceding centuries, bringing them to a flowering bloom in a few brief years, and seemingly bequeathing a glorious inheritance to the fortunate age to follow. Such a period was the early European Renaissance. Such, especially, was the early Renaissance in Spain.

Calderón, in one of his autos, says that the study of history only serves to make men learn their lesson and take warning. He only saw in history the ruin of great enterprises, powerful and prosperous nations brought low by the folly of their rulers, and the human race given over to pleasures and lusts, heedless of the future. Writing as he did in the Spain of the seventeenth century, he voiced the disillusion and despair of the more enlightened and high-minded of his countrymen who saw no hope for humanity in a world eaten through and through with rottenness. Had he lived two hundred years earlier, in 1460, his feelings would have been identical. Passing from the court of Philip IV to that of Henry IV, he would have noticed little difference. He would have seen vice and corruption reigning in the court of Castile, anarchy in the country, the peasants bled white by grasping nobles who only served their country when they engaged in mutual extermination. The Middle Ages in Spain, as indeed in most countries, had sunk as low as this, to an agonizing death in anarchy and civil war.
Park
Authors: Gray John
Published: July 2007

He was in Westminster Cathedral and it was also a railway station of intolerable vastness and silence. A church has chairs, vaulting; these provided abominations on the floor and overhead. A station has taxicabs, advertisements, kiosks, angles. What a wilderness of these features. There was a covered lorry with a stupid bill pasted on its hood : ‘G. S. R. Man is omnivorous.’ The lorry became multiplied to infinity in dreary perspective, the alignment perfect like an army-train or a boy’s drawing. Park went down the line in his vestments looking for the sacristy and a third-class smoking compartment. He had lost his server and his railway porter. I shall recognize him, for he is black. An unending train went through, pouring out passengers without stopping; all were negroes. Park halted and addressed himself prophetically :

Go through the swinging glass doors; no one will notice you, as you are black. With a wrench and a struggle he came to himself.
The Orthodox of Jerusalem
Authors: Attwater Donald
Published: July 2007

To those of us who reside in countries where Catholics and dissident Eastern Orthodox live, as regards one another, in practically ‘water-tight compartments,’ it would not appear that the death of an Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem (Mgr. Damianos Kassiotis, died August 14th, 1931) is of much interest to those in communion with the Holy See. Nevertheless, it must be realized—as it is realized in the Levant—that such an event has not merely interest for local Christians of all the ancient churches, but might conceivably result in events which would have significance for the Church at large. For the death of a patriarch involves the election of a successor; such an election involves ecclesiastical and even secular politics; and in the Near East politics of all sorts are fruitful of religious changes. Ever since, and even before, the break-up of Catholicism, religion in Palestine and Syria has gone hand in hand with politics ; and many of the numerous small mass-reunions of Eastern Christians to the Catholic Church that have taken place during the past three or four hundred years were directly traceable to ecclesiastical politics, and sometimes to grievances of a secular nature. Precisely for that reason some of them have not subsisted, and the reunion has collapsed in renewed schism, bringing upon Eastern Catholics an undeserved stigma of ‘tendency to disunion’; others have remained, and what began as a political move has developed into a soundly religious state of affairs.
Saint Albert the Great
Authors: Reeves John Baptist
Published: July 2007

The works attributed to Albert the Great make a very long and imposing list. Some of his authentic writings have never yet been; printed. His printed works fill twenty-one folio volumes in the 1651 Lyons edition; thirty-eight quarto volumes in the Paris edition of 1890. They include amongst the theological works, scriptural commentaries, sermons, a commentary on the Sentences and on the semi-mystical works of the Pseudo-Dionysius. But his scientific and philosophical writings represent his greatest achievement. When he began his career as a teacher, the works of Aristotle were still suspect in the ecclesiastical world, for they were as yet only known through the translations and commentaries of Arabs who had interpolated and coloured them with neoplatonism, Mahommedanism, and other oriental admixtures. Moreover, the parts best known (excepting the Organon with which, thanks to Boethius, the West had always been in some degree familiar) were the Physics, which were read in the first instance by laymen interested in Arabian medicine, alchemy, and astronomy.
Listening-Books
Authors: Valentine Ferdinand
Published: July 2007

May I introduce this article by giving two personal reminiscences? I once asked the Headmaster of a well-known choir school whether he had ever noticed that boys gifted with a keen musical perception remembered what they heard more easily than what they read. It was an unusual question, but the answer was immediate and unequivocal. Such, he agreed, was his experience. He had often wondered why many of his boys remembered so little of what they read; if, for example, he asked a class to sit down and read silently an Act of Hamlet and then afterwards examined them on their knowledge of it, he invariably found that the majority remembered far less than if he himself had read the Act aloud to them.

