bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Newman and the National Church
Authors: Tindal-Atkinson Aelwin
Published: July 2007

From whatever angle the Oxford Movement is examined, it is impossible to disregard the spirit of alarm which informed its opening phase. Reforms long overdue were beginning to take effect; further reforms of a more searching character were to follow. Outworn institutions and rusty machinery could not remain untouched when the national spirit was demanding radical developments in political and social institutions. Excluding a small body of the clergy, Englishmen of all ranks within and without the Established Church regarded that body and its ministers as an institution dependent for its existence upon the Body Politic. For them the Church of England was little more than a State Department; and in common with the rest this too must submit to the reforms which it urgently required.

Since the days of Elizabeth the National Church had been immediately sensitive to every political development: each successive crisis had struck it violently and left deep scars. With the termination of the Stuart period and the rejection of ‘Divine Right,’ the great days of Caroline High Churchmanship had come to an end. The High Church party as an effective power died within the Church, whilst the Non-Juring Sect languished into insignificance from lack of an object. The volumes of Caroline divinity remained untouched on the library shelves: theological interests, rules of Christian Perfection and Sacramental Doctrine had become unfashionable.
A Note on the University Sermons
Authors: Manson Ælfric
Published: July 2007

A thorough discussion of the content of Newman’s University Sermons would exceed the proper length of an article in a review. It would involve a study of his thought as a whole, for they are essentially incomplete, and deal with problems that exercised him throughout his life. In particular, a careful comparison would have to be made between them and the Grammar of Assent. By incomplete, however, we must not be understood to mean that they are sketchy or immature or unimportant. We mean simply that they represent the first stage, the initial orientation, of a synthesis which being organic and alive, naturally in the course of time developed. Far from being unimportant they are an impressive statement of the relations between faith and reason and mark a turning point in the history of modern religious thought. Newman himself, re-reading them in Rome after his conversion, wrote in a letter to Dalgairns: ‘I must say I think they are as a whole, the best things I have written, and I cannot believe that they are not Catholic, and will not be useful’ and writing to James Hope he characterises the volume as ‘the best, not the most perfect, book I have done. I mean there is more to develop in it though it is imperfect.’ Clearly he felt that they treated of fundamental issues and were personally significant as expressions of his thought.
Newman's Analysis of Development
Authors: Humphries Silvester
Published: July 2007

The notion of a development of Christianity is found in Tertullian and in Vincent of Lérins; indeed it is an immediate conclusion from the words of Our Lord, ‘I am not come to destroy but to fulfil.’ Yet no one gave the subject especial attention before Newman. The historical spirit is not rarely alien to the mind of the theologian, and theology has been received with little sympathy since the rise of modern historical science in the eighteenth century.

Newman, widely read in the Fathers, but saturated in the spirit of the Oxford of his day, approached the question by attempting to explain away a suspicion that the Roman Catholic Church of 1845 was the same body as the Primitive Church of historical research. Startling divergence seemed to reveal, as well as to conceal, an ultimate identity. His reconciliation of this seeming contradiction was the conclusion, but not the purpose, of his writing the essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. The historical, theological, philosophical and psychological vistas which the book opens up are manifold: we can here concern ourselves only with its analysis of the subject itself.
The Centre Party
Authors: Pottmann Karl
Published: July 2007

Catholic political action in Germany dates from the period after the Congress of Vienna. Three main questions influenced its growth; the spread of Liberalism; the Austro-Prussian struggle for leadership among the German states; and the Kulturkampf. The question of Austria or Prussia was really settled in 1866 in favour of the latter, but the problem lingered on until recently under the name of Particularism (Rights of Federal States), though it had comparatively little influence upon the thought of the Catholic party. Liberalism and the Kulturkampf had a more determinate effect. Liberalism and, later, its counterpart Socialism resulted in the separation of Catholic political theory from the commonly held political theory of the period; a result of the Kulturkampf was to form this theory into a political party.

It was natural that Catholic politics and thought should be opposed to the Liberal conceptions of society and the State. Were not most of the mcontrary to the Church’s doctrine of natural design? Thus in 1838 the mighty genius of Goerres already foreshadowed the rise of German Catholicism against the current political creed.
Two Portrait’s From de Vigny
Authors: Wilson Cecil H. S.
Published: July 2007

Amidst the welter of memoirs of the Napoleonic era De Vigny’s Servitude et Grandeur Militaires always seems to me to hold a peculiar charm and attraction. The very opening sentence of the book strikes that keynote of gentle melancholy and disillusion which is so characteristic of the high-souled Captain Renaud with his famous Canne de Jonc. ‘ If it is true, according to the Catholic poet, that there is nothing so painful as remembering happy days in the midst of misery, it is also true that the heart finds a certain happiness in recalling times of hardship and slavery, in a period of freedom and calm.’ This same air of philosophic detachment and experienced judgment pervades all the author’s reflections on the rottenness of the military system of the age and the hollowness of military glory. Incidentally the book contains also in the story of Laurette ou le Cachet Rouge, one of the tenderest and most poignant love-stories ever written.

