bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Chinese Puzzle
Authors: Jarrett Bede
Published: July 2007

It is a little difficult for the ordinary person who has merely the press to guide him to see his way into the confusion of China and to understand what the trouble is about.

But it is not really so difficult if the reader of the newspapers has certain facts well in view. He had better leave alone most of the names; the Changs and Chiangs will only make the muddle greater to him. There is really no need at the beginning for him to trouble himself with these. First, however, let him take as the simplest idea that the awakening sense of nationality is the dominant feature of the situation. Let him look on the South or the Cantonese as being mainly interested in this. The sense of nationality has reached the Chinese chiefly through the Western insistence on it. They have learnt this from us. The way in which it expresses itself may be happy or unhappy, may be right or wrong; but we must realise what is the power and the force of this before we can grasp what has happened in China, and what has to be done.

Awakening, then, to a sense of nationality, the China of to-day sees itself differently treated from other nations. It is the obvious exception to the rest. On its soil foreigners are encamped in a way that does not happen elsewhere. This hurts their pride or their self-consciousness. Now, self-conscious nationality is always bellicose, like a young man who feels his own strength. Rodin’s Bronze Age shows you the awakening of man to his manhood and its power. He stretches his arms out to their fullest, because he is now awake.
Reality
Authors: Jarrett Bede
Published: July 2007

The world of Canon Streeter is a very different world from that of William Clissold; for one thing, it seems to be based on fuller scientific knowledge, and to have been discovered by a more acute mind. William Clissold, like so many of his family, was born a little too long ago to be worth listening to when he babbles about science; had he been a specialist and kept up with the literature of his stuff, he would have been all very well. But he was too busy with his business to be a specialist. Moreover, he never had a first-class mind. His power of observation is admirable; his power of description is also equally felicitous. He had the makings of a great man.

He had one drawback. He suffered from an inferiority complex. Witness how he talks of ‘Mr. G.’ He has that unhappy mind that disdains what it cannot equal or cannot understand. Disdain ‘is probably the wrong word. He does not disdain it. He pulls snooks at it. He cannot abide anyone who is finer than himself. He and his family are clever at their little personal descriptions; they are clever, but with the cleverness of a gutter-snipe. He has the naughty gifts of the cockney, only he lacks the cockney’s heart.

Compared with his world, Canon Streeter’s world may well be called Reality; it is real in the sense that it seems to correspond with facts. Moreover, Canon Streeter has a very keen, incisive and subtle mind. There is a touch of Newman about him, as a Catholic theological expert has pointed out: he has that almost uncanny gift of analysis which Newman reveals.
A Dominican Apostle in Trinidad
Authors: Montgomery Francis
Published: July 2007

The island of Trinidad off the north-eastern coast of South America is considered part of the group of West Indian islands known as the Lesser Antilles, though it is nearer than any other to the coast of .Venezuela. It was discovered by Christopher Columbus on July 31st, 1498, when on his third voyage he touched the American Continent. The natives called it Yere, and it belonged to Spain until 1797, when it was seized by the English and definitely ceded to Great Britain by the Treaty of Amiens in 1802. With the adjacent island of Tobago it forms a separate British Colony of about a quarter of a million inhabitants. The climate is tropical, with only a dry and a rainy season, since it is within ten degrees of the Equator.

That valiant Protector of the American aborigines, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, has left us an interesting account of the condition of the island at the time of its discovery, and the cruel treatment of the natives by adventurers of all nations who followed in the wake or Columbus. But it may be well to give first a brief sketch of this intrepid apostle before quoting from his hitherto unpublished manuscript, Historia General de las Indias 1492-1520, in the Royal Library of Madrid.

Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, or Casaus, was born in Seville probably on August 24th, 1474. His father (Francisco de las Casas) accompanied Columbus to Hispaniola in 1493, and, according to one account, returned with considerable wealth to Seville in 1498. But another account states that he was with Columbus in the third voyage of 1496, returning home in 1500.
Allan Water
Authors: Gray John
Published: July 2007

Engineers know where folk need to go, and provide according to their knowledge. They like long valleys in which to place their sweetest lines at the service of men. Seldom do they desire to meddle with tracks made by sheep and the weather to destinations which have now lost much of their significance, with Kirkgates and Howgates. Here is one of the latter; take it. As to the gate, it is easy; men gang their ain gate in older speech; so let us, in both senses. But the How? It was not nothing once, whatever it be to-day, or the road to it would not have been tramped smooth, notwithstanding its other linear peculiarities. A shrine of sorts, to which innumerable feet tended, before people had the Mass, and a priestcraft, less rich in prophetic utterance, but more able in counsels of expiation.

Out and upward it drives, the Howgate, with the undecided obstination of the stream it often counters. Under its guidance cultivation deteriorates by small degrees from opulence to the derisory, even to piteous vestiges of abandoned effort. The rough; tenuous pasture; grouse and the curlew. For us the quality is improved with every mile; for our meditations are in a key which does not admit commiseration. Ancient images gather in us; there is no discord among them, and the spirit is stronger for this.