On another occasion, when I happened to live for several months with a musician of rare talents, I was always amused to find on entering his room a heap of garments in the middle of the floor. My amusement bewildered him; quite seriously he could not understand why such raiment should not occupy the centre of the room, provided, of course, the floor was clean. In this matter he was unteachable. I labelled him in my own mind the most untidy fellow I had ever met, until one evening, whilst he was playing, the simple truth dawned upon me. My friend was not untidy at all—he was non-tidy in the usual sense of the word ‘tidy.’ Tidiness for him was a musical, auricular, euphonic thing; it was harmony; and discord, dissonance, was untidiness.
The Anglo-Orthodox Rapprochement and the Catholic Church
Authors: Bennigsen G.
Published: July 2007

The Convocations of Canterbury and York having confirmed the terms of the agreement concluded at Bonn on July 2nd, 1931, by the representatives of the Church of England and of the ‘Old Catholics,’ intercommunion has been established between the State Church of this country and a religious body which, however unimportant and numerically insignificant, possesses, nevertheless, a valid Hierarchy and true Sacraments. The terms of this agreement, ratified also by the ‘Old Catholic’ Bishops on September 7th, 1931, are expressed in three paragraphs :

(1). Each communion recognises the catholicity and independence of the other, and maintains its own.

(2). Each communion agrees to admit members of the other communion to participate in the Sacraments.

(3). Intercommunion does not require from either communion the acceptance of all doctrinal opinion, devotion or liturgical practices characteristic of the other, but implies that each believes the other to hold all the essentials of the Christian faith.
Park III
Authors: Gray John
Published: July 2007

Once his emotions under control, Park unfolded the map. He looked for the place where he supposed himself to be; and at the point found a red dot. It was Svillig’s doing; for here and there were translations into Latin, in his handwriting, of the unintelligle words engraved. The country in which the dot appeared was called Regio principis Ednse. Kottatil, on both sides of the Severn estuary, was marked: urbs nostra. London was in the Hertfordshire direction and called Ito. The whole of Devon and Cornwall was forest; and, so far as the map showed—for a word crossed it firmly in heavy characters which Svillig had translated conclusa—quite uninhabited. The whole, saving these explanations, was one bewilderment of straight lines, ragged forms and unknown signs.

Park stared at it all sadly : but brightened when he saw in the minute script, somewhere about Lincolnshire, the words Villa gracilis indicating a small property.

As he folded the map Cuan came in and he asked him the time. The man pointed to a horizontal scale on which an indicator was moving clock-wise to the right. The bar had six great divisions, which equalled together a third of the solar day. When the indicator reached its course, it ran back with a distinctive murmur, not to zero, but to the first of the strokes representing the smallest sub-division (for it took just the time of one ‘second’ to run). The result was that, when the indicator stood midway on the scale, the time was (in our horology) noon, eight in the evening, or four in the morning. At the moment it wanted about a division to noon.
Architecture and Industrialism
Authors: Gill Eric
Published: July 2007

By architecture we mean building considered as a fine art—that is to say, an art which subserves mental and not merely physical necessities. Art is primarily simply skill—thus we rightly speak of the art of the dentist and the art of the pickpocket, and there is great art in washing up. Upon this lowly base is built up the grand erection of human accomplishment. To do or make something well is the root of the business.

But as it commonly happens that human works are used by human beings as well as done by human beings, it follows that the idea of suitability as well as that of utility occupies the mind of the workman. Hence even in the simplest articles of use the two ideas combine, coalesce or conflict, and the chair-maker who sets out to make simply a thing which will fit the sitting human body finds himself involved in all the complexity of the problems aroused by the question, what human body, or whose human body—am I making a child’s chair or an office stool, a chair for the dining room or one for the bishop in his cathedral?

