bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Bernard Shaw on Ruskin
Authors: Eden Helen Parry
Published: July 2007

It was a stock taunt at Ruskin twenty years ago, when he began to become unfashionable, that he was 1 a schoolmaster.’ In the sense that he was mainly concerned with the imposition of a divinely-inspired discipline on a perverse and unruly generation, this is undoubtedly true. The same may be said—at least in his later manifestations—of Mr. Shaw; with the devastating difference that his curriculum is avowedly of his own devising, and does not lay claim to any sanction whatever outside the author’s invariably upright but occasionally insensitive conscience. Bearing in mind these points of contact and cleavage, it is extraordinarily interesting to read in the speech delivered by Mr. Shaw at the Ruskin Centenary Exhibition, and now re-published as Ruskin's Politics, the younger teacher’s opinion of the older.

Mr. Shaw starts, as all good pedagogues do, by arguing from the seen to the unseen. He points out the portraits of Ruskin on the walls of the exhibition— the early Mozart-like medallion; the Herkomer, strongly resembling John Stuart Mill; the photographs taken at Coniston, where the head is a naturalist’s (Grant Allen’s, to be precise); and finally, Severn’s studies of the wonderful old man like ‘God as depicted in Blake’s Book of Job.’ Through these he traces the painter, music-lover, poet, rhetorician, economist and sociologist who ended (he says) by ‘developing sociology and economics into a religion, as all economics and sociology that are worth anything do finally develop.’

Now this is very much the same thing as saying that a sufficiently devoted mill-wheel finally develops into the mountain torrent that turns it.
Joris Karl Huymans
Authors: McDougall Alan G.
Published: July 2007

There are books which, after all, are but books—as cinematograph films are but films. And who ever yearned to probe the heart of the film producer, though our pockets bulge with photographs of film stars? But there are also books which are almost primarily letters of introduction to their authors. Such, in England, are the slim volumes which immortalize Lionel Johnson : such, in France, are the novels—for so we must call them—of Joris Karl Huysmans.

His is a lonely soul. Perhaps the best summaries of it are the quotations his title-pages almost always bear emblazoned on them : for these are armigerous books, even those which do not flaunt St. Benedict’s Cross for their crest. Of the rest the keynote is perhaps furnished by the sentence of Blessed John Ruys-broeck which introduces A Reborns: 11 faut que je me rejouisse au-dessus de mon temps . . . quoique le monde ait horrem de ma foie, et que sa grossièreté ne sache pas ce que je veux dire. Ruysbroeck, writing them, knew the echo : to Huysmans it came later : Sed confidite, ego vici mundum.

Another of these blazonries tells us Catholics the raison d'etre of the man. It is the shield of La Cathédrale—perhaps the only epic which has made another epic its hero : Domine, dilexi decorem domus tuae et locum habitationis gloriae tuae . . . Ne perdas cum impiis, Deus, animam meam. And in this book most of all Huysmans shows us the way to live out of an age of which so many of us are weary.
A City of England
Authors: Leicester Philip
Published: July 2007

The story of the city is that of England, for indeed it had its beginning before England was a name. Its history follows familiar lines. To a Roman frontier post succeeded a Saxon cathedral, a Benedictine abbey, and a Norman castle. Round this pile of buildings on the bank of a placid river gathered a busy community of traders and craftsmen. Walls and gates protected their growing wealth. Royal charters gave local self-government and a long succession of privileges. Fairs and markets attracted the produce of the fertile lands along the river valley, and the merchants of Europe carried far and wide the fame of the city looms. The records of a score of flourishing guilds and the numerous charitable foundations which survive to this day prove the wealth and dignity of this place in mediaeval days.

The religious changes of the sixteenth century had some effect upon the material prosperity of the city. The cloth trade dwindled and finally vanished. During the Civil Wars all classes suffered severely, but the destruction of the walls and of many of the timber houses allowed expansion and rebuilding. Wealth and prosperity returned, largely owing to new industries, to favourable situation on two important trunk roads, and to the position of the city as a provincial metropolis of a wide agricultural area.

The dawn of the nineteenth century found the city one of the largest and most prosperous in the country. The narrow old streets were lined with shops, owned in most cases by their proprietors, who lived in the same building, with their families and apprentices.
Pere de Foucauld and the Conversion of Islam
Authors: Balfour Reginald
Published: July 2007

That the ways of God are not men’s ways is very clear all through the life of the Père de Foucauld. It is singularly fortunate that this Saint of modern days should have M. Rene Bazin as his biographer. The skill in portraiture that he wields as a novelist, his sure and sympathetic touch are all needed to make a material world realise the deep and far-reaching import of Charles de Foucauld’s vocation.

Its chief characteristic was patient, faithful, waiting on the will of God. He knew from the first moment of his conversion that he had a destiny to accomplish. His own will was utterly subjected to this destiny, this purpose of God, and his sanctity grew in patient, steady labour in utter loneliness in the wide Sahara for its accomplishment. He has paved the way for a new impulse in the French nation for the conversion of the portion of Islam over which they rule.

