bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Cardinal Manning
Authors: Brown W. F.
Published: July 2007

Everyone who read Purcell’s Life of Manning must have felt that, however fascinating its pages, much remained to be written before a true estimate of the Cardinal’s character could be formed. His biographer was so anxious to expose every weak spot in Manning’s complex character that in spite of the splendid material in his hands the result was a painfully one-sided portrait of a really great man. Unfortunately, Mr. Leslie’s book appears so long after the publication of Purcell’s Life that very few people are still alive who knew Manning during the last decades of his life, and can make a just comparison between the first and the second biographer. Still, there can be no doubt Purcell’s volumes have been widely read, and Mr. Leslie’s work will do much to remove some of the uncomfortable impressions made by several of its chapters. He has been singularly fortunate in obtaining much fresh and rich material for his book, so much that one could have wished he had written two volumes instead of one. Manning must always be an enigma to many people. Conscious of great powers, and filled with a desire to use them to the utmost, in public life he inevitably incurs the hostility of those who resent ability and dub it ambition. In any career with his fine gifts of manner, of speech, of writing, with his comprehensive grasp of human affairs, with his power of managing men, in a word with his practical ability, he was bound to outstrip other competitors in the race for success. In politics, in diplomacy, in the higher walks of business, he would have come to the top, spite of every obstacle smaller men might have put in his way.
The Dante Sexcentenary
Authors: Makepeace J. F.
Published: July 2007

On September the 14th, this year, the six hundredth anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri, at Ravenna, will be celebrated. It is a significant fact that the revival of the study of the great Italian poet, and of mediæval Italian literature generally, in the nineteenth century was contemporaneous with the “Second Spring” of Catholic life in England. For while it is true that many non-Catholic scholars have contributed to our knowledge of his life and work, it is also true that no one who has not an inner knowledge of the Catholic Church can fully understand the Commedia. To such there must always be, inevitably, something in it that is alien to his mind. For Dante was, first and foremost, a Catholic and regarded everything from a Catholic standpoint.

The argument in his famous political treatise, De Monarchia, and the real purpose of the Guelph and Ghibelline wars in Italy, can be properly understood only from that point of view.

Those protracted wars ended at last, in 1266, after fifty years of swaying fortunes, in the victory of Charles of Anjou over King Manfred at Benevento, and the final supremacy of the Guelphs. Dante was one year old when that decisive battle was fought. The echoes of the long struggle are heard throughout all his writings, for his family were patriotic Guelphs. It must be remembered that the war was not, fundamentally, a strife for mastery between Popes and Emperors.
The Position of Bulgaria
Authors: Buxton Leland
Published: July 2007

Bulgaria has shown more readiness than any of our late enemies to carry out the crushing obligations imposed upon her, and the Allies have taken advantage of this attitude to treat her with greater severity than other States which have given more trouble. It may be possible to justify this policy, but it is surely impossible to deny that the Allied Powers, on their part, ought to carry out their Treaty undertakings towards Bulgaria. This they have failed to do.

They undertook, for instance, to provide Bulgaria with a commercial outlet on the Ægean. Not only have they done nothing to fulfil this promise, but the British Government still insists on retaining Greek sovereignty over Western Thrace (where less than a third of the population is Greek), which is equivalent to debarring Bulgaria altogether from direct access to the Mediterranean.

But the question which affects the Bulgarians even more vitally is that of the protection of minorities, for at least a quarter of the Bulgarian race is under the rule of its worst enemies. The Allied Powers have undertaken, in the St. Germain and other Treaties, to safeguard the racial and religious rights of minorities in Serbia, Roumania, and Greece. Since these Treaties were signed, tens of thousands of Bulgarians have been driven from their homes in Macedonia and Thrace ; all Bulgarian schools have been closed, and all Bulgarian churches handed over to the Patriarchists.
The Land
Authors: Dawson Christopher
Published: July 2007

Nowhere in the world has industrialism achieved such a complete victory as in England. Here alone do we see a Society which exists entirely by and for a cosmopolitan market, and which has lost the last remnants of economic self-sufficiency. And the disturbance of social equilibrium is the more profound because the England of the past was, more perhaps than any other country in Western Europe, an essentially agrarian State. The changes which have made English society and civilization so entirely different in type to anything that exists on the other side of the Channel, in so far as they are not attributable to religion, are mainly due to the peculiar course of English agrarian history.

During the Middle Ages the English countryside, with its open fields cultivated in strips and its wide stretches of common and forest, must have presented very much the same appearance as the neighbouring districts of the Continent, and at the same time England was socially a province of Christendom, sharing in a common civilization, a common art, and common political institutions. The Reformation, however, and the rise of the new landlord class, which had no real parallel in any of the continental countries, launched England on a new path.
Space, Time, and Deity
Authors: Walker Leslie J.
Published: July 2007

There have been many digressions and regressions, modifications, adaptations, new points of view, new theories on special subjects, in the philosophic world since the days of Berkeley, but, with the exception of Herbert Spencer, no one has attempted to devise a new philosophy outright. Professor Alexander has redeemed our English reputation for originality. Mill is little more than a methodologist, Wm. James and Dr. Schiller have given us a new theory of knowledge, Green adapts Hegel, Bradley introduces further modifications, and criticizes everybody else, Professor Ward has revived Leibnitz, but it has been reserved to Professor Alexander to make a fresh start and to think out a new philosophy ab initio.