It has been rather long expectation; but here is at last a stream, spreading wide over the immemorial, ineffaceable ford as the bridge takes it; immediately resuming its rocky course and the sound which sank to a murmur under the bridge; in which murmur the entranced by sunlight, and the timid by night, can sometimes pick up human, or inhuman, articulation.
Notes on the Four Notes
Authors: McNabb Vincent
Published: July 2007

I BELIEVE in One God..............and in Jesus

Christ His only begotten Son............in the One

Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.—Nicene Creed.

ONE. HOLY. CATHOLIC. APOSTOLIC.

These are the four attributes of Truth.

Truth is One; truth is Holy; therefore truth is Catholic; and therefore it is Apostolic.

The Church is the handiwork of Jesus, the infinite Truth.

It is fitting and indeed inevitable that the marks of Truth should be everywhere in the work of his hands.

As the Truth made one Church and not two or more Churches, these marks are therefore identification marks. Other churches might have one or other of these marks in this or that degree. Only his Church could have all four marks in their absolute degree.

By claiming to be One, the Church appeals to Philosophy.

By claiming to be Holy, the Church appeals to Ethics. .

By claiming to be Catholic, the Church appeals to Psychology.

By claiming to be Apostolic, the Church appeals to History.

These four sciences are in series. Moreover, they are the four main elements in what men call ‘culture’ or ‘a liberal education.’ Neither the mathematical sciences, which deal with abstract quantity, nor the physical sciences, which deal with matter, are capable of giving a liberal education. But a beginning of culture is made by the study of History. The Modern University, which has almost wholly given up the study of Philosophy and Ethics and is only dabbling in Psychology, is largely pursuing History as its main claim to give a liberal education.
When Betty's Good
Authors: Swinstead Margaret
Published: July 2007

When Betty’s good, the sun so bright Shines brighter still in its delight. The roses in the garden say,

‘We’re glad that Betty’s good to-day.’

When Betty’s good the birds and bees Sing of her praises to the trees,

And the whole earth from pole to pole, Rejoices at her shining soul.

When Betty’s good the courts of Heaven Are glad because a child was given,

And God’s great Angels smile to see How good a little girl can be.

As all God’s works in varying ways,

Are linked together for His praise,

So sky and mountain, field and flood,

All shout with joy when Betty’s good.

Postscript.

Only to be read very occasionally.

When Betty’s naughty then we say,

‘Poor Betty’s not quite well to-day.’

Margaret Swjnstead.
Field-Names and Local History
Authors: Ramsey L. F.
Published: July 2007

Bound up with the history of a neighbourhood and intimately connected with the past are the names of the fields. Those who are not countryfolk do not always realise that every field, like every village, has a name, or has had one at some time. These names are to be found in old tithe maps, and they are often of the greatest interest.

In many villages in the south of England you can find a field called Townfield. This name preserves the memory of an old feudal custom. The Townfield, a name which occurs in at least one document five centuries old, to be found in the British Museum, was the name given to the field of the village community. It belonged to a definite owner, who granted the field to certain of his tenants in return for specified services. The Townfield has no hedge, for reasons that will presently appear.

It was ploughed in acre or half-acre strips, by a team of oxen provided by the tenants, who all clubbed together for it.

These strips were each a furrow in length—i.e., 220 yards—and 22 yards wide, just as much as a team of oxen could comfortably plough in one day. The furrow represented, the length the team could go conveniently without turning, and a rod (5 yards) was the room occupied by a yoke of oxen, four abreast. Our awkward ‘long measure’ thus originated in the harness and capacity of a yoke of oxen.
Anglican Witness to St. Peter
Authors: McNabb Vincent
Published: July 2007

In The Dublin Review of July, 1893, Abbot Butler,

O.S.B., writes : ‘The first impression made upon our minds by the foregoing extract is that the arguments advanced in it are one and all quite familiar to us; they have been in common use for three centuries. Whence we gather that Bishop Lightfoot had really nothing to add to the case his predecessors had made out. This is, beyond doubt, a fact of no small importance.

‘But on second thoughts we realise that these arguments are here made to do a different duty from that assigned to them in their traditional use among Protestant controversialists. These latter denied that the Petrine texts had conferred any primacy on St. Peter; and in these circumstances the argument of equality drawn from the passages in St. Paul’s Epistles have had some weight. But unbelieving critics in Germany —men with no higher interests at stake than those of pure scholarship and accurate exegesis—have forced scholars of Bishop Lightfoot’s quality off the old Protestant ground. Now, therefore, that it is recognised our Lord did give St. Peter a primacy, these same arguments are put in evidence of the temporary character of that primacy. There has been a complete shifting of the ground’ (pp. 511-512).

This brief comment of Abbot Butler will help the reader to see the following extracts in their true light:—

I.