In the course of the Captain’s memoirs there stand out in clear detachment the portraits of two of the leading protagonists in the great struggle for supremacy, one of the Emperor himself, the other of the most chivalrous and high-souled of all England’s naval commanders, the illustrious Admiral Collingwood.
Rome in the Writings of Cardinal Wiseman
Authors: Borenius Tancred
Published: July 2007

A great and peculiarly many-sided historic character like that of Cardinal Wiseman must always offer a number of angles of approach to the student. Speaking more particularly of his literary work, the power of retaining after death the art of making friends (to use the phrase of Hazlitt) is one which Wiseman may be said to have possessed in an exceptional degree. As a constant and ever-appreciative reader of Wiseman—nowadays, I venture to think, read far less than he deserves to be—I may perhaps in the course of years have developed some points of view which it is worth while setting out in a connected fashion: though I should perhaps warn the reader that I shall have no startling discoveries to announce, no unknown material to make public.

The peculiar importance which attaches to Rome as a key to the personality and achievement of Wiseman springs, of course, primarily from the fact that so long a period of his youth and early manhood was spent there almost without interruption: practically the whole, that is, of twenty-two years, from 1818 to 1840. And the call of Rome was one which Wiseman had felt ever since his earliest youth; in that incomparable first chapter of what is, I think, perhaps his most lovable book, the Recollections of the Last Four Popes and of Rome in their Times (1858), in which he describes in so marvellously graphic a fashion the arrival of the first party of English students, sent to re-occupy the English College at Rome—in that chapter he reveals that the history and antiquities of Rome had formed the bonds of a little college society to which he had belonged, no doubt as its moving spirit, at Ushaw; and when much later in life he received the congratulations of St. Cuthbert’s College upon his elevation to the Cardinalate, the phrase which came quite naturally to him, in explaining why he had left Ushaw so early, when barely sixteen, was that of ‘the splendid temptation of Rome,’
The Necessity of Revolution
Authors: Prince J. F. T.
Published: July 2007

He is an inept apologist who urges that if the poor suffer the pangs of hunger, the rich too suffer the pangs of indigestion, that surfeit is no less painful than want. It is a mischievous casuistry that reminds us that nervous prostration is as often an attendant of prolonged satisfaction as of perennial anxiety as to where the next meal is coming from. Happiness is indeed relative to our wants, which are limited by our environment and by individual and social temperament. But it is dangerous to argue that between this class and that there is nothing to choose so far as the subjective enjoyment of life is concerned. In the brute economy, the lives of sheep-devouring wolves and wolf-devoured sheep enjoy doubtless the same average of pain and gratification; we can predicate of each vessel the same fullness according to its capacity in nature’s, scale. But Dives and Lazarus are not (I mean in the subjective order) the analogues of sheep and wolf. For Lazarus is a man: Dives too: the primate mammal, homo sapiens; though each may feel some difficulty in predicating it of the other.

These are incredulous times and we must be very careful. We are most of us as fatuous when we explicate the problem of pain as when we attempt to analyse the economy of its distribution amongst men. We remember having it explained to us in early youth that pain is primarily a prophylactic whose function is to sound the alarm of lesion and disease lest (fatally) they go unperceived.
Those Were the Days
Authors: Preedy John
Published: July 2007

Recently there came into my possession a faded copy of the Gloucestershire Chronicle of October 28th, 1876. Its immediate interest for me was an account of the death, truly described as melancholy, of a member of my family. Whilst shooting wild fowl on the banks of the Severn with two friends, he had swum out to reclaim a widgeon winged by one of them, and was drowned in spite of his friends’ efforts at rescue. In the obvious way peculiar to the period the coroner is reported as having addressed the jury thus: We seem to have all the evidence. It is a most melancholy case; certainly one of the most melancholy that I have had to sit upon for some time. It is a very sad thing—a young fellow, whom most of us knew, went out for amusement and lost his life. I suppose the water was cold? .... It is a melancholy and sad case. . . . No doubt the poor gentleman met his death accidentally and that will be your verdict.’

After indulging in what I must call a certain vicarious concern in this grief that was, I turned my attention to the remainder of the paper, so unfamiliar in its size, its closely printed columns, and its lack of pictorial illustration. There is a certain measured tread in the style of newspaper writing, even in the advertisements, of those days. We observe the same characteristic in the old bound Tablets and Punches of the ‘70’s. To us who are accustomed to find our persiflage light and airy, there is an inverted comicality in the older ways.
Beauty Loses Herself
Authors: Pepler Conrad
Published: July 2007

A modern proverb has arisen as a star to guide the erring artist: ‘Look after Truth and Goodness, and Beauty will look after herself.’ But let the artist beware. Such a star may prove to be a will-o’-the-wisp. At first sight the proverb appears to contain the complete ethic for aesthetics, reducing the tough problem of beauty to a simple and practical formula. How attractive to unite the Good and the True in holy wedlock and then turning discover Beauty the bridesmaid carrying the train behind. Simplifications, however, have their dangers. To bring them in touch with reality requires such care that in practice they become most complex, disclosing many an attractive but misleading view. A simplification should only be the completion of thought, never the commencement. For Mr. Gill this proverb has come as the answer to a long process of reasoning, as appears from this volume. He thus avoids the only serious pitfall. But other artists who begin with this motto may not be so fortunate.

