bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Resurrection of Adam
Authors: Reeves John - Baptist
Published: July 2007

The popular game of archaeology is played with bucket and spade. Some things are dug up, and others are buried away out of sight. It is an easy game, for the exhumations and interments proceed simultaneously. The rubbish removed from one spot has to be tipped somewhere else; so that a hole and a mound are engineered in a single process. While you are discovering new wonders in the hole, you are covering up old wonders under the mound. In the hole you find Elephas antiquus, Rhinoceros merckii, Ran gif er tarandus, Ursus spelaeus and other worthies, whose names and dignified bearing invite you to give them a place in or near the middle line of your genealogical tree. Under the mound you bury Parentes protoflasti, Pomum noxiale, Proditor multiformis, Opus salutis, Virgo mater, Agmina coelitum, Apostolorum chorus, Prophetarum numerus, Martyrum exercitus, Sumtna Trias, Verbum incarnatum, Salutaris hostia and every other legendary name that has hitherto made your ancestral stock a laughing stock.

Being only a game, archaeology cannot be expected to lead to any profitable end, or to arrive at any natural conclusion. If art is long, sport is longer. The only way of getting to the end of it is to call ‘Time.’ And even time cannot end sport; it merely marks an interval, after which every game begins again. The only end of sport is recreation. A really good game wrecks creation over and over again; and over and over again re-creates creation.

No game fulfils that condition so perfectly as archaeology. Over after over Creation is clean bowled out without a stump left standing. And every time up comes a new Creation smiling invincibly.

But archaeology is not cricket. We have acknowledged that it is played with a spade.
The Knight of Twickenham and his Daughter
Authors: Bracey Robert
Published: July 2007

For over one hundred and five years the memoirs of that decidedly acid female, Laetitia Matilda Hawkins, have served as a quarry from which writers on the eighteenth century have dug their best anecdotes and extracted their sourest and most spiteful criticism. But not until this present year of grace did anyone think of reproducing the original book; and even now that reproduction comes to us in an extremely abridged and compressed form, and with a large and much-needed attempt at re-arrangement. For never was there a work more devoid of method and order, or more stuffed and padded with extraneous matter— unless, indeed, it be the ‘official’ Life of Dr. Johnson perpetrated by the fair author’s father, Sir John Hawkins, Knight, that ‘most unclubbable’ of men!

Sir John Hawkins, who claimed descent from the famous Elizabethan admiral of the same name, began life as an attorney with literary tastes. A fortunate marriage enabled him to retire by the time he was forty, and to settle down as a wealthy country gentleman at Twickenham, with a town house at Queen Square, Westminster, and to devote his leisure to literature, music, angling, the formation of a fine library, and the duties of a magistrate. He wrote a tedious History of Music in five volumes quarto, and a number of other books which no one nowadays ever reads; he knew in a certain way almost everybody worth knowing; he was an original number of the famous ‘Club’ in Ivy Lane, and he was Dr. Johnson’s executor, and selected by the publishers to edit his works and write his Life. He lies buried in the cloisters of the Abbey, and very few would ever have heard of him had it not been for his rather grudging inclusion in the great ‘Johnsonian Circle.’ Boswell hated him, and Johnson just tolerated him.
Our Lady's Gift to Mexico
Authors: Montgomery F.
Published: July 2007

The visits of Our Lady to a poor native Mexican in the early years of the Spanish occupation of New Spain, and her gift through him of the miraculous painting, now venerated under the title of ‘Our Lady of Guadalupe,’ have often been recounted, but none of the early traditions, it would seem, bear a greater impress of truth and scrupulous investigation than the account left by the Spanish chronicler Fray Luis Becerra Tanco, Professor of Native Languages in the University of Mexico, and dated in 1666. He says that in the previous year he was invited by the Cathedral Chapter to depose on oath all that he knew on the subject, and he now commits to writing an accurate and circumstantial record of this evidence.

In the first place, he says he has a very clear recollection of the incident as related to him in his youth by three Spaniards of note, one of them his uncle, who had known contemporaries of the Bishop Fray Don Juan de Zumarraga and other personages concerned in the event, and were themselves born within a few years of the date of the miracle. Further, his knowledge of the native language and customs—his favourite study—-has enabled him to examine the native records of this happening before they had disappeared, for he says that, under the influence of Spanish education, the natives are losing the art they possessed of transmitting their traditions by pictures and chants. He adds that it cost him many vigils to correlate their reckoning with his own and separate exaggerations from reality: . . . . y a mi me costd mucho desvelo el ajustar su computo a el nuestro y afortar lo supersticioso de lo natural.’
Roxburgh
Authors: Gray John
Published: July 2007

Fumbling out of the old town

I hit the old road;

(Tobacco, limbs and tacketty shoon The outfit and the load)

By hooks and turns the craziest It reared and pitched and wound A general line on one great crest And far outseeing ground.

I saw, the road’s erratic guest,

Landscapes swing and bound;

The more I pressed my unknown quest Deeper repose I found.