Bishop Lightfoot of Durham made a name for profound scholarship by his edition of The Apostolic Fathers, especially St. Clement (1889-1890).
Thomism in English Thought
Authors: Anderson William James
Published: July 2007

In a very recent volume, entitled Present-Day Thinkers and the New Scholasticism, an American professor, Dr. Zybura, put together a very miscellaneous and highly informative collection of opinions of contemporary professors in America and Great Britain on the attitude of modern schools towards the Neo-Scholastic or Thomist movement, together with a number of statements by prominent Neo-Scholastics and Thomists in regard to their attitude to modern philosophy. The aim of the book was largely to call attention to the need, if not for a rapprochement at least for intercourse. It is intolerable that the scholastic movement should keep itself in isolation from contemporary philosophy. Modern schools have much to learn from acquaintance with Thomists. Dr. Zybura very rightly complains of this mutual ignorance. It is remarkable that this very book makes only a passing reference in a footnote to a series of lectures delivered in Oxford and London in 1916 under the auspices of so well-known a foundation as the Hibbert Trust, and published in 1920 and recently re-issued.a

Dr. Wicksteed’s works on Dante are well-known. He approaches St. Thomas by way of Dante, and aims not at criticism, but at exposition. He is concerned here with the Summa contra Gentes, and with apologetic and, to some extent, with the Philosophy of Religion, rather than with philosophy proper or with theology.

1 (B. Herder, London; 12/- net.)

2 The Reactions between Dogma and Philosophy illustrated from the Works of St. Thomas Aquinas. By Philip H. Wicksteed, M.A., D.Litt. (Constable, 1926; 10/6 net.)
Western Mysticism
Authors: Whitacare ÆLred
Published: July 2007

In this new edition of Abbot Butler’s book there is a two-fold change. The text itself is the same as in the first edition, except that the Epilogue is placeid at the end of the first part of the book instead of at the end of the second part. But for this minor change of distribution the text of this second edition is a reprint of the first.

There is, however, a valuable addition to the book of some eighty pages, which is called ‘Afterthoughts,’ and with this addition the book opens. These ‘Afterthoughts’ are due to further reading and reflection, and in some degree are due to criticisms of the first edition.

I. The Text.

In the March number of Blackfriars, 1923, we reviewed the text of the book. We made certain criticisms which still hold good; in brief they are the following:

(1) St. Augustine’s theory of the Divine Illumination (text 49-55). The theory that God is the intellects agens was most certainly not admitted by St. Thomas to be tenable and quite probable. This is a question of fact; in the Summa I, Q 77, Art. 4, St. Thomas says: ‘It is impossible . . . .’ Wherever then St. Augustine speaks of ideas being perceived in the light of God, in order to have a right meaning, such passages must be explained according to the doctrine of St. Thomas.

In the Summa I, Q 79, Art. 4, St. Thomas says : ‘According to the documents of our faith the intellects agens separatus is God Himself .... whence from Him the human soul participates intellectual light, and this is the intellectus agens.’
Cyder
Authors: Gray John
Published: July 2007

Cider is vile stuff. This is not demonstration, but abuse. So is bottled eider. So is cider. No matter which kind of cup it is drunk from; whether the blue and white decorated mug, with only one handle; or the other, with tall stem and shallow calix, used at weddings. Spelling its name with Y or Z does not enhance the beverage. Yet the drink exists.

Philips and others have blown up the subject to the limit of elasticity; but all good evidence points to the truth that it is radically the drink of the thirsty labourer.

Hark! where the sweeping scythe now rips along,

Each sturdy Mower, emulous and strong,

Whose writhing form meridian heat defies,

Bends o’er his work, and every sinew tries;

Prostrates the waving treasure at his feet,

But spares the rising clover, short and sweet.

Robert Bloomfield had reason to know what he was writing about; and is a credible witness that sturdy Mower will soon want a drink. If we assemble all the conditions, and have patience to adumbrate the sort of fluid called for, we shall approach the definition of cider. Not water; for the thirsty is not yet in pain and resisting despair. Like the seaman at the capstan or halliards, his cheerfulness is to be kept at due pitch. Enjoyment, such as it is, is already possessed; and has not now to be sought. The state of those who hope to

wade in the moonlight and snatching at a bough

is outside the desires of the moment. A brewage with the two properties of allaying and discouraging thirst is indicated.
Maria Laach and the Liturgy
Authors: McCann Dom Justin
Published: July 2007

The Church has witnessed within the last three decades a great revival of interest in the liturgy and in things liturgical. The great Pope, Pius X, whose motto it was ‘to restore all things in Christ,’ gave a powerful impetus to this movement. The eleven years in which he occupied the See of Peter were years full of achievement, and they have left a lasting impress on the Church. He drove out Modernism and raised the standard of traditional studies. He set up the Biblical Commission and the Biblical Institute, and inaugurated the revision of the Vulgate. The codification of the Canon Law was taken in hand, to be finished under his successor. But greatest and most fruitful of all his efforts, as it appears in the issue, were those which he devoted to the liturgy.