Truth belongs to the mind, goodness to the will, and beauty is the fruit of both the mind and the will. Any being in its perfection will be true in its correspondence to God’s idea of it; it will be good in its dependency on God’s will; and will be beautiful in its reflection of the harmony of God’s mind and will, which have produced the first two effects. Therefore beauty follows necessarily from the truth and goodness of a thing. Concentration on the first and the second produces the third automatically, since it is nothing less than the harmony between those two.
Louise, Duchesse de la Valliere, Carmelite
Authors: Trouncer Margaret
Published: July 2007

In a long narrow gallery of Versailles seldom opened to the public hangs a picture by Nocret of Louise Duchesse de la Vallière in court dress of the late seventeenth century. There is something strangely haunting about the beautiful aristocratic face with its great sad eyes ringed by dark circles. For all her fine parure she has the air of one whose nights are spent in weeping. And now her life has been written by one who seems to have crept into her very heart and learnt its whispered secret; a work so different from the usual ones on Louis XIV’s mistresses, and justly crowned by the Académie Française.

Here is the story. In 1661, the sixteen-year-old Madame Henriette d’Angleterre married Louis XIV’s brother. Among her ladies-in-waiting was Mlle. Louise de la Baume le Blanc, of Blois, aged seventeen. She had fair hair and innocent almond-shaped blue eyes, ‘ses yeux longs,’ and though she limped slightly, she was very exquisite. Madame herself said she was ‘douce, précieuse, admirable’ . . . ‘dans ses beaux yeux une douce langueur.’ As a little girl in Tours and at Blois, she had been greatly neglected by her mother and allowed to run wild. She had seen the King for the first time on his way to marry the Spanish Infanta. It was strange that on the high chimney of her chateau was the device: Ad principem ut ad ignes amor indissolubilis which by a strained translation is interpreted as foretelling her love for Louis and then its sacrifice to the fires of a greater love.
The Methods of the Group Movement
Authors: Southwell Julian
Published: July 2007

Is any religion better than none? The Church of England has evidently come to this conclusion, for it is hard to believe that any other alternative would have led the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London to give a personal ‘commission’ at Lambeth and St. Paul’s to an American Lutheran minister and a mixed crowd of five hundred amateur evangelists of every religious denomination for the purpose of converting London. I think it is true to say that fifteen years ago this could not have happened, and it is little less than a confession of spiritual penury that it can happen now. That the Bishop of Calcutta is sponsoring the Group Movement ‘Campaign’ has, perhaps, something to do with this official patronage, but nevertheless there is little that accords with the traditions and beliefs of the best type of Anglicanism in this strange mingle-mangle of Lutheran pietism, psycho-analytic methods and modern publicity propaganda.
The Study of Theology
Authors: Walker Luke
Published: July 2007

I Wish, in this paper, to say something about the spirit in which theology should be studied. I begin with a quotation for the length of which I must crave your indulgence :

This then is a second and not the least pernicious peculiarity of Romanism. It professes to be a complete theology. It arranges, adjusts, explains, exhausts every part of the Divine Economy. It may be said to leave no region unexplored, no heights unattempted, rounding off its doctrines with a neatness and finish which is destructive of many of the most noble and most salutary exercises of mind in the individual Christian. That feeling of awe and piety which the mysteriousness of the Gospel should excite fades away under the fictitious illumination which is poured over the entire Dispensation. Criticism, we know, is commonly considered fatal to poetical fervour and imagination ; and in like manner this technical religion destroys the delicacy and reverence of the Christian mind. So little has actually been revealed to us in a systematic way, that the genuine science of the Gospel, carried to its fullest limits, has no tendency to foster a spirit of rationalism. But Rome would classify and number everything; she would settle every sort of question, as if determined to detect and compass by the reason what runs out into the next world or is lost in this .... It is sufficiently evident what an opening is given by a theology of so ambitious a character to pride and self-confidence. It has been said that knowledge is power; and at least it creates in us the imagination of possessing it. This is what makes scientific and physical researches so intoxicating; it is the feeling they inspire of perfect acquaintance with the constitution of nature.
Mediaeval and Modern World
Authors: Foster P. D.
Published: July 2007