Thus has grown up the distinction between art and fine art. By art is meant simply the skill to do what needs doing or the skill to make what serves a physical use simply. By fine art is meant skill to do or to make that which is simply delightful to the mind. At the one extreme are such things as dentistry and pure engineering (though even dentists play about with gold stoppings for no real utilitarian reason), such things as working a London tube lift or mixing concrete for foundations.
The Laird of Abbotsford
Authors: Jarrett Bede
Published: July 2007

This is certainly the very type of biography Scott would most have desired. For him history was the clash of personalities, was a sustained human drama; he could only think of it as dynamic, moving, alive. While he was moved by ancient things, he had wit enough to know that ancient things were but relics of a living age; yet because of the living age they were descended from, he was content with relics. His imagination supplied all the life that had departed from them. Yet, curiously, his imagination seems to have needed a centre on which to focus. Clairvoyant as he was, he needed some personal belonging of the dead to be put in front of him before he could see him as once he was in his habit as a man. Hence he developed an overwhelming passion for collecting the flotsam of heroic ages; to Lady Scott it was a tiresome interference with the orderliness of house-keeping, to Sir Walter it was the central need for his creative power to set itself working. Out of it his memory, working under the spell of the contact, was roused to see and describe the man and his age. The long sword of Montrose was the most sacred object of the shrine of Abbotsford; it not only pleased Sir Walter to see it, but it actually moved him to understand Montrose. There was a curious earthliness about Sir Walter; he might weave romances in the air, but he wove them out of the solid materials of the earth.
Park
Authors: Gray John
Published: July 2007

The Service was in no way in excess of the meal: bird broth; candied and pickled fruit and vegetables; and the expected goslings, tasting of lemon; There was great variety of biscuits; the wines were sweet and not strong; and there were delicate morsels of cheese looking like wooden matches, taken at any time during the meal. At the end there were fine peaches; and sweets which no one took.

When, as has been said in certain times and places, the cloth was withdrawn, for there was never any sign of any cloth, Koti said :

There are several reasons why we cannot address questions to the most honoured present, and doubtless his wisdom has divined what they are. But nothing prevents his asking questions of us. Talk at table is sacred talk.

So Park began:

There is the surface population of this island. Is it denser in other parts than in this part?

Its density varies exactly with the productivity of the soil.

The soil feeds the whole population?

Yes, and it is the greatest thing done in la.

The moors and hills are uninhabited, said another speaker; except by wild creatures.

What?

Different kinds with antlers, including the great kinds.

Wild swine and bears.

Hunting forests?

Yes.

Who use them?

The nobles.

How are they hunted?

Mostly with dogs.

What’s the name of that long-legged feline?

Svillig looked pleased and said : N’ti. Have you seen it?

Yes, in captivity.

In captivity?

Yes, and often in pictures. I saw it in a picture the first day I was here, on the eve of the Assumption. Did you though?
The Japanese Farmer: The Man Behind The Manchurian Expedition
Authors: Anstice E. H.
Published: July 2007

A FEATURE of the Japanese Labour Movement as compared with similar movements in other countries is the prominent part played in it by the agriculturist. It is as strong in the country as in the town. Roughly 10 per cent, of the adult male agricultural population is organized into peasants’ or tenants’ unions, a state of affairs which compares very favourably with the position in the industrial world, where the percentage of trade union membership is, according to the latest returns, only 7.5.

The explanation for this is to be found in the peculiar status of the Japanese peasant and the conditions under which he gains his living. It must first be pointed out that the landless labourer as he is known in England does not exist. The Japanese farmer is either an owner, or a tenant, or part owner part tenant, the figures being respectively 31 per cent., 28 per cent., and 41 per cent. This does not, however, mean that he is any better off than the farm labourer. The total arable area is fifteen million acres, which are split up among five and a half million families (33,000,000 people). The average family holding is a bare 2 1/2 acres; 35 per cent, farm under 1 1/4 acres, 70 per cent, under 3, only 10 per cent, over 5, and in all Japan there are less than five thousand proprietors with over 125 acres.