The fact that the Aristotelian Society should have allotted four sittings to the discussion of Professor Alexander’s book, testifies to the esteem with which he is regarded in the philosophic world, and also to the importance of the views he sets forth. The reason is apparent. The fundamental reality out of which all evolves is for Professor Alexander space-time. His philosophy, in fact, though not based upon Einstein, nor discussing in detail his theory, may be aptly described as an Einstein-metaphysic.
Acorns in the Wheat Age
Authors: Biddle G. E.
Published: July 2007

“Après l’invention du blé, ils voulaient encore vivre A du gland.”

There is a prejudice against primitive survivals. Few men to-day persist in kindling their fires with the flint stock. The devotee who, in the twentieth century, invoked Apollo or prayed to Juno need expect scant sympathy. Manuscripts are no longer copied by hand, now that the printing press is everywhere available. The electric light has put out the feebler glimmers of thousands of tallow candles sufficient for our great-grandparents.

It had to be. We are being shoved along—willy-nilly. It is hard to kick against the pricks. The inventions of to-day leave behind the makeshift contrivances of yesterday. And to-morrow, the something newer that will be offered—at which we shall eagerly snatch—will find us as conceited and as unsatisfied as ever ! Hence the diffidence of many.

Men squatted on the ground until the bright genius arose to whom we owe chairs and sofas. Food was taken up with the fingers before seemliness suggested knives and forks. The strongest male carried off by force his mate until customs of wooing introduced refinements and sentiment into courtship and marriage. Grunts, scowls, nods and imitative gestures were the means of communicating ideas ere the wonders of language revealed a better way. And so forth.
Epilogue to the Life of Cardinal Manning
Authors: Leslie Shane
Published: July 2007

I received an amusing letter from a Catholic Layman recently, in which he said that the Holy See must be regarding with nervous apprehension the series of outspoken Lives which were accumulating round the names of the English Cardinals, Wiseman, Newman, and Manning (bis). Whether the Holy See approves of sincerity or indiscretion or both in the biographies of her favoured sons, she never speaks. She has other things to think of besides books in these days, though needless to say I would submit to the least whisper of her considered judgment, should she think it worth while to lift an eyelash over anything I happened to write.

In the matter of writing the Lives of Cardinals, one cannot be too careful, though so careful are the biographers of Cardinals abroad that their memory as men is forgotten behind a little cloud of fading incense. The tradition of writing frank and human lives of Cardinals must be an English tradition, and let us hope will remain one. Our Cardinals have been and are men of action and men of genius. I think Ward’s Life of Newman is the best Life of a Cardinal in any language, but I think that Cardinal Manning left the finest biographical material. How fine it was perhaps few except myself really know. At any rate Mr. Purcell and myself have both crawled up out of Grubb Street, thanks to piles of that splendid collection, the Manning Papers, and I think that several volumes could yet be written out of what remains.

Perhaps I am the best person to say what a number of friends and critics have hinted lately, that the final and all-comprising Life of Cardinal Manning remains to be written.
The Crime of Birth Control
Authors: McNabb Vincent
Published: July 2007

Two dates in the present year are likely to be of great moment to the historians of this country. On Thursday, March 17 (St. Patrick’s Day) there was opened at 61 Marlborough Road, Holloway, N., the first “Mothers’ Clinic for Birth Control.” Its founders were “Humphrey Verdon Roe and his wife, Marie Carmichael Stopes, D.Sc., Ph.D.”

On Tuesday, May 31, the Queen’s Hall held a large and sympathetic audience at a “Meeting convened by Dr. Marie Stopes, author of Married Love, Wise Parenthood, and Radiant Motherhood, on the theme of Constructive Birth Control: its Ideals and Helpfulness to the Individual and to the Race.”
A Translated Hymn
Authors: O'Connor John
Published: July 2007

Having refrained from verse more or less successfully for twenty years, or it might be only fifteen, I was seized with a certain impulse on re-reading the hymns in The Dream of Gerontius. An impulse is not the same as a well-considered reason for doing things, and so is not easy to define, but as well as I can analyse it, it was to this effect: That theology—that unwrought mine of poetry, as Patmore calls it—is by no means represented in our hymns except by fits and starts, and what we want, says impulse, is the cycle complete. See what Newman has done in his choir of Angelicals in surveying the subject from the nebular hypothesis right away to Purgatory. God wills it! Be a crusader, do one pillar of the temple—no one can do them all, but if you stir, someone else will do so too. Thus I began to find out some of the many, many things which mere critics never suspect: e.g. that a hymn, and a very good one, might be based on, say, the nature of efficacious grace, if only one could keep the subject long enough in solution in the alembic of imaginative experience. But there is the difficulty. It is only by a series of cosmic accidents that such things can arise, like the making of minerals, especially of that very condensed vegetable the diamond. So while we leave these processes to themselves, we must translate, translate, translate. This is the only feasible way of producing anything like a cycle of vernacular hymns. Songs, lyrics, more sacred or less, the vernacular is producing, has produced, but these fill no gaps in the cycle. This was Faber’s failure.
A Dominican Story-Teller
Authors: Robinson Gertrude
Published: July 2007