On a bright day in June of 1376, With the mistral blowing the brown waters of the Rhone into waves, and the sunlight shining on the walls of the new palace at Avignon, a woman on horseback entered beneath the town gates and went to her lodgings in the twisting streets. The woman was one of twenty-five children of a poor Sienese dyer. Persuaded of her religious vocation, she had persisted in a life of chastity and self-discipline, become a Dominican Tertiary, and, while still carrying on her household duties, had acquired a reputation in Siena for sanctity and for that power, miraculous in the uneducated daughter of an ordinary citizen, of solving the most difficult problems with a sanity and common sense, a grasp of principle, and an insistence in purpose, which are the marks of great Saints alone. Her reputation had spread through Siena, through Italy, and to-day she was entering Avignon as the mediator between the city of Florence and the Frenchman Pierre Roger, become Pope at Avignon. The embassy, however, was not the main purpose in the remarkable woman’s mind. She had quietly resolved in the back streets of Siena to bring back the Pope from Avignon to Rome.
The Release
Authors: Lovibond A. F.
Published: July 2007

A Girl sat alone in Room No. 10 of the Hotel du Corbeau. From the window she could hear a rush of movement and voices, a perpetual, driving rhythm; it was the Rhine. Nothing could be seen except high fortifications and one or two sentries on guard. But the girl waited by the window, listening.

She was used to listening. For more than three years, she had seen none of the events around her, only heard sounds and guessed at their meaning. Now, as she listened to the river, it became the beating of drums and the ringing of the tocsin and the shouting of words which she tried in vain to catch. The old, sickening agony swept over her. Would no one tell her the news? Why wouldn’t they let her go to her mother? And where was her aunt Elisabeth? Then she seemed to be with her mother, aunt, and brother again. It was a shivering January morning, and they could hear from below the barred window, as she now heard from the river, the cry of ‘Execution of Capetel’ But the noise of the river swelled out, growing mad, exultant, and hateful, till it became the noise of the mob one day in September. ‘Mon Dieu, Madame, it is the head of the Princesse de Lamballe that they are carrying!’ Through the confusion, she could still hear those words and see her mother’s face turn into a senseless mask.
One Way Out
Authors: Scott J. M. D.
Published: July 2007

When Russia fell under Bolshevik rule in 1917 it appeared as if a civilization had passed away. In 1919, when Fascism appeared in Italy, it seemed at first that this was but another form of Communism, but by 1926 it was clear that Fascism was making good, and the reconciliation with the Holy See in 1929 established it as the great political idea of the age. To-day it is permeating society. The U.S.A. and Germany are Fascist in principle, if not in name. Catholic Austria has set up a Fascist government. Ireland is fast approaching the same position, and a Fascist Party has been established in France. We may well ask ourselves what this Fascism is, and how it has succeeded so quickly in capturing the great nations of the world, with the exception of Great Britain.

The first thing to note is that Fascism and Communism have succeeded in Italy and Russia because their leaders believed in the soundness of their principles and had the courage to put them into practice. The root idea of Fascism is Action, and therefore it is the opposite of Parliamentarianism, which is founded on Debate. Debate is perhaps a satisfactory form of procedure when a landed oligarchy is the dominating power in society, and when the opposing parties have common interests in preserving this power, but when real control has passed into the hands of those who have no stake in the country, and parties have arisen which are opposed on the fundamental question of the form of society itself, it is an impossible position.
Dangers of Diagnosis
Authors: Swinstead A. E. H.
Published: July 2007

The body politic is sick, and physicians crowd to the bedside. We must surely still be very rich, for only the rich ever have so many doctors. It is the paradise of the diagnostician. Take up any paper or review, and you will find some symptom of the general disease explained: get this right, they say, and health will return. Unfortunately, the doctors do not agree, and this is not really surprising. If you are ill, the doctors may disagree about the treatment, they may even diifer in their diagnosis, but they are at least agreed about one thing, and that thing is health. Here the parallel breaks down hopelessly; there are nearly as many different ideas of social health as there are diagnoses. The patient may sometimes be excused for feeling that he prefers the disease he already has to the other disease that he is promised as a cure. And it is not as if the notion of health were always a reasoned thing. All kinds of preferences based, however unconsciously, on prejudice or personal taste and convenience have their say in it. If you doubt this, read Mr. Clayton’s article in the December Blackfriars, apply the method to yourself, and then plead Not Guilty, if you can. This is, in brief, the case for Catholic diagnosis of the public disease, for Catholicism knows what health is, and therefore knows what is disease and what is not. Not that individual Catholics may not be mistaken; failure to apply their own principles to themselves will make them as liable to prejudice and selfinterest as other men. But the principles are there, clear and ascertainable and constant, and for this reason alone Catholic diagnosis would be irreplaceable.
Economics, Mothercraft and Leakage II
Authors: Valentine Ferdinand
Published: July 2007

The social conditions of our times which we have briefly examined in our previous article have seriously impaired the art or craft of motherhood. The principal reason for this has been economic insecurity together with the contributory causes already referred to, the ‘dissipation of life’ and the diminished population of the home.

The economic security of the home and the stability given by the indissoluble marriage bond are ordained to the end of parenthood and especially to that of motherhood, and any deterioration in these two conditions must inevitably tend to destroy the home as the medium of Christian education.