The life and martyrdom of the Père de Foucauld is a protest against the attitude almost generally accepted that the Mussulman is unconvertable. This opinion has become a maxim—a stereotyped view. Hilaire Belloc, in his Esto Perpetua, a book of Algerian studies, says, speaking of Islam :

’ Against this vast permanent and rooted influence we have nothing to offer. Our designs of material benefit or of positive enlightenment are, to the presence of this common creed as is some human machine to the sea. We can. pass through it but we cannot occupy it. It spreads out before our advance, it closes up behind. Nor will our work be accomplished until we have recovered, perhaps through disasters suffered in our European homes, the full tradition of our philosophy and a faith which shall permeate all our actions as completely as does this faith of theirs.’
The Coalfields for a Holiday
Authors: Burdett Osbert
Published: July 2007

It is odd how shy people are of seeking a real change when they take a holiday. The city man, who plays golf in the suburbs every week-end throughout the rest of the year, can think of no better change than to play the same game by the sea-side in his August vacation. The middle-class villager usually departs for another village; the doctor takes a locum; the town-dweller from North or South makes a straight line for some London-by-the-sea; the nurse stays with another nurse; and people in general choose a country, near or far, that is only a glorified repetition of the countryside with which they are familiar. Conscious at last of the lack of imagination hitherto displayed in my own holidays, I determined to go to a Yorkshire coal-field, not that I might spend my time underground, for I had already visited the tube railways in London, but to see the countryside in which the smaller coal-fields lie and to make acquaintance with their inhabitants.

I know the corn-fields and the hay-fields, the Downs, the Cotswolds, the Cornish coast and the moors, so it seemed well to visit the coal-fields, the romantic spots of industrial England, wherein the smaller pits are buried. I avoided the larger mining districts, with their acres of glum houses, because it was the miners’ countryside that I desired to see. Staying with a friend who has to drive about the country for his work, I was left with an hour or so to spare in more than one mining village.
A Dialogue of Devotion
Authors: Eden Helen Parry
Published: July 2007

It came to pass on Sunday morn When the Parish Mass was done,

The men of Woodstock all went home,

And the women every one,

But Hugh the Glover set out north By the banks of Glyme alone.

The sun shone hot on stem and stone,

The robin sang on the thorn,

The last mist lifted off the grass Was tree-top high that morn,

When he doffed his shoes by Wootton Church. That stands high on a rocky perch,

Where the Glyme runs into the Dome.

And barefoot still, by vale and hill,

He took his pilgrim’s way,

For the King’s Glover of Woodstock Sought a great grace that day—

To learn of the Anker of Dornford Wherein Devotion lay.

Now Hugh the Glover was a rich burgess of Woodstock, high in the favour of King John and his peers. He had a fair, cheerful wife; six sons and two daughters; and a large, two-storied house with an arched door and a gabled roof. But for all this he had been ill at ease for a long time, because he did not know the meaning of the word ‘Devotion.’ I do not say he could not hazard a guess at it—most of us could do as much—but he did not think that was the right way to approach so noble a word. And every time he heard Mass—which was almost every day of his life—and the priest prayed for Hugh the Glover and all the other bystanders ‘quorum libi fides cognita esl, et nota devotio,’
Canon Law on the Bench
Authors: Wilmot‐Buxton E. M.
Published: July 2007

The records of the Ecclesiastical Court, some of which have recently been available for inspection, and to which special notice has been drawn of late by the very interesting paper read before the Royal Historical Society by Mr. Fincham, are full of interest for students of Catholic history.

These records consist of Books of Acts (including ‘Corrections’ ), Assignations, Books of Depositions, and ‘Libels, Allegations, and Sentences,’ and range from the year 1467 down to 1817. The Book of Acts was a record of the summons of offenders to Court, the charge or ‘libel’ brought against them, the ‘sworn personal answers’ of the accused and of the witnesses for or against them, and the ‘depositions’ on either side.

The Allegations were the replies of the accused to the ‘libel’ ; and the ‘assignation’ was the name given to the result of secret examination of witnesses in a series of ‘Interlocutary Orders.’

The matters dealt with by the Ecclesiastical Court would come under the two heads of Criminal and Civil cases, and of ‘Correction and Instances.’ The latter had to do with matrimonial cases and with questions arising out of wills, and were, in 1857, absorbed into the High Court of Probate, Divorce and Admiralty. The former were concerned with such things as ‘Recusancy,’ i.e. refusal to attend the Parish Church and to receive the Protestant Communion, usury, witchcraft, heresy, keeping of houses of ill-fame, brawling in Church,, defamation of character, and all offences against morals.
John Dryden
Authors: Makepeace John Foster
Published: July 2007

Finding that if he continued to call himself a Protestant his services would be overlooked, he declared himself a Papist. The king's parsimony instantly relaxed. Dryden was gratified with a pension of £100 a year, and was employed to defend his new religion both in prose and verse.