At the beginning of his pontificate he declared that ‘active participation in the most holy mysteries, and in the public and solemn prayer of the Church, is the primary and indispensable source of the true Christian spirit’ (Moiu Profrio, Nov. 22nd, 1903). The liturgy (he said again) is ‘the fountain head of Christian life.’ He regarded liturgical renewal as the direct road to his goal of restoring all things in Christ. And so we find him revising the breviary and the missal and the calendar, fighting vigorously for the restoration of the Gregorian Chant, and preaching early Communion for children and daily Communion for all. His object was to revive in the Catholic consciousness a practical belief in the mystical life of the Church, a genuine realisation of their fellowship with one another and with Christ.
Kevin O'Higgins
Authors: Gwynn Denis
Published: July 2007

It has been the fate of a long line of patriotic young Irishmen since the days of the Act of Union to be cut short in the best promise of their youth; snatched away dramatically and suddenly in a crisis, they have left a memory which has, in all probability, been more cherished than if they had lived to a more mature age. Robert Emmet, Wolfe Tone, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, have through generations been the romantic figures of modern Irish history. It is impossible to think of them otherwise than as young men who had already done their work, in the service of the country to which they had devoted every fibre of their young strength. Thomas Davis, a generation later, is still remembered as the chief figure in the Young Ireland movement, while his abler colleague, Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, is half forgotten. Anticlimax has overtaken all the older leaders of the Irish people with a depth of personal tragedy which is scarcely paralleled in other countries. In Ireland, so long as the struggle for self-government was carried on, there could be no easy retirement nor honours for old age. Daniel O’Connell, Isaac Butt, Parnell, John Redmond, each in his turn, was practically hounded out of public life. Only those who died young have left an untarnished memory.

And no generation of young men in all Irish history has been decimated to the same extent as that of Kevin O’Higgins. I was at school with him at Clon-gowes; and looking back now at the list of those who seemed most full of promise among his contemporaries to within ten years or so, one stands aghast at the devastating record of their mortality.
Jones of Nayland Goes Abroad
Authors: Bracey Robert
Published: July 2007

Of old, the name of Jones of Nayland was an honoured and familiar one, and the twelve volumes of his collected works found a place in the library of every self-respecting clergyman. To-day his is a quite forgotten personality, while as to his writings, the strain of false philosophy which runs through most of them would of itself be enough to warn off the ordinary reader.

When Sir Isaac Newton first propounded the theory of gravitation, it appeared to many religious-minded persons to contain within itself the seeds of atheism. Their alarm was eventually voiced by John Hutchinson (1674—1737), in his Moses’ Principia, in which was built up an opposing system of philosophy based on that inner significance which Hutchinson professed to discover in the sacred scriptures. Our modern books of reference decline altogether to make for us any analysis of Hutchinsonianism, and brush it aside as a worthless and exploded fallacy, utterly inconsistent with the received principles of physics. Yet, crude and wrong-headed as it may have been, in its day it exercised a powerful influence, and made many disciples. Of these the most conspicuous was Jones of Nayland.

The Reverend William Jones (1726—1800)1 was an Anglican divine of great learning, and (what was in the eighteenth century much more singular) one who never sought to make that learning the means of procuring a rich prebend or a comfortable benefice.
Mass
Authors: Essex Edwin
Published: July 2007

In chapel proud or lowly,

High tapers burning dim,

The fervent folk of morning Bow down and wait for Him.

Faithful He comes nor tarries,

Punctual at a phrase,

Swift on the mystic summons That bids Him live, and slays.

Without a stir His presence,

No glory gilds the sky;

Only the few perceiving That Jesus passes by.

Silent is Priest and Victim,

The Slayer and the Slain;

Never a whispered greeting,

He lives and dies again.

May God Who dies at morning,

Though bloodless now His doom,

Find every heart a garden That keeps for Him a tomb.

Edwin Essex, O.P.
The Church's Debt to Science
Authors: Jarrett Bede
Published: July 2007

‘To the Greeks and to the barbarians, to the wise and to the unwise, I am a debtor.’—Rom. I, 14.

In this declaration of St. Paul there seems no sign of humiliation, but something rather of pride. He does not mind at all that he should owe so much to the teaching of others: he seems rather to consider it an advantage to himself. He had indeed stood in the midst of the culture of his time, in the three great streams of it, and he had gained from it at every point. In his own Tarsus he had been in touch with the exquisite beauty of the balanced Greek theories of .art and die ideal poise of the athlete and the prudent management of life. His Roman citizenship had given him a width of tolerance which no mere Greek could know. His Jewish faith had given him a power of insight, a delicacy of conscience, a passion for divine things, a wisdom, a flaming love of God that melted his Greek and Roman heritage into a living sense of rapture, entranced by the comeliness of Christ.

Indeed, the sudden illumination that shone upon him on the Damascus road made him all the more grateful to the earlier knowledge which had led him to this more excellent knowledge and enabled him even better to appreciate it: Greek and Barbarian, wise and simple, all had been his schoolmasters to Christ.

The Greek beauty, the Roman tolerance and quiet dignity, the Jew’s passionate adoration of God—all had been leading him into captivity to the Crucified.
Italy After the Risorgimento
Authors: Bugeja Henry
Published: July 2007

A London Liberal journal, commenting last May on a speech by Mussolini, remarked that II Duce ‘had evidently never heard of II Risorgi-mento, Cavour, Mazzini and Garibaldi. A very sweeping assertion, this, and typical of the irresponsibility of some of our journalistic mentors. So persistently have the names of Cavour and the rest been dinned into the ears of all Italians, that you would more easily find one who has never tasted maccaroni than one who has never heard of them. Benito Mussolini is the least likely of all Italians to yield a surprise in either respect. The rise of Mussolini and Fascism is due precisely to the surfeit of Risorgi-mento, Cavour, Mazzini and Garibaldi which Italians have endured for fifty years, and which at the last brought Italy perilously near to ruin.