To have been a student in Paris in the early thirteenth century, to have seen the foundation of the Dominican Order, to have been present at the coronation of St. Louis and to have assisted at the Council of Lyons ; to have spent one’s early manhood in missionary journeys and one’s riper years as an Inquisitor, knowing France from end to end and acquainted with all the important people of one’s time ; surely such fullness of life as this would justify a man, if ever anything could, in writing his autobiography.
St. Dominic and Dante
Authors: Charles Louis
Published: July 2007

Was there ever such a year as 1921 for centenaries—centenaries, that is, of events which loom large in the history of the Christian Church? We have just celebrated in this country the seventh centenary of the Third Order of St. Francis ; we are about to celebrate that of the passing of St. Dominic ; almost simultaneously occurs the sixth centenary of the “Sommo Poeta,” Dante Alighieri, so intimately connected, spiritually and intellectually, with both the great Founders and their Orders. The Dominican Order celebrates this year the seventh centenary of its arrival in England. And attention was recently called to the fact that this same year sees the centenary of the conversion of St. Ignatius Loyola.

These coincidences lend interest to a Conference given by the eminent Italian publicist, the Marchese Crispolti, at Florence, on May 28th, in the Dominican Church of Santa Maria Novella. The distinguished orator pointed out to his hearers that Dante after having in his youth learnt grammar and the art of “composing rhymes in the vulgar tongue” and of writing Latin epistles in the schools of the Friars Minor at Santa Croce—where also he imbibed from the Franciscan surroundings and spirit his admiration for the life of the Poverello and his inclination towards mysticism—went forth at the age of eighteen to enter upon his public life. It was after the death of Beatrice, when already many other influences were partly drawing him aside from the pure influence of her memory, that the Poet, then about twenty-five years of age, felt attracted to more solid and more regular studies.
A Medieval Experiment in Reunion
Authors: Jarrett Bede
Published: July 2007

The medieval mind was always fertile in experiment. It had all the freshness of a new age that was ceaselessly driven by new circumstances to adapt the fashions of Christendom to conditions violently alien. The restless constitution-making in England, the long experiment in liberty that marks the line of Plantagenet, is part of the same effort; and it is no less visible in the disorderly histories of Florence and Venice. The Cathedrals are one expression of it, the Guilds another, and the Crusades flung valiantly abroad the same temper of adventure, the same daring that would risk defeat or even face certain failure.

As the central force of Christendom the Papacy was peculiarly subject to the same romantic influence, as the stories of Hildebrand and of Innocent III abundantly prove. John XXII with his curious career as theologian, as politician, as apostle, is another instance. The greatest foreign missioner of the line of Pontiffs since the days of Peter, he bears witness in the magnificence of his ideals and his unconquerable hopefulness to the same indomitable spirit. To his hand the Orders of Friars, particularly the Dominicans and the Franciscans, were the most fitted and best used instruments. It will be sufficient to quote the opening words of his Bull of 1318 to the Dominican Order, to show how tremendously alive the Church had become, both in head and members, to the need of Catholic propaganda. The Bull is addressed to “our beloved sons, the Friar Preachers in the lands of the Saracens, Pagans, Greeks, Bulgars, Tartars, Alani, Gazaenes, Goths, Ruthenians, Jacobites, Nubians, Nestorians, Georgians, Armenians, Indians, Macolites, and other unbelieving nations in the East and North.”
The Blackfriars at Oxford
Authors: Gumbley Walter
Published: July 2007

When a little band of Dominicans, led by Friar Gilbert de Fresney, arrived in Oxford on the feast of Our Lady’s Assumption, August the 15th, 1221, the University was already rising to fame. Oxford, however, at that date was in no sense the rival of Paris. Her glory was yet to come—a glory to which the newly arrived friars were to contribute considerably. Oxford gave Gilbert and his brethren an enthusiastic welcome and in a short time they were able to erect a small convent and schools in the Jewry. Their fame spread, their numbers increased, and in less than three years they had outgrown their accommodation and were forced to seek a new and larger home. At the suggestion of King Henry III they chose for their new site a river-island in the south suburb of the town, outside the Water Gate in the parish of St. Ebbe. The king himself owned this property, which he generously made over to the friars. And Isabel Bolbec de Vere, the widowed Countess of Oxford, undertook to build them a new priory. It is interesting to note that, fifty years later, another widowed Countess of Oxford, Alice de Vere, rebuilt the convent of the Dominicans in the sister University of Cambridge. Walter Mauclerk, Bishop of Carlisle and Treasurer of England, also proved a signal benefactor to the community amongst whom he entered as a novice in 1246. Countess Isabel died in 1245, a few months before the friars entered their new abode.
Encyclical Letter
Authors: Benedict
Published: July 2007