The great Whig historian’s sneer at the Cavalier dramatist’s conversion to the Catholic Faith was equally ungenerous and untrue. For Dryden had in all probability become a Catholic before Charles II died, as his wife and one of his sons had already been received into the Church. And the

‘pension,’ contemptuously referred to by Macaulay, was simply the belated payment of his salary as Laureate, already four years in arrears, together with other sums owing to the poet by the spendthrift King Charles. Lord Macaulay might have discovered if he liked, in the course of his historical researches among seventeenth century documents, the existing Treasury Warrant, signed by Rochester and dated May 6th, 1684, authorising the payment to Dryden of £ 50, being one quarter’s annuity (as poet laureate) due at Midsummer, 1680, and also the sum of £25, being one quarter’s additional annuity by Letters of Privy Seal, due Lady Day, 1680. James II, having a stricter sense of justice, thus paid off his brother’s debts. But Dryden lost his court post, and had the mortification of seeing it transferred to Shadwell. And he died in William Ill’s reign, a staunch Catholic and a poor man under a Protestant king.
A Long Exposure
Authors: Dinnis Enid
Published: July 2007

THE editor of the Daily Shouter was conscious from his salutation that it was young Phelps, the new reporter, who stood behind him, so it was not necessary to turn round. He went on sorting his papers, remarking as he did so, ‘You can run down to Airminster and see if you can get a story from the

R.A.F. man who got stuck up on the roof of the abbey yesterday. See if he’s got anything to say about how it felt being up there for eight hours—not about how he got down, we had all that last night; but just see if he has anything to say that you can make into a story. Hullo! ‘The editor had transferred his attention to the telephone.

Young Phelps accepted his assignation readily, and hopefully. The news editor of the Shouter had a wide reputation as a discoverer of possibilities in the events of the passing hour. True, he sometimes tested the mettle of new men on forlorn hopes, but young Phelps rather liked being put on his mettle; he hoped to be a news editor himself one day. At any rate, it was up to him to get a ‘story’ out of the hero of yesterday’s misadventure. The papers had given a due account of the accident which had brought down Flight-Lieut. Cliffordson’s aeroplane on to the roof of the fourteenth-century minster church from which Airminster derives its name. The machine had got itself entangled amongst the intricate masonry that surmounts the west facade, and when it came to earth with its pilot it was found that the lieutenant had been left clinging to a narrow ledge up amongst the gargoyles.
Where All Roads Lead
Authors: Chesterton G. K.
Published: July 2007

Until about the end of the nineteenth century, a man was expected to give his reasons for joining the Catholic Church. To-day a man is really expected to give his reasons for not joining it. This may seem an exaggeration; but I believe it to stand for a subconscious truth in thousands of minds. As for the fundamental reasons for a man doing it, there are only two that are really fundamental. One is that he believes it to be the solid objective truth, which is true whether he likes it or not; and the other that he seeks liberation from his sins. If there be any man for whom these are not the main motives, it is idle to enquire what were his philosophical or historical or emotional reasons for joining the old religion; for he has not joined it at all.

But a preliminary word or two may well be said about the other matter; which may be called the challenge of the Church. I mean that the world has recently become aware of that challenge in a curiously and almost creepy fashion. I am literally one of the least, because one of the latest, of a crowd of converts who have been thinking along the same lines as I. There has been a happy increase in the number of Catholics; but there has also been, if I may so express it, a happy increase in the number of non-Catholics; in the sense of conscious non-Catholics.
The Amateur in Art
Authors: Dwyer J. J.
Published: July 2007

We had been talking about the recent exhibitions and everybody agreed that it was a melancholy thing to see how men who had begun as real and sincere artists had, for obvious reasons, become purveyors of popular pictures. Another spoke of the work of a gifted and restless politician who was known to be in his spare moments a slashing painter of landscape. From this we came by a natural transition to amateurs generally and their ways.

Alison, the poet, contended strongly for the essential superiority of the amateur as a sort of aristocrat who was entitled to special consideration because he worked from inspiration while others worked by routine. Look at the daily articles, the weekly reviews, the annual novels. Look at the painters. ‘Look’ he said, ‘at the average production here and abroad, at the Academy, the galleries, the Salons. Routine work without inspiration. Potboilers. Things done, not because they had to be done, but because something must be done. Fellows always at it—starve if they didn’t, I am afraid, some of them. (Alison has a substantial income of his own). How can you have freshness of vision, spontaneity, sincerity the things that make Art vital? How does the fun of the thing come in? No fun at all, drudgery. You know, Howard, what Schiller said about the element of play in Art—a sort of sublime—or at any rate charming—play in which we escape from the trammels of everyday life. . .
The Inhabitants of Dante's Hell
Authors: Makepeace John Foster
Published: July 2007

It is said that Dante took his revenge upon his enemies by putting them in his Inferno and thus pilloried them for all time. According to Alphonse de Lamartine, for example, ‘le poeme exclusivement toscan du Dante était une espèce de satire vengeresse du poète et de l’homme d’Etat contre les hommes et le partis auxquels il avait voue sa haine.’ Lamartine's shallow Voltairian view is still vaguely held, for a modern writer has recently referred to Dante’s ‘vindictiveness which mars and prevaricates the truth.’ Carlyle, on the other hand, exclaimed, ‘What a paltry notion is that of his Divine Comedy’s being a poor, splenetic, impotent, terrestrial libel; putting those into hell whom he could not be avenged upon on earth ! ‘But the general impression among casual readers of the Commedia is that this was what he actually did.