Not as an angel understands,

The Thrones and Cherubim ;

‘I see the work of blessed hands By a light shrouded dim’

I seemed to wield a tenuous wand,

And with it write in space,

With trembling heart and steady hand,

A long-remembered phrase ;

Shortening it, in fluent air I had the power to trace The unforgettable; and there The outline of a face.
The Expert Judge of the Just Price
Authors: McNabb Vincent
Published: July 2007

For a long time we have admired Mr. Penty’s subtle argument for the necessity of the Guild of Experts based on the fundamental necessity of the Just Price. As a work of economic craftsmanship, this argument has long seemed to us to have few rivals, and no answer.

Yet we were never without our misgivings that somewhere in the subtle-simple ratiocination there was something akin to what the metaphysicians would call ‘a passing from the ideal order to the real.’ An uncomfortable feeling that there was a fly in Mr. Penty's translucent amber left us little or no intellectual rest.

We were not concerned to deny the ultimate conclusions drawn by Mr. Penty from his ultimate premisses. Indeed, for a long time, we hesitated to discuss even with ourselves our doubts about his reasoning, lest we should throw doubts upon his conclusions and eventually about his premisses. But in the end our thoughts have taken such definite shape that we cannot withold them from ourselves and even from Mr. Penty himself.

Several principles have to be understood before the subtle deflection in Mr. Penty’s argument can be detected or even understood.

1. Price is an ambiguous word. It may stand for real wealth, such as bread, butter, beer; or token-wealth, a gold sovereign, a currency note, a cheque, etc.

2. If price is taken to be token-wealth, it is clear that, to use the distinction of St. Thomas Aquinas, the . question is not essential but accidental, because only realities are essential, and tokens are accidental.
The Hornberg
Authors: Belloc Elizabeth
Published: July 2007

Above the col at Saanenmoser there is a mountain called the Hornberg, which the skiers love. The beginners practise all day on its lower fields of snow—’ the nursery slopes they call it, where it is steep straight going and no traps or pitfalls. Higher up there are the dark green fir-forests, and above them again the highest fields slope upwards towards the summit, dazzling white against the blue. On either side below the col the valleys wind away among a sea of mountains, on one side into the heart of Switzerland, on the other towards the Lake of Geneva and the mountains of Savoy.

I had often climbed the hard snowy track up the Hornberg in the early afternoon and run down on skis across the wide easy slopes. It was a jolly friendly mountain, its snow alive with skiers, its silence broken by voices, the upward path marked by occasional huts and chalets, the snow crossed and re-crossed all the way up with the tracks of innumerable skis. The skiers have familiarly named certain places: such as ‘Devil’s Gap,’ slippery with ice under the trees, through which the beginners slither and slide, and ‘Major’s Corner,’ the difficult path through the wood which some old Major was supposed to have made famous with his perpetual falls. It seemed to be a mountain entirely dedicated to mankind, too good-natured to resent the invaders, and appearing to achieve a perfect friendliness by sacrificing something of its dignity. The neighbouring peaks were too high for frequent ascents, and kept their terrors and austere secrets apart.
There Blew a Horn in Bethlehem
Authors: Eden Hellen Parry
Published: July 2007

There blew a horn in Bethlehem, Christ sat on Mary’s knee,

And ‘O,’ she said, ‘my Child,’ she said,

‘They blow that horn for Thee;

For Thou shalt hunt the heart of man,

Thy prey, from hole to hole,

Till at the last Thy little hands Shall close upon his soul.’

Helen Parry Eden.
Dr. William Barry's Memoirs
Authors: Reeves John - Baptist
Published: July 2007

Once upon a time a clerk in Holy (Roman) Orders was ipso facto a professional man of letters—even in England. Nowadays, the profession of letters is become a secular luxury for which English Catholic priests, though amply endowed with the requisite talents, rarely have opportunity, inclination, time or energy. They do not, any more than other classes of Englishmen, lack ambition to enrich the literature of which they are the heirs, and to win it back to the service of Catholic Truth in which it was begotten. But as a class they are disciplined to selfdenial . Though devotion to letters may be urged upon them as a duty—which indeed it is—there are other more pressing and less romantic duties, in sacristy, confessional, class-room and slum, which most of them would consider it a treason to postpone to the delights of reading and writing in a well-appointed study. Here and there, however, circumstances make it possible, or even necessary, to develop a vocation along the line more agreeable to nature. Such circumstances are becoming more normal nowadays than they were formerly. The discipline of self-denial is as necessary for young priests to-day as ever it was—perhaps more necessary than ever it was. But there are certain external conditions, as well as certain internal dispositions generated by modern education in many candidates for the priesthood, which make the old-time discipline of parochial life, with its paucity of pens and books, and its plenitude of accounts, bazaars, and committee-meetings, as dangerous to some individuals as it would be unprofitable to the community if those individuals were condemned to it.
Daylight I Love
Authors: Croft-Cooke Rupert
Published: July 2007

Daylight I love, since through its toiling hours God made us, and our little world of flowers.

Evenings I love, for with their quiet ends Our Lord would wander, talking with His friends.

And the dark night I love, for once it came To shade from dying eyes His peoples shame.