The proverbial insularity of Englishmen is never so apparent as when Italy is in question. To the average Englishman the name of Italy suggests Italian opera, coils of spaghetti, organ grinders, and ice-cream sellers : that is all. But even so, it is an improvement on the prejudices of sixty years ago, of which Justin McCarthy writes : ‘It is much to be feared that the popular enthusiasm for the unity and independence of Italy which (then) flamed out in England was only enthusiasm against the Pope. Something, no doubt, was due to the brilliancy of Garibaldi’s exploits in i860, and to the romantic halo which at that time, and for long after, surrounded Garibaldi himself; but no Englishman who thinks coolly over the subject will venture to deny that nine out of every ten enthusiasts for Italian liberty at that time were in favour of Italy because Italy was supposed to be in rebellion against the Pope.’
Falling Leaves
Authors: Essex Edwin
Published: July 2007

Jot willingly,

For men to trample low,

Each autumn tree

Sheds frail leaves to and fro.

Saffron and brown,

And golden-tinted leaves :

She sprinkles down

Her gathered wealth, and grieves.

Edwin Essex, O.P.
The Letters of Saint Catherine of Siena
Authors: Curtayne Alice
Published: July 2007

No one has ever told the story of Saint Catherine of Siena as truthfully as her own Letters tell it. She is more realistic in those pages of her own composition than within the compass of all the varied ‘Lives,’ from Di Capua’s to the most recent and beautiful one by Johannes Joergensen. It is said that the Sienese artists were never so truly inspired as when they painted her, but it is in the art as in the literature around her name : a succession of glimpses. Andrea di Vanni, her contemporary and a pupil in her school of mysticism, has left us one genuine likeness of her m his famous portrait: pallid oval face, long nose, mouth and chin which give some hint of her sheer courage and resolution, dark eyes with the abstracted expression of one who is solely concerned with the internal reality behind ‘the terrible doubt of appearances.’ So, remote and unresponsive, she probably looked when people crowded round her to kiss her hand; a fashion for which she was severely criticized, and which she defended by saying (somewhat wearily, perhaps) that she simply didn’t see how persons greeted her, she was so interested in them. Passing on to Bazzi’s really exquisite ‘Svenimento,’ this, too, probably represents her as she was in that moment of mystery of the Stigmatization: but through the whole gallery of frescoes and pictures, down to those of the sixteenth century, which depict her with the simper of a debutante, the real Catherine is not seized anywhere. Of necessity, the artists have failed more signally than the hagiographers and essayists.
Dr. Burney Redivivivus
Authors: Barcey Robert
Published: July 2007

Just off Leicester Square, in inconspicuous St.

Martin Street, a hoarding may to-day be seen enclosing a desolate plot of land heaped up with rubbish. There, until a short while ago, stood an ancient house, with lofty recessed windows and broad oaken staircase, carved chimney-pieces and painted ceilings, panelled walls and old-fashioned powdering-closet. Thither in the eighteenth century came time and again Sir Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, and many another Immortal; there night after night the greatest singers and violinists of the age filled the modest music-room with melody; and there Samuel Johnson delighted to read and talk and drink tea, and to show a side of his character unsuspected by Boswell—for in St. Martin Street at least there was nothing left of the Bear but his skin, and to those who dwelt there the Sage was mild as summer, full of social good humour, gay as a boy, sweet-tempered, anxious to please. That old house was the home of the Burneys, the happy talented family of which the great Lexicographer was wont to say, ‘I love all that breed, and love them because they love each other’ ; while the head and father of the household was Dr. Charles Burney, and of him Johnson wrote admiringly, ‘I much question if there is in the whole world such another man as Dr. Burney.’

When in 1776 Charles Burney, Doctor of Music and Fellow of the Royal Society, received from his bookseller the first volume of his gigantic General History of Music, he was in the enjoyment of an almost European reputation.
Eritis Sicut Deæ
Authors: Michaelson Alexander
Published: July 2007

‘E.M. Forster warms the teapot well enough,’ said Katherine Mansfield (she had just finished reading Howard's End), ‘ but he does not put in the tea.’ How aptly this sentence defines and relegates our clever (in the worst sense of the word) too clever women novelists, so sensitive to the charms of nature and of art, of human relationships and of animal favourites, so obtuse, so stupid in the vicinity of sin! The demoralised, de-Christianised novel—when the writer has listened deferentially to her inspirer’s Eriiis sicut Dece—bears witness to the absurdities of living without God, or rather in defiance of Him and His known laws.