At the approach of the happy day, when seven hundred years ago, that light of holiness, Dominic, passed from this world’s sorrows to the home of the blessed, it is a joy to Us who have so long been amongst his most devout clients, more especially since the day when We began to govern the Church of Bologna which religiously guards the Saint’s remains, it is a great joy to Us, We say, to be able to call upon the faithful from this Apostolic See to keep the memory of so great a saint. And in doing so we are not only yielding to feelings of personal piety, but also performing a duty of gratitude to the Founder and lawgiver and to his renowned family.

Dominic was wholly and thoroughly a man of God : so too was he perfectly a man of the Church, and the Church has ever found him an unconquered champion of the Faith and his Order a stout bulwark of defence. Wherefore not only did Dominic in his days fortify the temple but he took thought for its lasting defence, according to the prophetic words of Honorius III, uttered when he confirmed the Order, “the Brethren of thy Order are to be the champions of the Faith and the true lights of the world.”
Medical Ethics
Authors: McNabb Vincent
Published: July 2007

We do not know whether the book which has occasioned this article signifies the decay either of ethics or of (what its writer calls) “medicine” ; or of both ethics and medicine, for without a doubt it signifies a decay. A profession such as “medicine,” which deals with the human ultimates of birth, marriage, and death, has an ethical import which might well exercise the genius of a modern Thomas Browne. We must not be taken to indulge in personalities but rather to criticize a state of things and a state of learning if we look upon this work of an Edinburgh Lecturer on Medical Jurisprudence as a pathological specimen which we must patiently diagnose and treat.

It is the sub-title that reveals the unhealthy state of things. The book is entitled Medical Conduct and Practice. This is a sufficiently general title to cover the contents of the book ; and to allow the author to give shrewd advice to his Scottish medical readers on “how to get on in the world.”

But this non-committal title has the sub-title “A Guide to the Ethics of Medicine.” To most of us whom a University has befriended in youth, the word Ethics recalls that highest branch of Philosophy which the Greeks elaborated in order to endow Christian thought. We recall the Ethics of Aristotle, with many regrets that the true wisdom of that book is now a quarry for the philologist rather than for the philosopher. But the word Ethics stirs up such deep emotions in our heart that we are at expectation’s end to see what will be said of it by a modern brother of him who wrote Religio Medici, and especially by one of those accepted few who have sitten in the chair of Medicine near Arthur’s Seat.
Some Bygone Politics
Authors: Brennell Dorothea E.
Published: July 2007

Two notable centenaries fall in the present year. On August 6th, 1221, passed to his reward Dominic Guzman. Almost exactly one hundred years later, in July or September, 1321, the world’s greatest poet since ancient times left a world which had treated him hardly in order to make trial of the justice of a world he had hymned in almost inspired numbers.

Perhaps to a Catholic it is not fanciful to trace a connection between the two, yet few indeed outside the Church consider what the poet owed to the famigliar di Christo and his sons, whose praises are written in the greatest of his works. Dante Aligheri was born in 1265 ; he was a child of nine when Thomas Aquinas died, a boy of fifteen when the Doctor Universal, Albertus Magnus, passed to join his great pupil. His days were passed in wild times. The year of his birth saw the long strife in England between king and baronage culminate in the battle of Evesham, saw Manfred, king of Naples and Sicily, defeated and slain by Charles of Anjou. He was seventeen years old when the bad blood between Frenchman and Neapolitan found outlet in the Sicilian Vespers and the weary reign of anarchy which followed. In 1310, he saw the suppression of the Order of Knights Templars (so typical a product of the age of faith and chivalry), and in the prime of his years he lived amid the wars and rumours of wars, the intrigues, the treacheries in which his native Florence was involved, the long-drawn-out strife of Guelph and Ghibelline.

On all sides the old order was passing and many of the mediæval theories becoming empty of meaning. The glory which had surrounded the Holy Roman Empire seemed waning, while powerful nation-states arose to dispute its supremacy.
Giovanni Papini’s “Storia di Cristo”
Authors: Randall A. W. G.
Published: July 2007