It is of supreme importance, therefore, if the art of motherhood is to be preserved, to safeguard the economic security of the home; and if the leakage from the Catholic Church in England is due in large measure to the failure of the home as a means of Christian education, then the first remedy for such leakage is economic.
Charles Lamb and St. Thomas Aquinas
Authors: Wright Dudley
Published: July 2007

A strange juxtaposition! Yet a perfectly warranted one.

On 25th March, 1829, Charles Lamb wrote to his friend, Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet, telling him of some books he had purchased and then he went on to say :

And also one of whom I have oft heard and had dreams, but never saw in the flesh—that is, in sheepskin—the whole Theologic Works of Thomas Aquinas ! My arms ache with lugging it a mile to the stage; but the burden was a pleasure . . . . O, the glorious old Schoolman ! There must be something in him. Such great names imply greatness .... How I will revel in his cobwebs and subtleties, till my brain spins.

Seven months afterwards—on the 26th of October—he hears of the illness of Coleridge and he seems to have thought that the reading of St. Thomas would do him good, for he wrote to Mr. Gilman on that day :

How grieved I was to hear in what indifferent health Coleridge has been and I not to know of it! A little School Divinity well applied may be healing. I send him Honest Tom of Aquin, fhat was always an obscure great idea to me. I never thought or dreamt to see him in the flesh, but t’other day I rescued him from a stall in Barbican and brought him off in triumph. He comes to greet Coleridge’s acceptance, for his shoe-latchets I am unworthy to unloose.
An Open Letter to An Anglo-Catholic
Authors: McNabb Vincent
Published: July 2007

The long, almost life-long, friendship between us will dear this letter from the charge of impertinence. At the outset of our friendship we recognised that though we did not see eye to eye in matters of revealed truth, yet no statement of what either of us regarded as true could endanger our friendship.

It was a very friendly gesture of yours to send me the manifesto which your wing of the Anglo-Catholic Movement has drawn up. Your name does not appear amongst those that have officially given the manifesto their signature. But I know that among the many who will champion the manifesto none will outrun your whole-heartedness.

The Centenary of the Anglo-Catholic, or Tractarian, Movement begets almost a whirlwind of thought. Were it kept, as it will not be kept, by an absolutely united body of believers it would make an old Catholic like myself recall the dramatic story of a movement which, after an almost contemptible beginning in an Oxford common-room (like so many other lost and forgotten causes), went on to give the Catholic Church two cardinals, many bishops and priests, and a flock of lay converts perhaps unparalleled in the history of West or East. Amidst the regrets we still feel that Froude, Keble, Pusey were not given to us, yet we thank God for Newman, Manning, Ward, Wilberforce and a host of others. But our mingled thoughts of thanksgiving and'regret are not as simple as a unanimous Centenary might arouse. Your manifesto has further complicated our emotions. Let me approach this complication by an authentic incident. Some years ago a beneficed clergyman of the Church of England, a devoted Anglo-Catholic, consulted me about his duty to his conscience.
The Death of Saint Thomas
Authors: Anstruther Godfrey
Published: July 2007

In January 1274 St. Thomas Aquinas set out from Naples, where he had been teaching since October 1272, to attend the second Council of Lyons. He was under fifty years of age, and though he was extremely sensitive to physical pain, there is no evidence that his health was bad. He had been working as hard as ever during 1273, when he published, among other works, his commentaries on Romans, First Corinthians, and Aristotle’s De Generatione and De Cœlo. Moreover his commentaries on the Pater Noster, Ave Maria, Credo and on the Decalogue are the notes of his sermons preached in the vernacular during the Lent of 1273. Hence there is very little to suggest that he was in failing health, and at all events, he was well enough to undertake, on foot and in winter, the long journey from Naples to Lyons. He got no further than Fossanuova, some seventy miles from Naples, where he was taken suddenly ill, and died on March 7th.
M. Bergson, Mystic
Authors: Rice Cyprian
Published: July 2007

The appearance of a new book from M. Bergson’s pen is always an event; and the publication, early last year, of his Les deux Sources de la Morale et de la Religion is quite an exceptional event, since it forms, in a sense, the culmination of this philosopher’s thought. His conclusions are in a line with the tendencies of his earlier work—in the course of it he himself frequently refers to l’Evolution Créatrice —but no one could have foretold the definitely Christian and movingly devout note which is so frequently struck in it whenever M. Bergson quits his complicated and protracted disquisitions on social morality in agreement with Durckheim and his school.