The purpose, therefore, of this article is to enquire whether there is any evidence of ‘vindictiveness’ in the Inferno.

Now, apart from the crowd of mythological and scriptural and ancient historical personages, there are about sixty-seven persons, mostly contemporaries, mentioned by name or whose identity is undisputed. The supposed ‘vindictiveness,’ of course, could only be shown towards some of these. There are notorious Florentines, like Ciacco, the glutton, and Filippo Argenti, an arrogant and intolerant bully, of whom Boccaccio also tells us a characteristic Decameron story (ix, 8). There are common highway murderers like Rinier de Corneto and Rinier Pazzo. There are prodigals, like Lano of Siena, who in despair committed suicide, and Jacomo da Sant’ Andrea of Padua, who was executed for arson.
Repairs Neatly Executed
Authors: Biddle George Edgar
Published: July 2007

The baby, new to sky and earth, surrounded by toys and playthings, extracts the keenest pleasure from throwing them about, picking them to bits, thumping them flat, pulling them awry, squeezing them out of shape.

Although this early impulse is not necessarily an evidence of original sin, it does show a twisted instinct which will need correction. That correction comes, partly through parental discipline, partly from a dawning sense in the tiny brain that things are made to be kept and used.

So, somewhere about the age of six or seven, the boy or girl sets greater store by doll or tin soldier, picture book or toy train, even taking means to preserve them from injury, and being worried if they spoil. Thus there emerges in the child consciousness the notion of repair, and an inkling of the part it plays amongst us. Then follows the training of school to drive home the lesson.

We, too, are all at school : tuition flows in upon us continually from all quarters. Some of our teachers we like, some we dislike; but there is a general conspiracy to make us learn. We prefer, I suppose, the indirect method; and, as if to please us (by coating the pill), the parabolic way is that chiefly favoured by the great college of preceptors.

Materials for these parables are continually offering themselves to us. They are bound up with our common tasks. The Banished Duke in As You Like It found ‘tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,’ and so forth.
Where All Roads Lead: The Youth of the Church
Authors: Chesterton G. K.
Published: July 2007

When the Master-Builder spoke apprehensively of the younger generation knocking at the door, it certainly never occurred to him to apprehend that it might be the church-door. And yet even in the figure of Ibsen might have been found signs of so strange a sequel. The very words Master-Builder are but a tradition from a medieval system, and it is that very system which some would now make a rough model for the modern system. And if the Master-Builder had been driven by his ruthless lady friend to make a tour of Europe, looking for the tallest towers to climb, he would soon have discovered what people of what period had the right to be called masters of building He would have found himself in the tracks of many a master, who not only climbed his own tower but carved his own angels or devils at the four corners of it, hanging as on wings above the void. The artists and art critics of the rising generation had already begun knocking at the church-door fifty years ago, in the time of Ruskin and William Morris. In our own time a yet younger generation of art students are justifying their bold or possibly bald simplifications by yet severer doctrines drawn from the Primitives. The new artists may be in a chronological sense Post-Impressionists, but they are also in a strict historical sense Pre-Raphaelites. But this youngest generation knocks at the door of the Master-Builder, not only to ask about the church of which he was the builder,
‘GLORIOUS WAR’
Authors: Christitch Elizabeth
Published: July 2007

War has its apologists, defenders, and even glorifiers, however anomalous it may appear, among professed disciples of the Prince of Peace. Dwellers m lands untouched by the scourge have marshalled facts and expounded theories to justify its necessity and desirability. I have heard an armchair critic say that a ‘good war’ from time to time cleared the air, eased economic problems, gave a stimulus to industry, and was a blessing all round ! How far removed from logical Christianity is such a view of men’s relations to each other can be recognised by contrast with the attitude of the Father of Christendom, who never ceased calling on his children during the recent European war to abandon their abominable fratricide and compose their differences by peaceful arbitration. By no force of imagination can we represent the Founder of Christianity Himself as inciting to slaughter; and yet many who call themselves His followers deliberately encouraged revenge, and denied forgiveness to their prostrate enemies.