Giovanni Papini’s “Story of Christ” is, to put it on its lowest level, the literary sensation of the moment in Italy. Within one week after publication ten thousand copies were sold, and very shortly afterwards the whole of the first edition of twenty thousand was exhausted—this with a serious and by no means sensational book of over six hundred pages. The reason may perhaps partly be sought in the fact that the curious wished to see what would be made of the Gospels by a writer who, whatever the intellectual distinction of his other work, had certainly been guilty of uttering defiant anti-Christian sentiments and had, in addition to the legitimate effect produced by his works of imagination, exerted a definite influence against religion among the young intellectuals of Italy. But no one who looks beyond the immediate circumstances will account for all the popularity of Papini’s book in this way. He will add the further important facts—first, that this is a rewriting of the Gospel-story by a poet; secondly, that the act of faith uttered by Papini in this book corresponds to the profoundly Catholic and Christian sentiments of the Italian people, the younger generation not by any means excepted—for the war has driven many a doubter to serious reflection and self-examination, with spiritual results similar to those which were produced in Papini himself. By its literary qualities, then, and by its appropriateness to the prevailing religious emotions of men in Italy and in other countries which passed through the war, Giovanni Papini’s “Story of Christ” bids fair to become one of the most notable books of the century.
Economics for Christians
Authors: Clayton Joseph
Published: July 2007

By Economics we mean the conclusions arrived at by man in his study of the production and distribution of material wealth.

These conclusions are often called, with much solemnity, “laws” ; and if by “law” is meant something that has been observed to happen every time a certain set of conditions are present the word may pass.

For instance, the economic “law of diminishing returns” is the simple conclusion that there is a limit to the amount of labour that may be applied profitably to any given area. Half an hour spent daily on the plants in flower-pots or window-boxes should produce a profitable return, and another quarter of an hour may produce an increased return. But two hours would bring a diminishing return, that is, something certainly less than four times the good result of the half-hour’s attention. So with an allotment. Double crops may be obtained by the additional labour of a second person, but six people working on the same allotment will not produce six times as much harvest. A point is always reached by the “law of diminishing returns” when no more labour can be expended profitably on any given piece of work.
The Doctrinal Witness of the Fourth Gospel
Authors: McNabb Vincent
Published: July 2007

The recent Conference of Church of England Modernists has drawn attention to the Fourth Gospel. In calling it the Fourth Gospel we are not minded to deny that it is the Gospel of St. John, the beloved disciple. Indeed, we should be doing violence to our reason, or our reasons, if we did otherwise than believe it to be the eye-witness and ear-witness of him who leaned on the bosom of the Master. But our chief aim is to denote the historic value of this Gospel which, if it is not the eye-witness of the last years of Jesus was assuredly the eye-witness of the first years of His Church. In both cases it is of supreme value as a witness to that consciousness which has been the unique claim of the Catholic Church.

Two preliminaries will clear a way to the centre of our thesis.

The Fourth Gospel is a product of Eastern, not Western Christianity. It is a delicate point of history to decide whether it came from Jerusalem or from Ephesus. In either case its witness to the historic development of the Church can hardly be overrated. If it sprang from Ephesus, it arose out of a Christian consciousness which was definitely the work of St. Paul. If it sprang from Jerusalem, it arose from a Christian consciousness which, at the time of writing, owed little or nothing to St. Peter.

The oral instruction which Jesus had given His apostles had its limitations ; although it may well be doubted whether it had the limitations of written instruction. It is clear that human intelligences could not retain in a state of active consciousness all the sayings and doings of some three years, so filled with activity as to leave little time even for foodtaking.
Bishop Gore and the Anglican Modernists
Authors: Reeves J. B.
Published: July 2007

The Cambridge Conference has created a new crisis in the Church of England. Bishop Gore has publicly complained that a large and important and learned body of men, many of them officials in that Church, hold views which are fundamentally subversive of the whole fabric of Christian belief. To those of the “Catholic party” who ask him what is to be done in this emergency, he confesses he has no short and easy answer to give, but he makes a few suggestions.

These suggestions resolve themselves into a strong argument against defections to the Church of Rome. Dr. Gore declares himself incapable of being a Roman Catholic, on the grounds of his certainty that the Roman Catholic Church requires of its members adhesion to propositions which are unauthorized, untrue, and unhistorical.

It is impossible not to feel for Dr. Gore some of that enthusiastic admiration which his hearers testified on the occasion of this declaration. He is consistent, loyal, and sincere. Though his loyalty is to principles which are not ours, and his consistency achieved by a logic from which we dissent, we cannot, and we would not, refuse him the honour due to his intelligence, his integrity, and his unflinching courage.
“Novelty”
Authors: Walker Leslie J.
Published: July 2007

It is a custom with that venerable institution, the Aristotelian Society, to elect each year a new President whose duty it is to open proceedings with a Presidential Address. Dr. F. C. S. Schiller, our President for this year, chose as his subject “Novelty,” and endeavoured to prove first and foremost that novelty exists, “or rather occurs.” One wonders whether this was quite necessary, novelty is so very obvious everywhere. But we suppose that it must have been ; and there are at any rate people, known as Eleatics, who are supposed to have denied its existence, though illustrating it by their own. In any case, Dr. Schiller did prove it; if in no other way, by the very fact that a President of the venerable Aristotelian Society should have talked to us about milliners and tailors and the fashion of dressing one’s hair.