Rupert Croft-Cooke.
Empire Restored
Authors: Jarrett Bede
Published: July 2007

Under this title a small book has been brought out by a new firm of publishers, Messrs. Sheed and Ward. It is a proof of the courage of this new firm that it should have published a book on political economy for the sum of one shilling, for it is notorious that Books on economics have very little sale in England, except text-books for examination purposes, and these have only an adventitious popularity. Indeed, popularity is probably the wrong word. We hope here that the courage of these publishers will receive the counterpart it always merits, namely encouragement, and that the book will be widely read. Certainly the book itself deserves well of the reading public, since it takes the somewhat specialist subject of Imperial Preference and succeeds tn making it not only interesting but inspiring.

This is not to be wondered at, for the author, Mr. W. A. S. Hewins, knows his subject thoroughly from within. His influence in England has been considerable, though his name is not so widely known as his work has been. We think that this forgetting of his name and remembering of his work would please Mr. Hewins, for he has never been one to push his personal deserts or claims; it is a cause, an ideal, even a dream that is his real object. So long as that gets established and begins to produce its due effect, he has always been content to let the glory and the reward slip from him as the sacrificial price of its success.
Tenebrae Factae Sunt
Authors: Belloc Elizabeth
Published: July 2007

Amid the daylight gathers thick the gloom: Remembering Bethlehem and His earliest cry, The Night that saw Him born now making room Beneath her starless cloak for Him to die.

Elizabeth Belloc.
Dulce Desipere
Authors: Reeves John Baptist
Published: July 2007

It is a rare privilege to have been born an Englishman. But it is a rare misfortune to have nurtured the ambition of one day growing up to be a great Englishman.

A friend of mine who did so has just died of a broken heart in a workhouse asylum, aged forty. As a child he showed great promise, and received even greater encouragement. At fourteen he construed Xenophon with such rapidity and intelligence that his masters spoke to him without reserve of their hope that he might become even as themselves one day. He was esteemed and praised as much for his moral as for his intellectual virtues. He had an engaging manner, a quick creative fancy, a keen eye, and neat, clever, untiring hands.

His first great shock befell him when he was seventeen. It was on the annual prize day, when he was leaving school. He had been heaped with prizes and congratulations by a Right Reverend Prelate, and cheered to the echo by his hundreds of companions and the whole teaching staff. He sat at his desk modestly concealed behind Lingards History, Jebbs SofHoctes, Morleys English Poets, sundry popular scientific treatises, and a tiny purse of golden sovereigns. He had a minimum of ordinary human vanity, and a maximum of ordinary human gratitude. He was meditating profoundly and with some wonder on the inscription at the head of the prize-listPaltnam Qui Meruit Feratwhen the Right Reverend Prelate rose to sum up the prize-giving with appropriate words.

It was customary (he said) on these occasions to congratulate the prize-winners and to condole with those who had gained no prizes.
An Epoch-Marking Book
Authors: McNabb Vincent
Published: July 2007

The title page of this book runs thus :

Synopsis Evangelica. Textum Graecum quattuor Evangeliorum recensuit et justa ordinem chronologicum Lucae praesertim et Joannis concinnavit R. P. Maria Josephus Lagrange, O.P., sociatis curis R. P. Ceslai Lavergne eiusdem OrdinisBarcinone. Apud Editorial Alpha, Via Laietana 30 MCMXXVI.

We venture to speak of this book as epoch-marking because to find a precedent for it we should have to go back to Tatians Diatesseron. Indeed, if Tatians work was drawn up after his apostasy we have no precedent for Pre Lagranges Synopsis. Not that scholars have been without the almost indispensable help of Greek Synopses. Pfcre Lagrange, always so courteous in his thanks to scholars, whether believers or unbelievers, is at pains to show how the precedent set by Tatian has been followed of late years by such critics as Tischendorf, Huck, Larfeld. His own words of Latin preface are significant: Verum, quod mireris, ipsi critici a synopsibus graecis conficiendis non desistunt; inter quos Tischendorf, Huck, Larfeld nullus autem vir catholicusab omnibus laudantur. (Nevertheless, we may well wonder that these critics have not ceased to draw up Greek Synopses; amongst whom we must give praise to Tischendorf, Huck, Larfeldbut no Catholic!).

If, then, Pre Lagrange has ventured upon a Greek Synopsis, and if Tatians Diatesseron is the work of a heretic, this Synopsis, dated from Jerusalem, WhitSunday, 1926, marks the close of one epoch of Catholic biblical study and the opening of another.
The Pieta
Authors: Bellock Eliazabeth
Published: July 2007

She knew not then of the third day and the tomb’s unsealing :

She clasped Him close in her love and her bleak distress.

But He, He was dead and cold, and long past feeling The passionate gesture of her tenderness.

Elizabeth Belloc.
Mane Nobiscum Domine
Authors: Gray John
Published: July 2007

Stay with us Lord, the day is travelled far;

We meet Thee at its close.

Lord, at our humble table sit and share,

And be, our sweet repose.

Pledge of our hospitality, the bread Is broken by Thy hands.

Our quaking love, our most confiding dread Beholds and understands.

Food of our souls enlightens and updries Our darkness and our tears.

The Breaker and the Broken to our eyes Is all, and disappears.

We cannot be without Thee, Lord, because The night is perilous;

And anxiously our earthly journey draws To evening; stay with us.