It is obvious that with such small holdings as these figures indicate it is as much as the Japanese peasant can do to extract a living from the soil.
The Writings of Albert the Great
Authors: Callus Daniel M.
Published: July 2007

His Holiness Pope Pius XI, proclaiming Albertus Magnus a Saint and a Doctor of the Church, said of him, that he knew everything that was to be known. And indeed his outstanding characteristic was the universality of his learning. In his writings he covered the whole field of knowledge, and he was as great in philosophy and theology as in meteorology, astronomy, geography, mineralogy, chemistry, physics, zoology, botany, physiology, and in the other natural sciences. It is, therefore, not surprising that on account of the eminence and universality of his learning he was known among his contemporaries, as he has been known ever since, as the Doctor Universalis, and as Magnus, ‘ the Great.’

His complete works were printed for the first time in 1651 at Lyons, in twenty-one volumes in folio, and again at Paris in 1890-98, in thirty-eight volumes in quarto. Besides these, many authentic writings are still in manuscript in the libraries and archives of various cities of Europe. Scholars consider that, if published, they would fill at least ten folio volumes.

But it is impossible to appreciate the imposing personality of the Doctor Universalis without having a thorough knowledge of his writings, and that is an exceedingly difficult task without a sure guidance, as all those who are acquainted with mediaeval studies well know. At the moment this difficulty is the greater owing to the lack of a critical edition of his works, and to the fact that some of those published are either dubious or clearly spurious.
Under the Sky
Authors: Megroz R. L.
Published: July 2007

Travel in the younger sort is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience,’ announced the disconcerting Bacon, but I think there is more to be said for travel than that. ‘The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases,’ declares Hazlitt in the most charming of his essays. For him travel was a journeying into solitude—none of your collective hiking for him.’ For once let me have a truce with impertinence,’ he says. ‘Give me the dear blue sky over my head and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before.’ And in the same essay : ‘I cannot talk and think, or indulge in melancholy musing by fits and starts. “Let me have a companion of my way,” says Sterne, “were it but to remark how the shadows lengthen as the sun declines.” It is beautifully said; but, in my opinion, this continual comparing of notes interferes with the involuntary impression of things upon the mind, and hurts the sentiment .... I am for the synthetical method on a journey in preference to the analytical.’ There is no need to deny the sympathy that Sterne’s beautiful sentence invokes, even though in principle Hazlitt may command our assent. At the heart of the essayist’s rather forcibly expressed preference is a pleasure in the continuous addition of impressions in tranquillity; his notion of a journey is a solitary pilgrimage to the very bosom of a peaceful countryside; he is the dreaming watcher of sunset skies who resents unnecessary talk.
Monastic Night's Entertainment
Authors: Swinstead A. E. H.
Published: July 2007

Few people now read Vathek, and Redding’s Memoirs of William Beckford are probably read even less often. Indeed the book is not easy reading. The Encyclopaedia Britannica calls it ‘prolix,’ and someone recently said that it was the worst biography he knew. With the advent of other biographies of Beckford it may cease to be even useful. Yet the patient reader is not wholly unrewarded. There are passages in it that he would be sorry to have missed, even though the feelings they arouse are not precisely those intended by the author. Thus in a long and reverential account of Beckford’s travels we mark with pleasure that he left Bologna, ‘renowned for sausages and lap-dogs,’ ‘as an earthquake had just before put the land and people much out of humour.’

But it is when the Church is concerned, and especially monasticism, that Redding is most interesting. Catholic worship always fascinated Beckford, and its lasting effect on his mind will appear from later extracts. He was at the Grande Chartreuse when he was nineteen. He stayed there three days, read the works of St. Bruno, and wrote with some enthusiasm of the place. Indeed he left some exceedingly poor lines in the album of the monastery, ‘the larger portion being those of the tutor, Dr. Lettice, the pupil being, perhaps, not at the moment duly inspired.’ These favourable impressions never wholly faded, but other experiences were not so happy. In 1780 he made another tour, and in the Low Countries ‘he was active, and visited all the public buildings, and lions in the churches, such as the statuary and pictures.
The Servile State Reconsidered
Authors: Humphries Silvester
Published: July 2007

A radical contradiction vitiates the political theory of Mr. Belloc. It can be stated thus: the Roman civilisation and the medieval are continuous because in the dark ages the barbarians who dominated in society thought they were Romans and accepted the Roman Empire, although with manifest decadence; the British working classes are in imminent peril of becoming a servile class by the imposition of some elements of slavery, although they will not be called or considered slaves, by themselves or others.