Protagonists of war are now mostly to be found among men who have not encountered it face to face; and again, societies have arisen to prevent its recurrence because it is felt that, while war is an indirect cause of noble and humane actions, it remains nevertheless an evil and a producer of evils. If order is heaven’s first law, then war which means chaos is hellish in nature. The world’s outlook after the recent ‘splendid war,’ which was to end war, does not augur well for future peace;
Where All Roads Lead: II. The Case for Complexity
Authors: Chesterton G. K.
Published: July 2007

I Began with the power of the Church to grow young suddenly, when she is expected to grow old slowly, and remarked that this power in a creed was one which I could only conceive as thus regularly recurrent under two conditions : first, that it was really true; and second, that the power in it was more than mortal. In the ultimate sense, these are undoubtedly the reasons for what is a revolution that really returns like the revolution of a wheel. But among the secondary and superficial causes of this rejuvenation may be specially noted, I fancy, the very fact of which religious reformers have so constantly complained; I mean the complexity of the creeds. There is a sense in which the Faith is the simplest of religions; but there is another sense in which it really is by far the most complicated. And what I am emphasising here is that, contrary to many modern notions, it owes its victory over modern minds to its complexity and not its simplicity. It owes its most recent revivals to the very fact that it is the one creed that is still not ashamed of being complicated.

We have had during the last few centuries a series of extremely simple religions; each indeed trying to be more simple than the last. And the manifest mark of all these simplifications was, not only that they were finally sterile, but that they were very rapidly stale. A man had said the last word about them when he had said the first.
The Voice of the Church in Modern Problems
Authors: Jarrett Bede
Published: July 2007

The business of the Church in the world is twofold : to teach and to aid. She has to set out the divine truths, issue moral warnings, rebuke and exhort in season and out of season; further, she has the custody of those sacred signs which carry with them the grace of God, and through the communication of which the souls receiving them are enabled to carry out these divine precepts and exhortations. She teaches to the world about her the ideals of Christ, and she gives to the world the power of Christ whereby these ideals can be realised. In short, to use words which have become familiar to this generation, we can say that the Church has to perform the functions both of a priest and a prophet.

Now, if in view of these two functions we were to try to judge the Church of our own time in as detached a fashion as we could, we should probably agree that the priestly side of the Church’s office is being performed with a zeal and a response such as no other age of her history can have surpassed. To dogmatise on historical parallels between one age and another would be foolish, because impossible of verification or proof : yet the closest student of history would, I believe, be hard put to discover a period of Christian development when the sacramental system was so much frequented as it is to-day. Merely to consult any of the popular spiritual manuals of the last four centuries and to contrast them with those of to-day is to make one realise the enormous increase of sacramental devotion that has been made in these last years.
Dialogue as a Literary Form
Authors: Cunnington S.
Published: July 2007

This device, now so nearly obsolete, has in the past been the vehicle of sound knowledge and impassioned thought; but a writer of to-day deliberately hampers his message in employing it. Is it that the construction is discredited through the heavy-handed use of it in pedagogy? It may well be that the union of the pupil’s apt observations and the instructor’s bland copiousness so impregnated the method with tedium that few dare again adventure it.

In tracing the history of Dialogue, we find two well-marked streams of development; one in the literature of knowledge and the other in the literature of emotion. It would not be reasonable to recognise its origin in that primitive stage when continuous narrative consisted only in the necessary descriptions, and the story was delivered from the mouths of the characters. We are often reminded of this in the vigorous telling of the Old Testament stories. In the book of Job is the most ancient form of the Dialogue easily accessible to us. There is a prose introduction and a prose conclusion, but the body of the poem is a series of dialogues. Undoubtedly the philosopher-poet utilised an existing epic narrative as the core of his discussion of the problem of evil; and in the dispute between the hero and the subordinate characters is developed a theory of life and conduct. With eastern subtlety, the final conclusion is suggested rather than explicitly stated.

In this early example the appeal is to the reason; its intention is to teach, its aim to convince.
The Salvaging of Civilisation
Authors: Huray C. P.
Published: July 2007

Civilisation is in peril. Press and pulpit proclaim the fact. Politicians make its salvation their appeal to popular suffrage, and communists hail its fall as an unqualified blessing.

Of what nature is the menace to civilisation? Politicians call it Bolshevism, and communists call it the Class War. The politician and his party papers see the finger of Bolshevism in Ireland, in the German Reparations difficulty and in every industrial dispute at home and abroad. All labour members of Parliament, all trade unionists, all co-operators, all socialists are Bolshevists and, ipso facto, enemies of the existing order of society. With equal intolerance, communists regard all who compromise with society and its institutions as lacking in class-consciousness and enemies of the proletariat.

The communist is a socialist in a hurry, and that is why he has lost all sense of proportion. It is futile, he argues, to suppose that a majority of the people, who could express their will in a constitutional manner, can ever be converted to the principles of communism. A leaven of communists, a coup d’etat, and civilisation will be overthrown. The real work of conversion can then begin. There must be rigorous suppression of all that is antagonistic to the new order of society. Force alone will prevail with the grown-ups, for their mentality has already been warped. They are capitalistically minded, and only the practical demonstration of the superiority of communism will reconcile them to the new order. The children will present no such difficulty.
Where All Roads Lead: III.—The History of a Half-Truth
Authors: Chesterton G. K.
Published: July 2007