There can be no room for doubt: M. Bergson, when he writes of the experiences and the ideals of mystics and saints, writes and feels as a mystic and a saint. The saints whose doctrine and example he has studied so closely have responded by winning for him a special, if occasional, gift of mystical connaturalty and kinship. It is in contrast with this genuine and moving mystic note that the Durckheimian disquisitions seem such a burden on the soaring élan of M. Bergson’s spirit.
Purpose and Admiration
Authors: Manson Ælfric
Published: July 2007

It is a relief to turn from the apocalyptic literature, so prevalent to-day, to a book whose purpose is to indicate the elements which make for reconstruction and order in one of the basic activities of human life. Its author, the retiring President of the Headmasters’ Conference, is the head of a great school in one of the most ancient and traditional cities of this country. We need not, therefore, be on our guard against a fanatic of modernity for its own sake; and, in fact, the most striking quality of his book is the breadth and sanity of its outlook, a deep appreciation of the great things of the past with a live awareness of what is vital and sincere in our own time. ‘The affectation of despising the old masters is not less dangerous than the opposite error of looking back on art as something embedded in a lost culture, like a fly in amber. Art is continuous, and genuine modernity is not a denial, but only a fresh application in new circumstances, of eternal principles bequeathed to us by the art of all ages .... The real lover of art finds no incompatibility between new and old. His exciting consciousness of his own age, as a creative renaissance, only whets his appetite for the best fruits of archaeological research and discovery.’ The book has a further merit. There are plenty of monographs dealing with the modern manifestations of this or that art, such as Mr. Casson’s works on sculpture and Mr. Roger Fry’s on painting. No one would question their value or their legitimacy, but by the very fact that they treat each subject in isolation they continue to uphold the illusion that art is something apart and remote from normal human life. But Mr. Barton succeeds in making us realise that, in the past, art was integrated in the whole social life of the community and that it must be so again if we are to achieve a true civilisation.
Two Books on Reunion
Authors: St. John Henry
Published: July 2007

The coming Centenary of the Oxford Movement has revealed a deep cleavage betwen two sections of the Anglo-Catholic party. A realisation of the existence and extent of this cleavage makes it plain that the two sections as they crystallise and gain clearer definition will find themselves heading in opposite directions—the one for Rome, the other for Pan-Protestantism. This cleavage between the two sections lies in their respective views of the nature and authority of the Church of Christ. The section which lately made itself heard in the Manifesto of the Fifty stands by the traditional Anglo-Catholic doctrine of the nature and authority of the Church; a society (temporarily divided it is true) but essentially one and endowed with what has been nicknamed ‘oracular’ infallibility. The section of the party whose views find expression in Essays: Catholic and Critical has abandoned these traditional views and has evolved a new theory of the nature and authority of the Church, which is said to be consonant with New Testament teaching but which does not, apparently, lay claim to historical sanction in the period which lies between the Apostles’ days and our own. Mr. Will Spens, the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, in putting this theory forward, admits that ‘if (as is admitted) we are bound to assert that the Church must possess an actual unity, and if for the purposes of the discussion the Church can adequately be thought of as a society, the Roman conclusion is in the long run inevitable’ (Theology, March, 1928, ‘The Anglican Doctrine of the Church,’ p. 137).
A New Hymn Book
Authors: Moncrieff Francis
Published: July 2007

We have listened for so long to sentimental words, to slushy tunes, and are so tired of them, that our range grows narrower and narrower, and finally is reduced to a mere handful of hymns which are sung because ‘everybody knows them.’ Surely this is the dead end of all hymn-singing! Whereas the real art is still alive and practised daily in the Liturgy of the Church, with glorious words and noble tunes. Why must our vernacular hymns fall to the other extreme? For, though vernacular hymn-singing is necessarily an extra-liturgical practice, yet there are many occasions when it can be exercised to the increase of devotion in the faithful, and when it supplies a need possibly more felt now than in the days when the Liturgy itself fulfilled that purpose.

A Daily Hymn Book aroused our expectation. It is a large book, planned on a generous scale, intended to provide hymns for most big feasts in the Church’s Calendar, and arranged according to the liturgical year. It is well and clearly printed, the organist’s copy is a handsome volume, the smaller copies have the advantage of including the tunes to each hymn, which, is a great improvement on the usual book of words. It is prefaced by the Cardinal Archbishop, and has a formidable array of names of authors, composers, and sources. This is the impression of its makeup, after a cursory glance.
Mr. Roger Fry on French Art
Authors: Pope-Hennessy John
Published: July 2007

The difficulty of dealing adequately with French painting as a whole is that the very use of the term ‘French painting’ implies a continuity, a unifying tradition, which among French painters is entirely absent. Appreciation of tradition alone suffices to explain why Sasseta was Sasseta or Greco Greco, but it is vain to ask Fragonard why Daumier was Daumier or to look in Watteau for the germ of Delacroix. In each separate case to find the original influence we have to go outside France, with Wat teau and Delacroix to Rubens, with Fragonard and Daumier to the atelier of Rembrandt. Though certain French painters group themselves together, Ingres and David and Prud’hon or Monet and Sisley and Berthe Morisot, we can look for a very long time without discovering a common denominator between any two such groups. There are French painters; there is no French painting. In French art more than in the art of any other country we are dealing with the individual as a single entity and not as part of a progressive chain and we therefore find ourselves, more frequently than elsewhere, coming up again and again against the personal, unheralded assertion of individuality that we call genius. Study of these inconsequent phenomena can necessarily only take the form of interpretative biography and not of the mere objective history certain writers have attempted to make of it.
English Law and the Seal of Confession
Authors: Henriques C. G. X.
Published: July 2007