‘Religion is like adenoids. We have read Freud and Havelock Ellis. We say “syncopated,” not “ragtime” like our elders nor “jazz” like the herd. There is no harm except pain.’ We see and touch in ‘Helen and Felicia (by E. B. C. Jones; Chatto and Windus, 1927) the blight of the author’s immoral theories destroying the vitality of the characters skilfully evoked. Remove chastity from the virtues, exalt conceit, and then write Helen and Felicia. In her Inigo Sandys Miss Jones had attacked, in the most ladylike way, a redoubtable situation; but her Inigo had not been able to give Charles what he wanted : her rashness has grown with the impurity of the modern novel, and her Helen serenely offers her husband to her younger sister, not out of Pandarus perversity, but because she is so fond of both. Eriiis sicut Dece, surely, surely. Rosamond Lehmann at least had left her Judith pondering on Dusty Answers. E. B. C. Jones with less charm, less atmosphere, more experience, has not dared to look beyond the triumph of the three adversaries of the soul.
Gregorio Martinez Sierra and the Catholic Theatre
Authors: Hereford Philip
Published: July 2007

On disait i° édification, 20 art (ou métier), 30 divertissement, sacrifiant trop souvent au premier terme les deux autres. Nous disons, nous: divertissement: le thMtre n’est pas la chaire, la comédie n’est pas le prêche . . . ne confondons jamais les genres ... “art (ou métier): les rfegles du sermon sont une chose et les regies du drame une autre : Dieu veut de l’ouvrage bien fait ... Edification qui est le résultat suprême. C’est par le moyen d’un art sftr, par le plaisir qu’il donnera, que nous parviendrons 4 porter les 4m es sur le plan de Dieu oh nous voulons les aider 4 revivre, 4 se retrouver, 4 se reconnaltre, 4 fonder, 4 agir.

Henri GhEon.

Within the past twelve months three plays by Gregorio Martinez Sierra have been produced in London : last winter Canddn de cuna and El Enamorado, and, now running at the Strand Theatre, El reino de Dios. Of these the first and last may be said to belong to the théâtre chrétien (and Catholic) of modern Europe, considered in its wider sense. It is not proposed here to discuss Martinez Sierra as play wright, novelist, propagandist, publisher (SE Rena-cimiento’), manager of a theatre (’ Eslava’ ), producer of plays—his activity is enormous—but to consider briefly those of his plays whose setting or action has a definitely religious colouring, and in particular El reino de Dios, Cancion de cuna, Lirio entre espinas, Los -pastores, for interesting though they are, we may leave out of present account his free adaptations of old plays, such as La adultera fenitente by Agusti'n Moreto and others (on St. Theodora of Alexandria) or the Lucero de nuestra salvacidn of Inocencio de Salcedo (Our Lady’s leave-taking of her Son when He started on His last journey to Jerusalem). In these he has, so to speak, revivified old bones, the ideas are ready made.
A New View of James II
Authors: Manson Ælefric
Published: July 2007

The problem of this book is important, and the solution given one we are unable to accept. James II, we are told, pursued two aims, the restoration of popular monarchy and toleration. He was defeated by the newly rich. He died virtually a martyr for the faith. With almost the insistence of a litany Mr. Belloc warns us that the ‘academic historians’ have very much erred in their ways. They are not denounced by name—a curious mercy in view of the fact that on this reign both Catholic and Protestant writers are in substantial agreement. Even the psalmist felt it excessive when he said all men are liars.

We learn that in spite of foreign parentage James was intensely national. It is indeed touching to know how much British bravery appealed to him. The sentiment, however, cannot have been overwhelming. Tt was not sufficiently strong to stay his feverish money from Louis XIV at the beginning of his reign, on his humble excuses to that monarch for summoning a Parliament, or his resolve to regain his throne with the aid of Frenchmen. It did not preserve him from a ruthless disregard of the law of the land. In the Hales case, for example, he removed four indocile judges and the Solicitor-General. To secure the repeal of the Test Act he obtained the resignation or dismissal of half the Lords Lieutenant and eight hundred magistrates and filled their places with his own nominees.
Cardinal Newman and the Function of Education
Authors: Thristram Henery
Published: July 2007

‘If all the nonsense which, in the past quarter of a century, has been talked on all other subjects were thrown into one scale, and all that has been talked on the subject of education alone were thrown into the other, I think the latter would preponderate.’

This sweeping statement—which I borrow as a useful diving-board, a plank from which I may comfortably plunge in medias res, is not my own. Neither would I have it thought that I identify myself with the opinion so tartly expressed, nor held to be casting any undeserved reflection on the writers who, during the course of the present century, have dealt so laboriously and so voluminously with educational principles and theories. Education is proverbially a dull subject. It is also a subject on which every man thinks he has something to say. Naturally, therefore, it becomes the focus of a considerable amount of dull nonsense—dull because only the man of practical experience can find, or make it, interesting—nonsense because it is pre-eminently a subject in which the apparently obvious is most often wrong.

My words are a quotation. The novelist, Thomas Love Peacock, in whom there has lately been a revival of interest, puts them into the mouth of that estimable and excellent clergyman, Dr. Opimian, the most charming character in that most charming novel Gryll Grange, which was the fruit of the Indian summer of its author’s genius. Peacock wrote this novel in i860 after many years of silence.
Francisco de Vitoria
Authors: Macdiarmid A.C.
Published: July 2007

A Recent paragraph in a Catholic paper stated that ‘the Francisco de Vitoria chair of international law was inaugurated on 10th November last at Salamanca University. The object of the chair is to make better known the teachings of the Dominican Friar Francisco de Vitoria on the rights of men.’-

The fact that Spain numbered among her illustrious sons the man, who, rather than Grotius, may be regarded as the founder of international law in Europe was evidently forgotten by a section of the press in this country when it greeted with surprised protests her request to be granted a seat on the permanent Council of the League of Nations.