John Gray.
The Illusiveness of Modern Thought
Authors: Clayton Joseph
Published: July 2007

Cardinal Newman held that modern thought needed reforming in the light of the Christian revelation, not the Christian revelation in the light of modern thought. The opposite and Protestant view prevails with the greater number of our neighbours who profess a theism and do not disdain to be known as Christians.

But what is this modern thought,’ which daily with the steady destructiveness of an encroaching sea wears and crumbles the faith of Anglicans and free-church-men, and from time to time detaches Catholics from the household of faith? Whence comes it? A new impression of the Hibbert Lectures on the Reformation, delivered by Dr. Beard—a nonconformist divine—rather more than forty years ago, prefaced by Dr. Ernest Barker, the distinguished Principal of King’s College, London, bids us place the beginnings of modern thought in the break up of Christendom in the sixteenth century—in ‘the specifically religious revolution which we call the Reformation.’ Dr. Beard, with the persuasive reasonableness of a good Victorian, is content to let modern thought whittle away all Christian dogma, believing that mankind will thereby ‘penetrate more and more deeply into the glory and the wonder of God.’ Dr. Ernest Barker, maintaining that ‘the fundamental meaning of the Reformation is a new theology; and the new theology ‘a purer revelation of God direct to each Christian soul,’ hopes, with Dr. Beard, for ‘a new kindling and a further brightening of its light.’
The Sisters
Authors: Clegg Mary
Published: July 2007

A French Portrait

Mile. Marie and Mile. Jeanne de Grandet were the last of a distinguished family of the Midi. I have often visited their little town, and I knew them and their ancient dwelling well. It was approached by way of a cobbled street, running close to the foot of the citadel.

It was a charming place, rambling round a courtyard spaced and shaded with bay-trees and oleanders. To the world its aspect was grave and reticent; but giving on the paved and formal garden were galleries flecked with sun between the twisted branches of vine and wisteria, and purple to the spring and autumn skies. Old grey roofs were set with dormer-windows, from which you might watch the changes of light and colour on Pyrenean snows, or the flag flapping against the blue on the top of the Chateau Fort.

Within, the house was dark. People of the Midi fear the sun, knowing him in his might; and so, at high noon of brightest midsummer, the house was full of mystery and shade. Such light as filtered through the shuttered windows fell faintly in the sombre rooms, lay still on the panelled walls, the aged tapestries, the ancestral furniture. Perhaps, after all, it was airless. One felt at first a little breathless, restrained, enclosed, as in a narrow valley among high mountains where the air is still and no flower stirs in the grass. But slowly the restraint became safety; the lack of movement, rest; the noiselessness, peace. Slowly there was distilled of ancient perfumes, of forgotten airs, the meditative voice of the race and family, enunciating eternal and Catholic verities to the grave and tranquil measure of the great French grandfather clock.
The Ethics of Prohibition
Authors: Isham Gyles
Published: July 2007

The United States of America began eight years ago to deal with the drink problem on a national scale. Professor Gilbert Murray has ranked that experiment in the New World with another great experiment in the Old World, the League of Nations. These two stand for him as earnest of world progress.

The vast majority of people in this country dismiss Prohibition with a shrug, and complain that it has nothing to do with them. They are hostile to it, as an idea, just as they are hostile to Bolshevism as an idea, but with this difference: the latter is a useful pawn in current politics : the former is not. I doubt very much whether the Liquor Popular Control Bill (known as the ‘Oxford’ Bill), and its rediscussion in the House of Lords in an amended form, has done more than annoy the Brewers and hearten the Temperance Societies—not that the ‘Oxford Bill is a measure of Prohibition: it is a measure of the country’s interest in liquor control. The Observer, which is a regular champion of the Bill and Temperance in general, takes to task the Government spokesman in the Lords debate for dismissing Prohibition in America by a contemptuous reference to Bootleggers. Yet American fiction and drama, as studied in this country, are largely responsible for this. The strength of Socialism in England could hardly Be gauged by the references of music-hall artists.

Let there be no mistake. Prohibition is the biggest political issue in the United States since Slavery. In both contests, ideas and principles are at war. How little this is realised, even in America, can easily be shown.
The Romance of Philip D'Auvergne
Authors: Bracey Robert
Published: July 2007

In the Ardennes, in what is now Belgian Luxemburg, there lies a wide tract of land some one hundred and fifty miles in extent, covered with mountain and forest, well wooded and well watered, which for long centuries formed the Sovereign Principality of Bouillon, under the suzerainty of France. Its tiny capital (known to every tourist) stands at the bottom of a little valley, where the river bends sharply round a precipitous rock crowned by a grim castle, once the home of the gallant crusader Godfrey of Bouillon. Its history, and that of its later Dukes, of the great French house of La Tour d’Auvergne, warriors and statesmen, Huguenots and Catholics, Generals of the Fronde, and Cardinals of Holy Church, may be found written by the Maurist Benedictines in one of those monumental compilations which were the glory of the eighteenth century.