He was not quite so successful, however, it seems to me, in establishing his second point, namely, that hatred of novelty exists and is man’s normal attitude. Our President, at any rate, is an exception here again ; and in his philosophic studies has nobly resisted the “inertia, laziness, custom, timidity, stupidity, the whole brood of Habit and Ignorance” which “combine their forces to repulse the new.” He admits that there are exceptions, however ; and mentions as instances the love of novelty in fashion, and the craving for news. Science also has “looked with favour upon novelty in the last century or two.” But this is not enough. Science has not only favoured novelty in the last century or two : it lives upon novelty and always has done so.
The Psychology of Conversion
Authors: Folghera J. D.
Published: July 2007

I have just been reading—rather late in the day—A Spiritual Æneid, a fascinating book ‘in which Father Ronald Knox tells the story of his conversion from Anglicanism to the Catholic faith. To me these accounts of conversion are always interesting, whether they relate the process that led the convert from unbelief to belief or whether they describe that other style of conversion, I mean that awakening from a dead faith and no works to a keen and enthusiastic practice of the virtue of religion.

But although conversions do not fascinate everyone, few who notice them can remain indifferent. The strongest emotions are aroused, anger and repulsion, wonder and scepticism. It sometimes happens that the witness of a conversion is moved to “go and do likewise.” That is to say conversion can become a motive of credibility, a reason for believing. Yet it is curious to notice that, if we except some very recent books, conversion has never before been reckoned among those facta divina of secondary value which, like prophecy and miracles, are the external motives for our accepting revelation as from God.
The Catholic Revival in France
Authors: Gwynn Denis
Published: July 2007

Prejudices die hard, and I suppose the idea still prevails abroad that France is an irreligious, if not actually an anti-Catholic, country. Living in France after the war, it is a continual source of astonishment that such an impression should ever have arisen at all. I know, for instance, a very shrewd old French lady, the wife of a deputé for a Southern constituency, who regards Paris as a religious centre second in importance only to Rome itself. She has spent a great part of each year in Paris for fifty years, more or less, and she ought to be in a position to know its character. She and her husband the deputé have for twenty years never once missed making their annual pilgrimage to Lourdes. I know of another deputé, from the other end of France, who once a month stays up all night on duty at the perpetual adoration in the Sacre Cœur Basilica. These are not even isolated cases : they have both come within my own acquaintance in one typically unpretentious middle-class hotel. Neither of them are men of any particular note outside of the districts that elected them to the Chambre.
Charles Dickens and Catholicism
Authors: Clayton Joseph
Published: July 2007

Charles Dickens must be seen clearly as a representative Englishman, a spokesman of the so largely inarticulate English people, discerned towering above contemporaries as Sir Thomas More or Doctor Johnson is discerned. How, otherwise, can we explain the hatred of Dickens for Puritanism, and his distrust of all professions of Protestantism?

The immediate recognition of his genius is evidence that Dickens’s standpoint was understood and approved by the mass of his fellow-countrymen, and this standpoint is very definitely Christian. Of all our great novelists none is more definitely Christian.

Throughout his writings Dickens insists on the fundamental beliefs of Christendom. That God rules and orders the whole universe ; that mankind has an Eternal Father, and a Divine Redeemer and Saviour, His Son—these are facts that Dickens takes for granted in all his books. With all his zest for social reforms Dickens never assumes, after the fashion of certain of our latter-day novelists, that God being absent from the universe it is the business of the writer of popular fiction to order a new heaven and a new earth and prescribe a new religion for the children of men.
The Effect of Printing on Literature
Authors: Burdett Osbert
Published: July 2007

In the first number of Blackfriars I promised, with the permission of the Editor, to follow a paper upon “The Author’s Tool” with another on the effect of printing on Letters. We think that we know too well the extent of our debt to Caxton to reflect, as a rule, upon the remoter consequences of the invention of printing. The advantages of a multiplication of manuscripts are obvious. The disadvantages are also worth a moment’s thought. To begin with, the multiplication of anything leads us into the realm of arithmetic, a mystic science, not because certain numbers have a peculiar significance whereby we call three and seven “mystic numbers,” but because the mere multiplication of anything changes its character. For example, a fine house is a fine thing, but a row of similarly designed fine houses is detestable. In repetition itself there seems to be something ominous. This is a fact which everyone knows, and no one can explain. All we can say is that quantity and quality seem to be by nature hostile to each other. Perhaps the advantages and disadvantages of the invention of printing can be summarized fairly in the statement, that printing has made the best books more accessible and multiplied indefinitely the worse. But before we consider whether a general accessibility of the best books is free from disadvantage, and whether the multiplication of bad books is something gained, we must remember that the influence of numbers has been apparent, not only in the increase of books printed, but also in the increase of readers. Multiplication of population soon followed multiplication of books.
Cross versus Crescent in Albania
Authors: Christitch E.
Published: July 2007

To-day when, encouraged by the ostensible causes of and excuses for the Great War, the oppressed of centuries raise their heads, it behoves Catholics to look around and abroad, noting how fare their brethren in various parts of the globe. Troubles in foreign as well as adjacent lands are too often dismissed with the comfortable assurance that “these people are always fighting among themselves.” If enquiry reveals that grave wrongs are perpetrated with impunity, but also that interference entails risk of financial loss in great commercial transactions, the subject is laid aside and attention directed elsewhere. Thus only can be explained the indifference of Christian communities who equip missions for the Far East, to the desperate plight of Christians close at hand struggling for the right to live under the powerful pressure of ever-triumphant Mohammed.