The former thesis (that of Europe and the Faith) assumes that society depends on the formalities of the mind: what it intends to accept. The latter thesis (that of the Servile State) assumes that society depends on what the mind actually accepts, regardless of formalities or aspects.
The Charades of Metaphysics
Authors: Anstruther Godfrey
Published: July 2007

‘He was a great man,’ says Isaac Disraeli of St. Thomas Aquinas, ‘busied all his life with making the Charades of Metaphysics.’

The Charades of Metaphysics, or metaphysical charades, as we generally call them, must not be confused with the Physical Charades, invented by Francis Bacon, nor with the Dumb Charades which are our modern contribution to knowledge. They have a distinct character; they are really quite a different game. In these days when so much attention is paid to Morris Dances and medieval folk-lore, it may be a service to rescue from oblivion the varied accounts of this game which are to be found in our literature. I have drawn my quotations, not from the philosophers, but from the great literary writers of the past, because the best judges of any game are the onlookers who take no part in it. And if I seem to have a weakness for Thomases, it is because I feel that on those who received his name in Baptism, the mantle of Thomas Aquinas must surely have fallen.

Physical Charades was essentially an open-air game. Gallileo spent his spare time dropping bodies from the top of the leaning tower at Pisa: Newton played in his orchard near Grantham. Metaphysical Charades, on the contrary, was emphatically an indoor game, and for this I have the authority of no less a supporter than Thomas De Quincey.
A Case History of Family Religion
Authors: H.K.G.
Published: July 2007

The history of family religious life, as a microcosm of the national religious life, seems to me to offer a virgin field for research and documentation. I offer these pages as a study of one family, my own.

At the outset I wish to admit a prejudice in favour of continuity, homogeneity and unity in family religious life. It is only through these safeguards—the fruit, by the bye, of singleness of Faith—that we enjoy the blessings of mutual understanding, concord in social relationships and the benefit of a traditional ethical and spiritual culture. Under the group system of religion the nation is committed to a system that makes for misunderstanding and estrangement between group and group, faction in family life, and prejudice and suspicion between individuals. True it is, as says a Kempis: ‘He who seeks to enjoy things alone, forfeits the advantages that are in common.’
The Church and the Modern Theatre
Authors: Mackenzie Margaret
Published: July 2007

The days have passed when, on the Continent anyhow, to be on the stage was to be outside the Church. This was brought home by the Master-General of the Dominican Order, at a meeting of the English Catholic Stage Guild last summer, when he, who had been its Director, spoke of the activities and spiritual life of the Stage Guild of France.

The theatre is the prodigal daughter of the Church; she was born of the Church and her first playgrounds were in the churches. Now in a ‘far land’ she is, at least in this country, in spiritual destitution and has hardly the strength to arise and return to her home, but the Church, her mother, has set out on the road to meet her.

In England, it is true, the theatre did not go of her own accord from the Church, she was carried away from it in the arms of public life. We may find in the pages of Shakespeare many traces of the Church’s influence and much hankering for the home that the theatre had been torn from; but since Shakespeare the Drama in England has been purely secular, but not as in countries where it was in active rebellion, and not until our own day, irreligious. The Puritan element in the country looked at the theatre askance and not until late Victorian days was it considered a respectable institution.
A Book That Shook an Empire
Authors: Carter Barbara Barclay
Published: July 2007

When a hundred years ago Sivio Pellico published his Le Mie Prigioni, the description of his ten years’ imprisonment in an Austrian fortress, it was with no political purpose. Partly, one may guess, as the result of those terrible years, and partly because, before the intensity of his religious experience during those same years, all else paled and became insignificant, on his release he turned away from politics, and all his writings henceforth would be on religious and moral themes. And if he published the story of his sufferings, it was at the instance of his parish priest, with the sole aim, as he says,

of helping to comfort the unhappy by showing the evils I suffered and the consolations that attended on the worst misfortunes; to show that through myi long torment I did not find humanity so wicked, so unworthy of indulgence, so poor in noble souls as it is often made out to be; to invite noble hearts to love much, to hate no one .... and to repeat a truth well-known but often forgotten: that Religion and Philosophy create strong wills and calm judgments, and that without these united conditions there can be no justice nor dignity nor sure principle.’