In 1552 the Council of Trent, in affirming the previous decisions of Popes and Councils, declared that the Sacrament of Penance consists of three essential and indispensable elements; viz., contrition, confession and satisfaction; that these are of divine institution; that every penitent must confess his grievous sins at least once a year, and that no minister who is not in priest’s orders has the power of absolution. The wilful omission of any material circumstance vitiates the whole confession and renders it null and void. It is, therefore, clear that the Catholic cannot evade the obligation of confession without grave injury to conscience. The priest, on the other hand, cannot deny his duty of hearing confession to any who seeks it, though he may refuse to give absolution afterwards. The Church goes further and binds him to an inviolable secrecy as to what is told him in the privacy of the confessional. He is bound, under the most solemn obligation, never under any circumstances or whatever demand be made upon him, to reveal any sin which a penitent has confessed for the purpose of sacramental absolution. The priest, by his very act of administering the Sacrament, binds himself to a secrecy, a secrecy which he cannot violate without mortal sin, and the forfeiture of all that is most valuable in life. ‘The Seal, as it is called, is of divine right most strictly binding the priest, in every case, even where the welfare of the State is at stake, and even after the death of the penitent, to reveal nothing that he has heard in confession, so that the Sacrament be not rendered intolerable and hateful to the people,’ And we know from the high standard of the priesthood that no priest would so violate his religion and his honour as to be guilty of such a crime for all that the world could offer. The priest remains under this obligation even when in doubt as to having heard the matter in question in the confessional.
To Paris With Dr. Johnson
Authors: Bracey Robert
Published: July 2007

It may be truly said that many years before Dr. Johnson’s death, he had obtained the universal respect of his fellow-countrymen. And this esteem continued for at least a generation after he had passed away, for had not the genius of his great biographer ‘Johnsonized the land’? However, later on there came a time, and one that lasted long, when his fame suffered an eclipse, and that almost total. Romanticism and a new Liberalism were now sovereign; Byron and Scott, Wordsworth and Shelley, these were men’s gods; there was no place for the sturdy common-sense of Johnson. But to-day this movement has more or less run its course, and by an inevitable reaction Dr. Johnson has come into his own again. There is a general revival of interest in him, his circle, and his period, and that not only in England, but very markedly in America also. Societies are founded to study his works and his opinions. New editions of Johnson and Boswell, with careful and meticulous commentaries and annotations, issue from the press. Every detail is scanned, every morsel of interest is brought to light. Collections of letters and sayings are published. Essays are written, meetings are held, speeches are delivered, literary repositories are ransacked, manuscripts are unearthed and collated, and transatlantic millionaires bear down upon our auction-rooms and at incredible cost secure rich Johnsonian prizes.
The Language Question in Malta (II)
Authors: Bonnici C. Mifsud
Published: July 2007

The second part of this brief exposition of the language question in Malta opens with the grant of self-government to the Maltese Islands in 1921. The Charter then granted by His Majesty’s Government practically incorporated the actual use of the languages. It was not what the National Assembly had asked for, but it gave in this matter full justice to the historical traditions of the Island. His Majesty’s Government’s declaration on the subject proceeded on the assurance that the settlement arrived at had been inspired by a wish to avoid further struggles on that question. Indeed, in paragraph 7 of Mr. Amery’s despatch of April 9th, 1921, it is stated that

‘in endeavouring to arrive at a final settlement of the language question, the only object kept in view was to avoid future discussion and controversy by a solution which should take equally into account the historic and cultural traditions of the Island, its position as a member of the British Commonwealth and the every day needs of its people. There was certainly no intention of displacing or restricting the use of the Italian language.’

Further, Lord Milner in his despatch of May 28th, 1920, paragraph 13, wrote that:

‘Those (religion and language) are matters which it is obviously desirable to keep outside the field of party strife, and which should not be liable to alteration at the discretion of a purely temporary majority'.’

This attitude shows that His Majesty’s Government intended to give a final solution to the problem in the sense that any departure from the state of things sanctioned by the Constitution on this question should be made only if and when public opinion had definitely expressed itself in a stronger sense than a temporary parliamentary majority could provide.
The Jacobites of Malabar
Authors: Rains J. C. T.
Published: July 2007

Somewhat over three years ago, the Catholic Church was rejoiced by the conversion of Mar Ivanios, the schismatic Metropolitan of Trivandrum on the Malabar Coast of India, together with his suffragan bishop, Mar Theophilus, and many of their followers, both clerical and lay. The body to which these distinguished converts belonged is the Jacobite Church, and the details of these events are still fresh in the minds of most Catholics by reason of the steady stream of conversions from the Jacobite ranks that has gone on ever since the submission to Rome of Mar Ivanios and Mar Theophilus. But it seems to the writer of this article that there is a considerable lack of clarity on the part of those who have chronicled these happenings as to the exact nature and position of the Jacobites in India—one is told, for example, that the particular branch to which Mar Ivanios belonged split off from some other body, but what that parent body is or was is not made clear. It would seem, therefore, that it is not out of place to endeavour to trace the history and character of the church which formerly numbered Mar Ivanios as its most distinguished member.