Constantinople is popularly supposed to be the last stronghold of the Turk in Europe. In reality he is ensconced nearer home amid the impregnable fastnesses of Albania, whence he harries the Christians within reach, imposing his will on these fated slaves who still resist the shining lure of the Crescent. Among the recalcitrants are the Miridite, Malissori, and other Catholic tribes who mistakenly took it for granted that Turkey shared the defeat of her allies in the late war, and that they need no longer submit to the rule of Mohammed but could govern themselves on Christian lines.
Roman Tourists
Authors: Steuart Francis A.
Published: July 2007

“All roads lead to Rome,” and all these roads x \ bring tourists and pilgrims. The latter are the more interesting of the two classes although both are very often intermixed. The pilgrim, whether he is a religious pilgrim or an antiquarian one, at least knows what he ought to see, or wants to see, but the tourist merely sees sights that are there, those that come in his way, or are thrust upon him. Hence one gets priceless questions addressed generally to hotel concierges or guides. The writer himself heard an anxious American ask: “I say, can you tell me if there is anything to see in Rome?”

And for this class is there? They come without any interest or knowledge, and wonder what Roman history was all about. Did not (according to the legend) another American drive to Cook’s Tourist Office in the Piazza d’Espagna and demand a guide to show him “all Rome.” “How long are you going to stay?” asked the wily official. “Well, I guess about an hour and a half.” The official said this was insufficient for all Rome, but, as a carriage was on the spot, their guide could give the tourist the opportunity of a hasty visit to St. Peter’s, and to the Coliseum. Having driven off, they stopped at the latter. “Well,” said the American looking up at the ruin, “Which is this?”
Some French Books of 1921
Authors: Randall A. W. G.
Published: July 2007

The experience of the Great War seems so far to have left little mark on French literature, and the reader of current French novels, poetry and drama will often find himself wondering what the cause of this may be. He will discover in French political and social life enough evidence of the fact that France in the last seven years passed through a terrible war and emerged devastated, robbed of hundreds of thousands of her sons, but unbroken and proud. In literature, however, so the observer will often think to himself, all this appears to have changed nothing. On the stage, in fiction and poetry, we might be in 1914, before the shadow of the disaster was to be seen or thought of. England, Italy, Germany even, have, in their imaginative and intellectual life, ‘reacted’ more thoroughly to the war than has France, most terribly stricken of them all.

Without criticising this ‘stationary’ character of contemporary French literature or in any way assuming that it will be permanent, we can readily find a reason for it. More than any other of the belligerents France lost her young intellectuals in the great struggle. The men through whom she speaks to-day, in her art and literature, are very often those who were accepted classics already in 1914, incapable of radical change or departure from the style they have made their own. The young writers who should now be writing alongside of them, and eventually succeed them, are dead.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Authors: Burdett Osbert
Published: July 2007

The art of Hawthorne is the most beautiful thing; that has come out of America. Perhaps its fantastic quality of imagination, in which beauty kindles from word to word as colour will in tapestry or in the red glow against the dun background of a Yanina embroidery, picked out here and there with fragmentary touches of gold thread, is due to the fact that his sense of beauty was a changeling and had no father in American soil. His subject is the Puritan conscience, whose fine and rigid quality was reflected in a stern law, the first refuge of frigid men who had entered a strange continent with all the forces of nature arrayed against them. Transplanted into a soil unprepared for them, the pioneers, who had revolted from their original home, identified their foes without with their foes within, so that nature everywhere became the enemy, and life itself sinful. To have been born at all was the first sin to these Puritans,—who suffered from the most dreadful of all human superstitions, expiated by sacrifice. To them repentance meant wearing sackcloth and ashes. But there is an old word not open to this confusion, the word resipiscence. It means, as repentance should be held to mean, change to a better frame of mind. This they neglected. The means were confused with the end; punishment was enjoyed for its own sake, and suffering became a man-eating idol after the manner of Moloch.

What, then, could a sensitive and imaginative descendant of these Puritans do but play around the border of forbidden things,
George Herbert
Authors: Makepeace John Foster
Published: July 2007

The first, that with any effectual success attempted a diversion of this foul and overflowing stream,’ wrote Henry Vaughan in the preface to Silex Scintillans, ‘was the blessed man, Mr. George Herbert, whose holy life and verse . . . gave the first check to a most flourishing and admired Wit of his time.’ Perhaps this attempt to divert the ‘foul stream’ and check an ‘admired Wit of his time’ may explain why, as he tells us, he at first ‘sought out quaint words and trim invention, curling with metaphors a plain intention/ since in the Sonnet sent to his mother as a New Year’s gift from Cambridge in 1608, he asks :

My God, where is that ancient heat towards thee?