In the years preceding the French Revolution, the reigning Duke of Bouillon, Charles Godfrey de la Tour d’Auvergne, dwelt in his splendid Chateau of Navarre, near the city of Evreux, an anxious and troubled man. He had vast wealth and great estates, a park of one hundred thousand acres well stocked with game, a palace which was a miniature Versailles (Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour, Voltaire and Charles Edward Stuart had been its guests, and the ex-Empress Josephine would one day hold in it her sad little court). He had his gardens and his orangeries, his aviaries and menageries, his great stables filled with plunging horses and lumbering state carriages, his hot-houses, lakes and fountains, his pagodas and oriental pavilions. His house was filled with statues and paintings, and tapestries and lustres and porcelain, silver and gold and costly gems, obsequious courtiers, guards and lacqueys.
Social Theories of the Middle Ages
Authors: Calthrop M. M. C.
Published: July 2007

‘‘Y’OU see a field of bones,’ says this author, speaking of Scholasticism, ‘but the bones live.’ The same may be said of the categories on which his work is built up. Categories have an obstinate way of remaining skeletons. Thanks, however, to the constructive power of the writer, the bones take on flesh and sinew: they live. In the mass of history and voice ‘production’ we welcome like the natural voice this evidence of an authentic historical gift that makes categories—those troublesome things—ceme alive, that introduces us not merely to the abstract thought but to the thinker of the Middle Ages, not only to what was thought but why it was thought, and, above all, to the vision of life that inspired the thought. The narrative is enlivened throughout with the asides ‘(one might almost call them the captions labelling the pictures), which convey the author’s conclusions to our intelligence.’ Education had come out of the sanctuary into the library, it had not yet left the library for the counting-house .... it had not yet begun to teach men how to make a livelihood, it was still engaged in teaching men how to live ‘(p. 68)—or this :’ Mediaeval man was by nature a philosopher, by instinct a believer, by education a scientist, but by choice an artist ‘(p. 236)— or :’ the analysis of thought was always his (the scholastic’s) occupation, as the analysis of man is ours ‘(p. 244). The power of conveying a swift impression in the flash of a word is certainly Father Jarrett’s, and we could go on multiplying instances by way of illustration, but let these suffice: ‘the strange pleasures of the water,’ ‘the cosier sense of home.’
The Political Theory of Don Sturzo
Authors: Carter Barbara Barclay
Published: July 2007

To many Catholics the condemnation of the Action

Franfaise by the Holy See has brought a sharp awakening, firstly to the dangers of dependence on a movement of alien spirit, and secondly to the need for a political theory giving full and adequate expression to the Catholic ideal.

In view of this a study of the work of Don Luigi Sturzo is of especial interest, a work of which the informing principle, constant and invariable, has been the effort to permeate the political and social life of his country with the religious, moral and social elements of Christianity.

If as a theorist this distinguished Sicilian priest ranks among the foremost political thinkers of the day, it is impossible to dissociate his theory and his practice, for he has invariably translated his ideas into action.

His early education was classical and literary, with aesthetic tendencies, giving a large place to scholastic philosophy. Having completed his theological studies with the Jesuits of the Gregorian University of Rome he became professor of philosophy and political economy in the seminary of his native Caltagirone. Rerum Novarum was then four years old and the Christian Democratic movement in the ardour of its first youth. Under its influence his free hours were given to work among the peasants and workers whom he organised in co-operative, agricultural banking associations and trade unions, helping them in their fight against usury and exploitation.

These activities, the charitable institutions and municipal bodies of which he was administrator, his work for afforestation, his position as Mayor for fifteen years of a city of 50,000 inhabitants, as General Vice-President of the Association of Italian Municipalities, as Secretary General of Catholic Action, as founder of the National Foundation for War Orphans, of the National Emigration Association, and institutions of kindred nature, make him appear more the man of action than the student.
Nature-Morte
Authors: Gray John
Published: July 2007

La levre creuse et spheroide de l’air avide Suce nos &cres essences; desseche et vide De ses teintes virides la matière exquise D’une feuille qui s’attenue et se brise.

Bulbes de lumi&re h queues tordues,

L’imagier nous fait giser sur un plateau nu, Qu’agrée l’étoffe rayée qu’il a tendue dessous Pour faire plaisir à lui-même, que sachons-nous? Qui nous a créés, crois-tu, sceur oignonne, Dont nos joues nacrées nous-mêmes étonnent? C’est un chrétien des lointaines lies de la Gaule Qu’une fois voyait Gautier le plaid sur l’épaule.

John Gray.
Ephesus and England
Authors: McNabb Vincent
Published: July 2007

It is seldom that so good a book is given so good an Introduction as the Rev. Spencer Jones gives to the book of the Rev. S. H .Scott. We have rarely read a statement which made a greater appeal to be quoted in full. But we can quote only the following :

’ After all, we shall find no sanction in Scripture for contradictory communions of Christians; nor at any time in its history does the Christian community appear without a prominent visible personage at the centre, in the Person of the Man Christ at the outset, of St. Peter, afterwards of the Pope; while it is into this community, not into the Church of England as such, that we are all baptised, and to which our profession expressly pledges us.