In fundamentals the Church rejoices in being unchangeable; but she is sometimes charged with being too stiff and stationary, even in those externals that are the legitimate sphere of change. And in one sense I think this is indeed true; if we mean by the Church its mortal machinery. The Church cannot change quite so fast as the charges against her do. She is sometimes caught napping and still disproving what was said about her on Monday, to the neglect of the completely contrary thing that is said about her on Tuesday. She does sometimes live pathetically in the past, to the extent of innocently supposing that the modern thinker may think to-day what he thought yesterday. Modern thought does outstrip her, in the sense that it disappears of itself before she has done disproving it. She is slow and belated, in the sense that she studies a heresy more seriously than the here siarch does. Most of us could point out examples of this error, if it be an error, so far as the external controversial machinery of Catholicism is concerned. There are Catholics who are still answering Calvinists, though there are no Calvinists to answer. There are admirable apologists assuming that the average Englishman blames the Church for distrusting the Bible; though nowadays he is much more likely to blame her for trusting it. There are those who have to apologise, in the Greek if not in the English sense, for the exalted place which our theology gives to a woman; as if our fashionable feminists still held the views of John Knox about the monstrous regiment of women.
The Banquet of Dante
Authors: Makepeace John Foster
Published: July 2007

There may be some readers of the Commedia who are not familiar with the Convivio, or ‘Banquet’ ; the unfinished philosophical commentary on certain of his odes, which Villani called ‘a beautiful, subtle and very great work.’ And yet its medieval lore, its depth of feeling and (for those who read Italian) its wonderful word-music render it as fascinating as the love-story of the Vita Nuova which Rossetti popularised. One may therefore perhaps venture to introduce such readers to its Fourth Book, in which Dante discourses of ‘true nobility.’

Its title is Contra gli erranti, ‘Against the erring ones,’ which he takes, he says, ‘from the example of the good brother Thomas of Aquino, who gave to a book which he wrote for the confusion of all who depart from our faith the title Contra Gentili.’ He undertakes a mighty work, grande e alta opera, and one that has rarely been handled by others, viz. to examine what constitutes natural nobility. To understand this potenza di natura is all-important, because our mistakes about it lead to the confusion of moral values in our social estimates.

‘There was a certain emperor ‘—he is referring to that brilliant ‘stupor mundi,’ Frederick the Second, Barbarossa’s grandson, whose authority as arbiter of Sicilian taste was as great as his cunning in deceiving the Holy See—’ who was once asked : What is gen-tilezza?’ We English have no word for gentilezza, because we have not enough regard for the quality it

signifies, the quality which is connoted in ‘gentlefolk/ Elsewhere Dante uses the word nobilta, nobleness, as its synonym.
Western Mysticism
Authors: Whitacre ÆLred
Published: July 2007

Abbot Butler has written an extremely fascinating book on a subject of enthralling interest. The mystical life is the highest of all practical sciences in the sense that of all others, it matters most to a human being on earth. A purely speculative knowledge of God, however profound, is wisdom, but it is not to be compared in this life with love of God, since here below the mind only thinks God, whereas the will goes out to grasp Him. The mind for ever remains within the logical order, but the will whose every act is based on love seeks to get hold of the reality—that is to say, its term or rest is the ontological. In heaven the converse is true as regards the taking hold of God : the will of a truth will attain its supreme satiety in cleaving to God, but it is the mind, first and foremost, that takes hold of God, the will cleaving to the reality made captive by the mind.

In the Beatific Vision, we hold as true that which Hegel perversely endeavoured to apply to this world, namely, the identity of the logical and ontological orders. In the Beatific Vision alone are ‘thought’ and ‘thing’ identified; for the ‘thought’ of God in the created mind is the ‘reality’ of God Himself. When Hegel formulated his astounding philosophy, he was unknowingly formulating one of the most profound doctrines of Thomistic theology concerning the Beatific Vision.
Oberammergau and Justification by Faith
Authors: Stockley W. F. P.
Published: July 2007

‘You must be a believer,’ said an Irish Protestant, ‘to go to Oberammergau.’ Perhaps this good paterfamilias, revealed what the shock of the actualities of Catholicism awoke in him—the sense that he was a vague Theist, or perhaps, as theologians might say, some sort of Monophysite, but that he was disinherited from the Incarnation, and was but confounded, when taken inside the household of faith. All round him in Ireland the faithful lived, bad and good; and had the Faith. But he never went into the only places that best be called churches, nor divined the instinct for reality, the knowledge of the true proportion of things, the supernatural insight, belonging even to the most untried faith.

It is, indeed, no light mantle of greatness, worn (thought Dr. Martineau), by even the humblest Catholic, belonging to a religion passing times and lands, in which there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither bond or free, of which kings have been the nursing fathers, and queens the nursing mothers, for which princes have laid down their crowns, and where, daily, wealth hides its pomp under the rough robe of the cloister (that place in which the Christians still have all things in common); the religion that cares not for race, nor language, for feudalism nor revolution; in the sense, that, whatever turns up among

‘the rapid, blind,

And fleeting generations of mankind,’

the Church will be always there, at home under Charles the Great, and in English haphazard colonies, that Church of the French Jesuits,
The Poems of Alice Meynell
Authors: Mary Benvenuta Sister
Published: July 2007

I imagine that there is hardly a living mortal, be he poet or acknowledged critic, who, called upon for an appreciation of Mrs. Meynell’s poetry, will not approach his task feeling as might a surveyor called in to take the measurements of the Holy of Holies. The everyday reviewer will have the shamefaced consciousness of hobnail boots added to that of the surveyor’s incongruous calling.