To scholars and jurists Francisco de Vitoria has long been known.

The first volume of the ‘Classics of International Law,’ published at Washington in 1917 is devoted to him. It contains the Latin text, with an English translation, of his great ‘Relectiones,’ ‘De Indis’ and ‘De jure belli,’ with an introductory sketch of his life by the Belgian Professor E. Nys. The General Editor of the Series, James Brown Scott, President of the American Institute of International Law, writes: ‘The General Editor is unwilling to allow this volume to go to press without a tribute in passing to the broad-minded and generous-hearted Dominican, justly regarded as one of the founders of International Law, and whose two tractates here reproduced are, as Thucydides would say, a perpetual possession to the international lawyer ....
Isis Unveiled
Authors: Michaelson Alexander
Published: July 2007

Madame Blavatsky, purple-lilac (I thought her colour that of a certain type of stout female foreigner, red and white blended into violet, but as her most vivid chronicler insists on her livid earth-grey skin, it must have been the purple-lilac of wrath) sat on the great sofa in the great drawing room in Richmond Terrace, Whitehall. Her unwieldy girth obscured her colossal height. She wore a black sacque, not her familiar red flannel wrapper. She smoked. Her small boneless hands, her many rings, her pale turquoise eyes—how they have been described, how they have cheated, flashed, deceived. I would call her the Therese Humbert of Theosophy if Theosophy contained as much as the empty safe of Madame Humbert. She was attacking Frederick Myers, the Zelator of the Phantasms of the living, as I came in : no doubt the S. P. R.’s adverse report, though not yet published, was known to her. She was afraid and indignant. Her hostess, who had patted and fed so many lions, so many lambs, in Paris and in London, who had figured so romantically in Flaubert’s life, so unforgettably in Merimee’s reminiscences, could not shield her son-in-law from the outraged Priestess of Isis. She could not, as once in the Place Vendome, decapitate all Oscar Wilde’s stories with hospitable interruptions : Encore un biscuit, chere Princesse! Encore un verre d’orgeat, chere Princesse! Madame Blavatsky was no mere Danubian (no Nubian even like Anatole France’s minuscule adorer), and she cried out: ‘Mr. Myers, if you had not made me so angry I would cause all the bells in this house to ring’ (we all held our breaths —would she relent?), ‘but I will not do so.’
As We were Saying Yesterday
Authors: Illa-Barry Juan
Published: July 2007

It was the twenty-ninth of January, 1577. The city of Salamanca, that Athens of sixteenth century Spain, showed no signs of unwonted animation. The students of its famous University prepared to attend their classes apparently unconscious of any untoward happening. Nevertheless an historic scene was about to be enacted in their midst. One of their professors, that valiant fighter, Fray Luis de Leon, was about to resume among them his interesting and instructive lectures after an interruption of five years. The ignorance of some, the malice of others, the impetuosity of his own temperament, had condemned him to pass that period in a harsh prison. Now at length, the Holy Office of the Inquisition had given sentence, exculpatory, even honourable for the accused, establishing his innocence and putting an end to his confinement, as was the invariable custom of this Tribunal in its dealings with those who had been found blameless.

The throng of hearers who knew full well the passionate nature of our hero were in eager expectation of hearing from his lips either some virulent denunciation of his enemies, some biting allusions to their attacks, or> at least a lively, animated and at the same time harrowing exposition of the sufferings he had been compelled to undergo. But what was not their astonishment when their revered professor opened his lecture in these memorable terms: Dicebamus hesterna die; as we were saying yesterday.... just as if the five years spent in prison had been completely blotted out from his memory, leaving not the faintest trace of bitterness against the authors of his punishment, This lofty and noble attitude won for him

the respect and admiration of his contemporaries whilst bringing into relief his ardent and impetuous, withal generous and magnanimous disposition.
A True Blue
Authors: McNabb Vincent
Published: July 2007

This sketch of C— H— is written against my death. Ever since God took him down from his cross there has murmured in my conscience the phrase, ‘You must tell the world of him before you die.’ To leave his story untold would be to meet death with unpaid debts. To tell his story will be a royal preparation to go where he went even if in my cowardice, I cannot follow his hero way of going.

His father, who held high office in his native town of M------, thought to prepare him for citizenship of England by sending him to Oxford. I am not sure he ever won, or even sought to win, academic honours. It was Oxford of the playing fields and playing honours that made him captive. Perhaps with fine medieval chivalry he could not brook the sacrilege of a liberal education used as a mere preparation for a business career. An instinct, the very soul of scholarship, forbade him to make the higher serve the lower even at the risk of losing kindred or friends.