‘Now, as the great Tractarian leaders came to see this, and to appreciate the significance of the Anglican appeal to antiquity and particularly to the four first Councils, an appeal to which all parties alike are pledged and committed, they came to see also that the Catholic revival was resolving itself gradually and inevitably, not only into a counter-reformation movement, but also into a movement towards Rome; and that if “Rome” was not always meant by the mover, “Rome” was certainly what the movement itself always meant’ (pp. 8, 9).

The little book which has been served so well, though not unduly by its Introduction, is a paper recently read by its writer before the Society of St. Thomas of Canterbury. This paper is a summary of a fuller work of the same writer which the University of Oxford accepted for a research doctorate degree.
For a Goldenl Jubilee of Priesthood
Authors: Benvenuta Mary
Published: July 2007

Now half a hundred golden years are gone;

For golden were they in the sun-thrilled haze Of youth’s enchanted morning, till the day’s Young splendour paled and passed; and high noon shone,

And golden now again before the wan

Grey ashes of the twilight quench the blaze That gilds again more gloriously the ways Your feet have trod, as though God smiled thereon.

Is it indeed life’s transient sunset light,

A-shine with memories that shift and fade?

Or is it He Whom on the western height

The poet saw in ‘pomp of blood’ portrayed? From feet and hands and Heart the red rays smite The golden road His alchemy has made.

Sister Mary Benvenuta, O.P,
The Case for the Liturgy
Authors: McCann Justi
Published: July 2007

Something was said, in the last number of Blackfriars, about the modern liturgical movement and about a German centre of that movement, the Abbey of Maria Laach. It was hinted also in that article that behind the movement, especially in Germany, there lay a definite theory, or body of theory, regarding Catholic worship and devotion. The movement in Germany is in fact especially characterised by its insistence on the doctrinal foundations as distinguished from antiquarian or aesthetical considerations. It is essentially theological in its nature, bases its appeal upon doctrine, and asks for a full realisation of the implications of the official Christian liturgy. In the present article some attempt will be made to expound the criticism which this militant movement would pass upon our present practice, and to set forth the claims which it makes for the liturgy. We shall not attempt to set the matter out in full, but endeavour only to give a few of the main ideas which lie behind the liturgical attack.

Abbot Herwegen is of the opinion that there has been nothing short of a revolution in our devotional attitude as compared with the devotional attitude of the early Church. On the one hand, he argues, we have an objective, sacramental and social worship; on the other, a highly subjective, personal and individualistic effort. He conceives it to be the main work of the ‘liturgical apostolate’ to reform this state of affairs and to infuse into our present-day religion some measure of the ancient spirit. And he believes that the instrument of such a reform lies ready to our hands, is in fact nothing else than our current and official liturgy.
The Alps
Authors: Belloc Elizabeth
Published: July 2007

The great lines of the Alps, and their sweet perfumes and haunting voices, reach the mind through the senses, and the mind in its impotence deals with them in a succession of images. Mont Blanc is a tidal wave that never falls, the crash for ever imminent above the valley; you watch it and feel that the very next moment it will surge forward and curl over in a dreadful arc and drop down upon the villages beneath in a glory and confusion of snow-white foam shot with innumerable rainbows. The Dents de Midi rears his great heads against the sky, a diabolic Trinity with his three dreadful faces staring over into Savoy. But he is a giant who has his mood of repentance for whatever stony sins have so scarred his forehead. From the top of the Col de Chesèrie in July, as you come up the final slope, there he is, quite suddenly, almost leaning over you, iron-grey and terrible, his granite faces streaked with tears of melting snow. From down on the shore of the lake of Geneva the Spring climbs the slope with difficulty : first the cherry-blossom : then the sharp green of the lower beechwoods, and higher up browny-green beech-woods half in bud, and, above them, brown woods where the winter still holds its own. The blending bands of colour mount upwards to the old dark green of the pines, to the stony crags, to the snow. It looks as if the light-foot Spring will never conquer up there.
The Convert from Nature Worship
Authors: Childe Wilfred
Published: July 2007

The delicate, high and gentle yoke of Christ Be on my fierce blood and my wandering feet, The myrrh of His pure tears be far more sweet Than the world’s honey luxuriously spiced;

I saw the dawn ascending like a queen Beyond the mountains and the desert sand,

But, lo, she was but light shed from His hand, Born of that awful Effluence serene.

The mice and coneys of the wilderness Were of His family, the spine-stemmed flowers Chaliced His glory within purple veils;

The intolerable weight of loneliness

Was peopled with His Whisper, the cold hours

Of midnight chanted how His Love prevails.

Wilfred Childe.
Darwin Redivivus
Authors: McNabb Vncent
Published: July 2007

Atheologian is too conscientiously concerned with truth, even with physical truth, not to take a deep interest in the yearly meetings of the British Association. Especially does he interest himself in the Presidential Address, which is given with such an accepted sense of finality that it is not open to the discussion of the subsequent meetings. Part of the theologian’s almost exaggerated respect for this Presidential Address is his reverence for Human reason when it flies, as Dryden says, at ‘its own quarry.’ Every theologian guides his thoughts by the profoundly humble wisdom of St. Thomas Aquinas. ‘Since Scripture can be explained in a multiplicity of senses, one should adhere to a particular explanation only in such measure as to be ready to abandon it if it be proved with certainty (certa ratione) to be false; lest Holy Scripture be exposed to the ridicule of unbelievers and an obstacle be placed to their believing The theologian’s failure to accept the assured findings of Science would be an infidelity not only to Science but also to Theology. Scientists who, as such, are not dealing with ethical categories can have no idea of the theologian’s concern to accept and assimilate every truth which comes to him with the ‘certa ratio’ —the certainty of a unanimous science.