Mrs. Meynell was undoubtedly one of the greatest poets of an age of great poets. The greatest we may not call her, since some extra merit must be accorded to the difficult achievement of excellence sustained throughout bulky volumes; but making necessary allowance for differing tastes, perhaps it were not too much to call her the most perfect poet of the nineteenth century. What other has so matched the perfect word to the perfect thought? Where else than in the hundred or so brief poems she gave to the world, shall we seek vainly for a commonplace line or phrase, or a word put in merely to fill up the measure of rhyme or rhythm? Had she chosen to put her art before her life, her vocation as poet before her vocation as wife and mother, possibly the inimitable quality of her poetry might not have lost by quantity—wherein, however, such rare excellence as hers is hardly to be looked for, perhaps not even desired. We best appreciate the faultless specimen of some rare flower in its cloistral solitude of the hot-house.
The Mediatorship of the Blessed Virgin
Authors: Mcnabb Vincent
Published: July 2007

The Decree of the Sacred Congregation of Rites (12th January, 1921) authorising the Office and Mass of our Lady ‘Mediatrix Gratiarum’ (Mediatrix of Graces), has given rise to a theological discussion on the nature of this mediatorship of our Blessed Lady..

The most common, and perhaps the most convenient, formula of this mediatorship is :

All Graces come through Mary, the Mother

This formula has two meanings. First, all graces come through Mary because Jesus Christ, the Divine Redeemer, came through her. Second, all graces come through Mary because her intercession is now a preliminary of the distribution of all graces. We will discuss these two meanings separately.

All Graces come through Mary because Jesus Christy, the Divine Redeemer, came through her.

(1) Our Blessed Lady’s greatest title is that given by the Council of Ephesus, namely, θϵoτóκoζ Deipara” Mother of God. For His own inscrutable ends God chose to take flesh miraculously in the virgin womb, arid after the free consent of Mary, the wife of St. Joseph of Nazareth.

(2) Our Blessed Lady did not merit as such the Incarnation. St. Thomas says that no one could have merited the Incarnation condignly (ex condigno), ‘yet the holy Fathers merited the Incarnation congruously by desiring and beseeching; for it was becoming (congruum) that God should hearken to those who obeyed Him’ (III Qu. 2, Art. 2, Eng. trans.).
Some French Books of 1922
Authors: Randall A. W. G.
Published: July 2007

In an article on French literature during 1921, which was published in this review last April, emphasis was laid on what was named the ‘stationary’ character of present-day French literature. The principal cause of this, it was suggested, was to be found in the abnormal loss of her young writers and intellectuals which France suffered in the war. In the course of the past year a change seems to have come about. Without giving any comprehensive account of French literature for the last twelve months it would be impossible to state all the reasons for this impression, but close students of France’s literary production would probably agree that, although it would be idle to generalise too confidently, more idle still to talk with any definiteness of new ‘tendencies,’ yet there has been a greater spontaneity, a greater virility, less aimlessness or wanton experiment in the past year than during any year since the Armistice.

In fiction, which it is natural to take first, that being the department of literature in which France excels and best gives expression to her national genius, an increasing number of young writers have appeared, full of promise. Among those who unhappily did not survive to fulfil their promise, or rather, we should say in this connection, extend it, the most remarkable was Louis Hemon. His novel of French-Canadian life, Maria Chapdelaine, really belongs to 1921 and, as it was translated into English not long ago, little need be said of it here.
Candlemass
Authors: Baring Maurice
Published: July 2007

The town is half awake; the nave, the choir,

Are dark, and all is dim within, without,

But every chapel fringed with the devout,

Is bright with. February flowers of fire.

At Mass, a thousand years ago in Rome,

Thus Priest, thus Server at the altar bowed;

Thus knelt, thus blessed itself the kneeling crowd,

At Dawn, within the secret catacomb.

Thus shall they meet for Mass, until the day The glory of the world shall pass away.

And beauty far above all human reach.

And power, and wealth beyond all mortal price,

And glory that outsoars all thought, all speech,

Speak in the whispered words of sacrifice.

Maurice Baring.
Dr. Johnson's Catholic Friends
Authors: Bracey Robert
Published: July 2007

Thomas Carlyle never could pass by the church of St. Clement Danes without thinking with admiration and awe of Samuel Johnson ‘in the era of Voltaire’ purifying his soul within its walls, full of genuine devotion, sometimes in fear and darkness, at others in patience and quiet hope, but ever with intense and burning conviction. ‘Religion,’ says Mr. Birrell, ‘was to Johnson an awful thing; he never learned to take his ease on Zion. Yet is his trembling piety and utter sincerity a true haven of refuge for the student of the heartless scepticism of the eighteenth century.’