It was in the playing fields, where honour, and not gain, is youth’s only prize that C— H— learned to follow his leader, Jesus Christ. Perhaps it befell him as it befell the youth Edmund—who in these same playing fields of Oxford saw Jesus of Nazareth as a fair, smiling boy! Be that as it may, when C— H— heard the call of Christ beckoning him out of the playing fields of Oxford and of life into the Church and into the cloister he did not lag in following his leader.
Erasmus at Cambridge
Authors: Wilby Noel Macdonald
Published: July 2007

It is to John Fisher, most illustrious of her Chancellors, that Cambridge owes the introduction of the New Learning which transformed the whole academic system and inspired it with fresh vigour. In his early years at the University Italian scholarship was beginning to arouse the interest of the learned; and the name of his friend Erasmus is forever associated with the Humanist movement and the study of Greek which was then beginning to revolutionise the academic world.

Perhaps few men have ever been more persistently misrepresented, both by contemporaries and by posterity, than the most famous scholar of the Renaissance, Erasmus of Rotterdam. The testimony of his own works was, and is, often either ignored or totally misread; and a number of his later biographers show a distressing lack of any sense of humour—without which he must indeed remain an enigma to the most learned mind—that alone makes them incapable of understanding the witty genius who complained so bitterly when his contemporaries took him too seriously. Some even hail him as one of the leaders of the Reformation, ranging him with Luther and his companions, against whose works the great scholar fought with all the might of his pen. Even the ‘uncoguid’ among those of his own faith have distrusted Erasmus. Surely the best answer to all criticisms— granting all his faults—is the eloquent fact that the two men who knew him best in England, and who stood by him to the end, were Thomas More and John Fisher. If it be true that we may judge a man by his friends, the judgment should stand Erasmus in good stead.
The Liturgical Edict of Pope Pius X
Authors: Maginty Edward A.
Published: July 2007

St. Cecilia’s Day, November 22nd, 1928, will be the twenty-fifth anniversary of the promulgation by Pope Pius X of his edict upon liturgical music. To those who have the duty of putting its provisions into force it is too well known to warrant recapitulation. Its essential features, however, may be briefly summarised. As there was nothing in the economy of the private chapels of religious institutions to call for animadversion, the Motu profrio had no reference to them; it concerned only public churches. Upon the latter were laid three charges, light and unimportant in themselves, but, in the anaemic liturgical conditions of the time, so heavy as to create something of alarm. It was ordained that:—

(1) The ancient melodic chant should be restored; first for the reason of its appropriate and intrinsic excellence ; secondly, as the most congruous means to a more serious end, namely that the faithful might once more resume the right, filched from them at the Reformation, to sing the music assigned to them from the beginning;

(2) Where it might for good reasons appear desirable that the harmony of a select choir should continue to be substituted for the collective singing of the congregation, while a guarded permission might be given for more recent compositions, good and serious enough to be worthy of liturgical use, the classical polyphony of the Roman school should be preferred;

(3) On no account should women be admitted as members of such a select choir.
Christ's Prayer in the Garden
Authors: Walker Luke
Published: July 2007

In a useful work on the doctrine of the Incarnation published last year, Dr. Arendzen, speaking of the Agony in the Garden, writes as follows: ‘It would be a mistake to regard “this chalice” as the torments and death on the Cross, and to think that He prayed to escape crucifixion and was refused. The Chalice was the agony in the Garden. He asked it to pass away and it passed away.’ Readers of this passage would be naturally led to suppose that an opinion so confidently expressed was in no way open to question. An attempt is here made to show that it is open to question, and that there exists another, and much better founded, interpretation of this prayer of Our Lord.

Saint Mark gives the prayer in these words: ‘Abba, Father, all things are possible to Thee. Remove this chalice from me. Yet not what I will, but what Thou wilt’ (xiv, 36).

The first point to be decided is the meaning of the words ‘this chalice.’ We say, then, that Our Lord means by this phrase His passion and death on the Cross. First of all, this meaning is clear from a comparison with St. John xviii, II: ‘Jesus therefore said to Peter: Put up, thy sword into the scabbard. The chalice which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?’ Here, certainly, ‘the chalice’ stands for His passion and death. The Agony in the Garden was already over, the soldiers were about to arrest Jesus and to lead Him away, and Peter draws his sword in an attempt to save Him by force from the death which, he fears, awaits Him.
Letter of Vladimir Solovief to L. M. Tolstoy
Authors: Solovief Vladimir
Published: July 2007

DEAR L. M.,

Since I last wrote to you I have been twice seriously ill, so I will not postpone further the important talk I owe you.

It seems to me that all our differences may be reduced and focussed into one concrete point—the Resurrection of Christ. I think from your own point of view (if I have understood your last writings correctly) there is nothing to prevent you from acknowledging the truth of the Resurrection: there is even something which compels you to acknowledge it. I shall first speak of the idea of the Resurrection in general, and then of Christ’s Resurrection. (1) You admit that our world changes progressively, passing from inferior forms and grades of life to higher and more perfect forms. (2) You admit the reciprocal action of the inward and outward (physical) life, and: (3) upon the ground of this reciprocal action you admit that the perfection of the spiritual being is expressed by its complete control of its own physical life, by subjugating and taking possession of it. Starting from these three points, I imagine we necessarily attain the truth of the Resurrection. In fact, the spiritual power in relation to the material being is not a permanent but an increasing proportion. In the animal kingdom it generally exists in a hidden potential state; in mankind it is set free and becomes visible. But this liberation is effected at first only as an ideal, in the shape of a rational consciousness.