The region with which our story deals is the undulating stretch of country which lies along the south-western coast of India between the sea and the Anamullay mountains. It stretches for about two hundred miles from Mangalore on the north to Cape Comorin, and includes British Malabar and the native states of Travancore and Cochin.

To understand who the Jacobites are and what their name means we must go back several centuries. The story is a complicated one, and as a beginning we must say something about a schismatical body which stands doctrinally at the opposite pole to the Jacobites.
Hawker of Morwenstow
Authors: Sewell Michiael
Published: July 2007

The centenary of the Oxford Movement brings to mind Robert Stephen Hawker, the High Church clergyman and poet who lived right through the hey-day of the Movement entirely unaffected by it, and was received into the Catholic Church on his death-bed. He is the subject of one of the most entertaining of biographies, The Vicar of Morwenstow, by the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould, which was published in 1876, the year after Hawker’s death. Baring-Gould was a Devonshire High Church parson and squire. He wrote the hymn ‘Onward Christian Soldiers,’ three or four good novels, and a number of books on West Country traditions and antiquities. He had a huge appreciation of unusual characters and was the ideal biographer for so altogether striking a character as Mr. Hawker.

Robert Stephen Hawker was born at Plymouth in 1804. In his boyhood and youth he had a reputation as a dangerous practical joker. Baring-Gould relates several of the tricks that he played which are classics of their kind. Along with this exuberance he had a religious and poetical mind. At the age of seventeen he issued his first poems in a little book called ‘Tendrils by Reuben.’ He proceeded to the University of Oxford and was destined for the Anglican ministry. When he was twenty the family finances were involved in some misfortune and his career was almost wrecked for lack of means. As soon as he heard what had happened, Robert, who was at home, rushed off and proposed to an old friend of his, a Miss I’Ans, who was forty years old and who had a considerable income. She accepted him. He was able to continue his studies and the marriage was happy and successful.
No Time Like the Present
Authors: Vann Gerald
Published: July 2007

‘The desire for order is a primary need of our nature, of our minds and bodies .... In the sphere of society man desires primarily a clear order, the deep satisfaction of knowing himself bound up with that which is moving to some defined end.’

There is nowadays no dearth of writers whose theme is the condemnation of our modern chaos. They fall, usually, into one of two distinct classes: there is the pure satirist, mildly mocking or disgustedly slashing but with no positive advice as to how our Humpty Dumpty should be put together again; there is the perhaps more placid person whose solution is ready to hand and whose only difficulty lies in the apparent hopelessness of getting the world to accept that solution. Miss Storm Jameson belongs to neither camp. She does not mock, and though she hits hard it is, one feels, in real sorrow and not in righteous anger; and, on the other hand, while she sees in what direction the solution must lie, it is by no means cut and dried for her. Our trouble is that ‘there is no end solution, no Good, no value greater than all the others, to which we can relate and subordinate our separate lesser values’; we know the evil of that disruption, that ‘division between man’s outer and inner life, which starts with the Renaissance.’ But the modern world cannot ‘turn back .... to the medieval supremacy of the Church’; ‘formal religion’ has collapsed. And meanwhile, we bow the knee to the ‘bitch-goddess, Success,’ and at the same time seem all too likely to turn renegade even to that religion by suicidally plunging into another war.
The Land of Hope
Authors: Pepler Conrad
Published: July 2007

During their forty years’ exile in the desert the Israelites were supported by the expectation of the Promised Land flowing with milk and honey. The same promise has often been made in our own day to the pale-faced city clerk and all city dwellers in their desert of papers and figures. A factory-ridden people is encouraged to return to the land, for it is said to be the only life fit for man. They are in bondage; they need the freedom of the soil, out in the spacious fields. The children of the Father of heaven are free; so, we are told, are the children of mother earth—in fact, we are almost led to imagine the two sets of offspring to be identical. Satan invented the machine to lash mankind in bondage. God means his sons to be free, following the furrow of the plough.

Freedom is not, however, the only advantage attributed to this form of life, for to freedom they add all the joys of living. The delight of hard muscular toil will be followed by relaxation in a comfortable chair before a glowing hearth with one’s children gathering round quiet and content. Is not Nature the kindest of mothers, and is there anything to compare for sheer delight with daily toil in the brown earth among the gentle beasts placed at man’s service? These are the fruits taken by the spies from the promised land.

This pleasant picture, however, remains little more than an imaginative one, having little resemblance to reality. It might even be a snare for the young romantic who does not care much for rational explanations.