But our modern scientists will bear with us when we profess—or confess—that we do not know where to look, whether eastward or westward, north or south, for this unanimous verdict of Science.
The Abbé Bergey
Authors: Gwynn Denis
Published: July 2007

To be the parish priest of St. Emilion—that home of a great vintage whose name is more ruthlessly profaned than that of almost any other in the cheaper English restaurants—is in itself a picturesque and interesting title. But the Abbe Bergey, who is in fact the cure of that famous little town, is far more picturesque and interesting than his title. There has been nothing like his incursion into French politics within modern memory ; and in France he is regarded more or less as the prototype of M. Clément Vautel’s bestseller, Mon Curé chez les riches. The resemblance is only superficial; for the Abbe Bergey is a genius of extraordinary vigour and abilities; and M. Clément Vautel’s hero was a very retiring little country priest who came back! from the trenches, talking army slang and scandalising the bourgeoisie by his preference for the society of common people.

Allowing for differences of character, however, and still more for the absurd ideas of M. Clement Vautel as to how his ecclesiastical superiors would regard such a man, the Abbe Bergey’s career has been somewhat similar. As a young priest he left his parish to serve in the trenches, and like all the French priests with the army he distinguished himself by his personal bravery and his moral example. It is since his return from the war that his story becomes really exciting. He did come back very much with the ideas of the plain blunt man who had learnt a good deal in the war, who felt that the comradeship of the trenches was the biggest thing he had ever encountered, and that those who had not experienced it belonged to a different world.
In Snow
Authors: Croft-Cooke. Rupert
Published: July 2007

Last night to see the earth snow-kissed I thrust My frozen window fro; and from the Thames The sirens sounded; seeing that sparkling dust I knew that even God was fond of gems.

Rupert Croft-Cooke.
Chesterton as Poet
Authors: O'Connor John
Published: July 2007

The book is worth the money, there is such a lot of it, but the editing is defective, the misprints are the work of the devil, because they alter or obscure the sense, and the index is almost a joke. The second edition of this book, if done with better cunning, should be more valuable than the first, seeing that there are omissions to be made good and better proofreading to be expected. On p. 10, 1. 5, ‘the news dragons’ is not a shy at Northbrook or Beavermere, but a misprint for new dragons. On p. 21 ‘Great Dostoievsky’s dance’ should be ‘Dostoiesky dance,’ dance being a verb in the subjunctive, a mood abhorred of casual or half-educated persons in every land. And on p. 115 no hand hath ere let fall ‘is obviously the error of an amanuensis which ought to have been put right in printing. Mr. Chesterton cannot be expected to correct his own proofs, they are so many, but someone is expected to be careful for him.

We miss a ballade or two, such as the threnody for Queen Anne, and that one beginning

O you that dwell where city smoke and grime

containing the memorable lines :

Hearing below bridges o’er the giant slime Returning rivers to the ancient sea.

A poem on the Christian Social Union meeting at Nottingham would have been worth including forasmuch as it adds to the gaiety of this nation. However, it requires a note by the author, since in this case he does not write in his own name nor in any known onomastic, but solely as an impartial, too impartial, onlooker. We do not deny that a complete
Community Singing
Authors: Maginty Edward A.
Published: July 2007

Af EW months ago ninety thousand sporting men, before settling down to the serious business of football at the London Stadium, sang the well-known hymn ‘Abide with me,’ or ‘Mane nobiscum quoniam advesfer ascii’ A Catholic who had heard it told me it was Great.’ He meant that he had no other means of describing the powerful effect of the hymn thus sung by this huge, haphazard choir. I asked about tHe general demeanour during this act of Christian devotion. My friend informed me that the hymn was sung with apparent reverence, with conviction, and with unmistakable satisfaction by every man in that vast assembly.

The episode is significant. The world has dis covered a fact which the Church has known from her cradle: that where two or three units, hundreds or thousands are gathered together, they want to sing. Hitherto almost the only outlet for this urgent instinct has been congregational singing in the churches; but as men have, in the main, given up church-going altogether, the instinct runs to waste. The thought occurred to somebody that it might be organised to suit a useful social purpose. The result is community singing. But, although the catalogues have all been ransacked over and over again (for community songs must be old songs), the organisers find a difficulty in providing acceptable fare. The crowds are hard to please; they will not swallow every bait. At a pinch, for want of better, traditional Southerners will sing the federal John Brown's Body, invoke again for the thousandth time the ghost of Annie Laurie, and grow happier while ‘Poor Mary is a-weeping’ ; but the kind of song that forces men to sing, and women too, even though its words are only vaguely comprehensible, is Shenandoah; for the successful community song must have its special characteristics.
The Doctrine of the Two Natures in Christ
Authors: Walker Luke
Published: July 2007

We may begin by speaking of two books recently published. The first consists of essays on various doctrinal subjects by fourteen members of the Anglican Church. One or two of the essays—for instance, Professor A. E. Taylor’s on ‘The Vindication of Religion’ —reach a high level. Others have little claim to be called either Catholic or critical. The only essay, however, that concerns us here is one entitled ‘The Incarnation,’ by the Rev. J. K. Mozley. The second of the two books is a plain, useful exposition of the doctrine of the Incarnation by Dr. J. P. Arendzen.