… Doth poetrie

Wear Venus’ Kverie? onely serve her turn?

Why are not sonnets made of thee? and layes Upon thine altar burnt?

for undoubtedly some of his poems in their allegorical obscureness and subtlety of expression rival those of the wearers of ‘Venus’ liverie.’ The subtlety, however, Is only in the form in which he has chosen to express familiar religious truths in order to allure those who would be attracted by it.

But, indeed, as Vaughan’s words suggest, it was his own ‘holy life’ that was the first and most powerful element in the remarkable influence he exercised over his contemporaries, and it was this that gave meaning and charm to his poetry.

His mother, the gracious lady whom Donne regarded with such affectionate admiration and used to address as ‘The Lady Magdalen Herbert, of St. Mary Magdalen,’ was a notable woman in her devotion to the education of her seven sons. Her husband had died when Edward, the eldest, was sixteen years old, and George, the fifth son, was four.
Mr. Belloc on the Jews
Authors: Burdett Osbert
Published: July 2007

By the time that these lines are in print Mr. Belloc’s latest book will have been reviewed in many papers; and I cannot but fear that, if it is taken as gravely as it deserves, it will provoke impatient comment from both English and Jewish readers. For it has been written deliberately to raise the Jewish question, to make it a conscious issue, and to insist that only by the frank acceptance of this issue on both sides can an impending calamity be forestalled. At the moment, for reasons which Mr. Belloc explains, there is only one section of the community alertly conscious of the Jewish problem, and anxious to raise it, namely the Anti-Semites, who are eager to take the first opportunity of attacking the Jews. The rest of us, including the Jews themselves, do not want the question raised at all, and even deny its existence. They severally declare, or wish it be assumed, that the Jews are not an alien nation, but fellow nationals only differentiated by a religion peculiar to themselves. It would not be surprising therefore if the first effect of the book were to excite an irrational Jewish protest, scepticism and annoyance in the general mass, and among the Anti-Semites embittered disappointment that one as alive to the issue as themselves should yet deliberately dissociate himself from their antagonistic policy. For in matters liable to acute controversy the disinterested seeker after truth and consideration is rarely welcomed.

Mr. Belloc is not an Anti-Semite.
Religion and Education
Authors: Phillimore J. S.
Published: July 2007

Religion and education have been inseparably involved ever since the Church was founded. Just as the two Cities and the two Citizenships are inextricable : and here their jurisdictions meet. The right to teach is part of the Church’s charter, everywhere claimed. In the last struggle between the Church and Paganism, there was a curious episode connected with education—the Julianic persecution.

Julian had never been a Catholic, and when he ceased to be an Arian he became an enthusiast for Paganism. He exhibits the same sort of anti-quarianism raised to a passion and an enthusiasm, as was often found in the Renaissance. Julian forbade any Christian to teach literature, on the ground that nobody should teach what he does not believe: ancient literature is full of heathen gods and goddesses : therefore Christianity must not teach it. The principle would have interesting modern applications . . .

Paganism became intellectually and morally bankrupt. The philosophy stripped off, nothing but a devil-worship was left, which obscurely lingered on in holes and corners, where doubtless they talked of their ‘grand old independence,’ &c. But the Church discovered a part of her mission hitherto unsuspected. It became evident when the forms of Roman Civilization were flooded with barbaric material; then the only life within those forms and the only civilizing power was the Church. While Pagans were still prating about the disloyalty of Catholics as the cause of the downfall, the Church was setting about a new task.
Waste and Anti-Waste
Authors: Clayton Joseph
Published: July 2007

For the satisfaction of the needs of the body, and the nourishment of the physical life, four things are required : food, clothing, fuel, and shelter. By labour, and by labour alone, can these necessary things be obtained, and that labour must be applied to the earth, created by God and placed in subjection to the dominion of man. While ever the populations of the earth are in need of food, clothing, fuel and shelter, labour engaged on the production and distribution of these primary goods is fulfilling an economic purpose and is not wasteful.

Economic waste is either of a positive character, taking place when labour is organized for the destruction of human life and the necessities of human life; or it is a negative thing, seen when labour is engaged at tasks that do not minister to the health of man or is left totally unemployed.

Of positive waste the most obvious examples are war and the whole business of armaments and the manufacture of chemical agencies for the taking of life in war. (Yet even in the case of war it may be that the very real waste of labour is sometimes the only apparent means of stopping a greater and more disastrous waste. As the advance of a raging fire must be checked, and can only be checked by clearing an area —in itself a wasteful proceeding—to the end that the fire shall die down for lack of further fuel; as the progress of an epidemic may require the pulling down of dwelling-houses lest the ravages of plague and pestilence extend unhindered;