When an eminent Protestant told him that he had been converted to Catholicism by an eloquent passage in praise of confession, Silvio Pellico felt he had not written it in vain. That his book should seize the imaginations of Europe and do more than any other to shake the Austrian domination in Italy, was neither in his expectations nor intentions.
The Apologia of Gerdibert of Mayence
Authors: Marshall T. L.
Published: July 2007

The Ordo Vagorum was already cutting its teeth when Gerdibert was born. But the infant was precocious and caught up with the vagabonds in the second lap; by his majority he was well apace with them. Not officially one of their number, their spirit was his, their doctrine his creed. He was not one of them because circumstances against which his character—more ready to smile winsomely on adversity than to attack it—could not compete, thrust him early into a very different environment. Thanks to the pious impatience of a romantic and rather erratic mother he was clapped into a cloister, sicut denarium furatum in bursam as he said, and hidden with a like despatch from the curious gaze of the world. Gerdibert was certainly in those early years too soft and submitting to be entirely lovable. Yet lovable he was even then, with his mane of fair hair that was always unruly, his brilliant eyes, his chiselled nose, his full yet delicate lips which tempted many a maid and matron, his ready amenity. Perhaps at first he found the cloistral solitude soothing, for it freed him from the matrons with marriageable daughters, a pest by no means confined to our later ages, who pursued him, as he said, sicut leonissae quaerentes quern devorent. His friend Philibert had capped the quotation: ‘quibus resiste fortis in coelibatu,’ adding the Tu autern Domine miserere mihi, for he himself was wed some fourteen years and had spent thirteen and three-quarters regretting it.
Maha-Pralaya and Last Judgment
Authors: Gilby Thomas , Coomaraswamy Ananda K. , Tollast Robert
Published: July 2007

Vedic tradition envisages the voyage of the individual after death as a passing on from one plane of being to another; and though there is the possibility of perpetuity on any given plane until the End of Time, when all Determinations are resolved, there is no conception of the possibility of a return to any past state. The later doctrine of reincarnation, in which the possibility of a return to a previous condition is conceived, seems to reflect an edifying tendency of the religious and psychological extensions, perhaps incorporating popular, non-Vedic elements.

The voyage has its end on the Farther Shore of the Sea of Life. When land is made there, the contingent Self knows itself as the Supreme Self, absolute space in the heart is known as the absolute space body of Being and Non-Being, and the Sea of Life is counter-seen by the Self as the multiplicity of its own identity. Voyaging, we are given intimations of that Paradise in Union consummating Thought, in Ecstasy consummating Will, and in the Consent of Art; knowledge, love, and work becoming Pure Act. There is in fact an ever present possibility of Immediate Enfranchisement by return to the Centre of our Being, to the Eternal Now, one and the same wherever and whenever we may be, in Heaven or on Earth. But as we are speaking in terms of Time, the possibility of severing in this way at one stroke all the knots of the heart remains only virtual. What we foresee is an Enfranchisement reached by a process of ripening and preparation; our ado is not with the Comprehensor, but the Wayfarer.
Cobwebbed Schoolmen
Authors: Anstruther Godfrey
Published: July 2007

Mr. Dudley Wright’s note on Charles Lamb and St. Thomas (Blackfriars, February, 1933) opens up an attractive question which has never been treated with any fullness—namely, how many of our eighteenth and early nineteenth century writers were familiar with the works of the Angelic Doctor.

In 1814 Hallam wrote as follows:

‘Perhaps I may have imagined the scholastics to be more forgotten than they really are. Within a short time I have met with four living English writers who have read parts of Thomas Aquinas: Mr. Turner, Mr. Berington, Mr. Coleridge, and the Edinburgh Reviewer (Macaulay). Still, I cannot bring myself to think that there are four more in this country who can say the same,’