Mr. Mozley’s essay contains statements which a Catholic could hardly accept, but as an attempt at showing the reasonableness of the definition of Chalcedon concerning the two natures in Christ it seems to us to deserve praise. As Mr. Mozley and Dr. Arendzen both remind us, that definition is nowadays held in contempt by many who would call themselves Christian theologians. The former describes the state of things mildly when he says (p. 190): ‘In the doctrine of Christ’s Person the disparagement of the formula of the Two Natures has become in some circles almost a convention.’ This attitude, of course, is not new. Just twenty years ago Holtzmann could finish a well-known book of his on Jesus Christ with the assertion that’ no Protestant theologian of note any longer professes the doctrine of the Creeds on the two natures.’
Clerical Journalism
Authors: Editor
Published: July 2007

The Catholic bishops of Slovakia and Carpatho-Russia not long ago issued a peremptory order strictly forbidding priests in their dioceses to edit newspapers, even Catholic newspapers, or to become permanent writers for the Press. We have not been able to discover the reasons that have dictated this episcopal discouragement of clerical journalism; but it may, without rashness, be guessed that the prohibition had something to do with the complicated political situation in Slovakia. The bishops are doubtless only giving expression to the wise desire to withhold their clergy from entering an unseemly welter of political passion and racial fury : there is no evidence to show that they have banned clerical journalism on the general principle that priests, by reason of their priestly office, are unsuitable persons to hold pens in their hands or to sit in editorial chairs. Indeed, the fact that St. Francis of Sales has been officially declared the Patron of Journalists would seem to make so sweeping a proscription impossible.

Yet a writer in The Fortnightly Review (St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.A.) quotes this action of the Slovakian bishops as an argument against all priest-editors and clerical journalism in general. ‘A similar prohibition might be salutary and profitable,’ he says, ‘if extended to other countries.’ A priest who becomes an editor, he goes on to say, ‘deserts his calling, neglects his training, and gives himself to a service that a layman can do as well.’
Parliament at the Crossways
Authors: McNabb Vincent
Published: July 2007

This autumn session of Parliament, when the Alternative Prayer Book of the Established Church is to be brought before the House of Commons, will provide a real crisis in the history of the Church of England: and in that crisis even the Roman Catholics must be not spectators only, but actors. When the Deposited Prayer Book comes before the Legislature of the nation, everyone who has a parliamentary vote has a moral duty, which he cannot shirk through sloth or fear.

At first sight it would seem that Roman Catholic voters and members of Parliament, inasmuch as they have no part or lot with the Church of England may easily satisfy their conscience by what is called ‘abstention.’ Indeed, on all sides we have members of the Church of England urging the incongruity of Methodists, Wesleyans, Baptists, Congregationalists, Quakers, Buddhists, Brahmins, Moslems, Atheists using their constitutional powers to vote on a domestic religious issue of a religious body claiming to be an integral part of the Christian Church. Yet something more than incongruity might be created by abstention. Just as nothing is more dogmatic than denial, so, too, nothing can be more effective than abstention. Every abstention is at least one decisive vote for the majority! To abstain from voting may merely salve and deceive the conscience of men who feel their conscience cannot allow them the positive act of voting.

In speaking of conscience-salving we have touched the heart of what we feel should be put not only before the readers of Blackfriars, but even before the electorate of England.
Renan's Life of Jesus
Authors: Walker Luke
Published: July 2007

An English translation of Renan’s Vie de Jesus has just been published in ‘Everyman’s Library,’ and Dr. Gore has written a short introduction to it. Both of these facts are, of course, regrettable in themselves. But since, as far as we know, the publishers do not profess the Catholic Faith, and in view of the present state of religious belief in England, we should hardly be justified in protesting against the publication; and as regards the introduction it would be unfair to Dr. Gore to judge him as if he were really a Catholic. ‘If,’ writes Dr. Gore (p. x), I have been chosen by the publishers of this translation to write a very brief Introduction to a work which has been more than sixty years in circulation, it is certainly not because I could be expected to write a panegyric, nor because I was wanted to write a denunciation, but because what was desired was a critical estimate, from a present-day point of view— a very different day from Renan’s own.’ We cannot pretend to Dr. Gore’s extensive acquaintance with present-day criticism of the New Testament. In the few lines that follow we can only offer an estimate of the book (and of the introduction) formed in the light of the ordinary principles of common sense— which, however, have this advantage that they were valid long before Renan’s day and will be long after Dr. Gore’s. Dr. Gore enumerates some defects of Renan’s work, general and particular, but as he is more sensitive to the dictates of to-day’s critics than to those of perennial common sense, he naturally misses the most fundamental criticism of all.