It is a singular fact that for more than forty years Samuel Johnson dwelt within a stone’s throw of the most venerated and conspicuous English Catholic of his day. They must inevitably often have passed each other in the street. But they lived in totally distinct worlds, and we can hardly presume that Dr. Johnson and Bishop Challoner ever exchanged a single word. Yet had they very many acquaintances in common.

Pages, volumes almost, have been written regarding Johnson’s sympathy with Catholic doctrine and practice. He frequently stood up for Catholics : he would refute objections, brush aside prejudices, weigh everything in the scales of his sturdy common-sense. His attitude in this respect was far in advance of that of his contemporaries, and this is doubtless the secret of the reverence with which so many children of the Church have regarded him in later generations.

But we question if it has ever quite been realised how very many Catholics he personally knew. Considering how Catholics in those days of the Penal Laws shrank from observation, kept
The Tree of Knowledge
Authors: Le Huray C. P.
Published: July 2007

The farmer, who expressed contempt for our national system of education because a lad of school-leaving age in his employ did not know the dental formula of a yearling sheep, was merely giving expression to the thought in the minds of many.

For there are two schools of thought in matters educational. One regards education as the means to an end; the other regards it as an end in itself. To the former school of thought belong most teachers and education officials; to the latter most practical business men. The effect of this conflict between the practical and the ideal is the crowding of the curriculum in both elementary and secondary schools, so that boys and girls leave those institutions with a superficial smattering of knowledge, unrelated to the occupations they intend to follow and not making, in any large degree, for any ethical advance in society.

Fashions in methods of education are as frequent in their changes as are those in ladies’ attire. Pestalozzi, Froebel and Montessori have had their day. They still linger on, when they do not give place to Margaret McMillan and the Dalton Plan. It appears to be an established law that any new idea in education, although excellent in its results in the hands of its discoverer, comes to naught when practised by his disciples.

The Dalton Plan, however, which marks the latest phase in the development of educational theory, is a triumph for the practical school. Assuming the pupil to have a good grounding in the three R’s, it makes of him a pseudo-research-student, and allows him to draw up his own programme of study.
A Note on A. E. Housman
Authors: Essex Edwin
Published: July 2007

I.

After an interval of sixteen years, Mr. A. E. Housman has given us a sequel to A Shropshire Lad. During that time one might naturally have expected the Lad of 1896 to have arrived at manhood’s estate; expected, perhaps, from the poet a hero with a different philosophy of life, and an experience ripened by almost a score of years. Mr. Housman could so easily have made his character grow up, see with new eyes, and speak with a new tongue. That is what would have happened in the case of any other poet who was not the supreme artist Mr. Housman has proved himself to be. For in Last Poems (absit omen !) he is still in the same mood as in A Shropshire Lad, and has thus demonstrated the artistic unity of his work.

That is the crowning triumph of his poetry. The hundred and five poems that make up these two volumes, and that represent, say, twenty years work, are really just one poem looked at and presented in one hundred and five different ways. Just as one person may have a hundred striking experiences in two decades of life without losing his individuality, or breaking up his personality into little pieces; or an air may have a hundred variations; so one rich mood of imagination has sufficed for Mr. Housman to enrich our literature with a hundred poems. He struck one precious seam of gold and worked it faithfully to the end.

How he worked it we are told with a charming (and pathetic ?) simplicity at the beginning of Last Poems. 41 can no longer expect to be re-visited by the continuous excitement under which in the early months of 1895 I wrote the greater part of my other book, nor indeed could I well sustain it if it came . . . About a quarter of this matter {Last Poems) belongs to the April of the present year, but most of it to dates between 1895 and 1910/
Vita Nuova
Authors: Baring Maurice
Published: July 2007

I

I found the clue I sought not in the night, While wandering in a pathless maze of gloom; The sky was hidden behind shapes of doom; There was no moon, nor any star in sight.

My hopes, my dreams and my beliefs were slain; Like corpses on a battlefield they lay;

The world was but a graveyard dark with clay; The stiffling cloud denied one drop of rain;

When from the giddy marge of the abyss I cried aloud in agony and fear,

When suddenly it seemed my single tear Stretched and became a shining bridge to bliss.

I stood before a topless gate. Within I guessed the light, I dared not enter in.

II

One day I heard a whisper: ‘Wherefore wait? Why linger in a separated porch?

Why nurse the flicker of a severed torch?

The fire is there, ablaze beyond the gate.

Why tremble, foolish soul? Why hesitate? However faint the knock it will be heard.’

I knocked, and swiftly came the answering word, Which bade me enter to my own estate.

I found myself in a familiar place;

And there my broken soul began to mend;

I knew the smile of every long-lost face— They whom I had forgot remembered me;

I knelt, I knew—it was too bright to see— The welcome of a King who was my friend.

Ill

My treasure and my resting-place are found,

My mother-land, my immemorial home;

Beyond the reefs of treasonable foam,

I know the lights are flashing on the sound. Lightning may strike, and hurricane may blow, Whatever shall befall I cannot fear:

Whether the hour be faraway or near,

That tranquil harbour shines and waits, I know.