bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Aubrey Beardsley's Sister
Authors: Michaelson Alexander
Published: July 2007

A milkmaid Cosie Lennox decided. In those far-off years he had given St. Philip Neri his seven lamps in memory of Lord Alexander Gordon Lennox, compiler of the Daily Prayer Book, and of Lady Boo, a Townley; he had the air of a young Roman patrician who shared all the pastimes of Catullus ; stage-struck but not yet a mummer; young enough to shake off the obsession of painted faces : ‘I am never attracted by anyone I have not seen made up; almost anyone made up can attract me; no attraction responded to outlasts six weeks’ he once confided to me. That conversation has weighed on my memory like a dream from which unlikely, unseemly, isolated episodes emerge. Can it all have happened, can he have told me about those Jews, the widower, the mother? (How little we had to learn from Proust.) He was not yet married to Miss Marie Tempest, nor contemplating such an alliance; he was indeed already, had we but known, an animated signpost that leads to the tragic desert.

A milkmaid, Mabel, our Mélisande: it was inconceivable that she should ever have suggested a milkmaid, unless one imagined Madame de Lamballe or Madame de Polignac at the Petit Trianon. Not that hers was a Beardsley type, either naturally or willingly, like Baroness Olga de Meyer, for instance; she had nothing of the girl with Messalina; perhaps at her most triumphant she recalled or inspired the beautiful Venus of Under the hill. Not long before her blessed release from this world, when she suffered from delusions, writing cheques, giving them away or thinking she did so, to dear compassionate friends, her face appeared to me like a gilt mask, carved, lacquered, lovable, heart-breaking.
A Peep Backwards
Authors: Pope Hugh
Published: July 2007

A Railway Guide of long ago makes fascinating reading, and we know many people who can drink delight from the faded pages of a back number of an aged Bradshaw; and in the same way an old-time Catholic Directory is interesting, since it serves as a mirror of times which can never return. Just now, when our thoughts are directed towards the coming centenary of Catholic Emancipation, nothing will afford us a more illuminating view of the changes wrought in the past seventy years than a glance at one of these old Directories.

We will take the modest little volume published for the year 1850. It has an interest of its own from the fact that, being prepared of course in 1849, it was in use during the year that saw the re-establishment of the Hierarchy and consequently the passing of the old government by Vicars Apostolic of whom there had been since 1840 eight instead of the accustomed four. The Directory in question is of course drawn up on the basis of this division into eight Vicariates, and the resulting confusion during the year 1850 must have been considerable.

But apart from this, the first thing that strikes one is the curious fact that the Christian names of many priests were unknown; we find entries such as Rev.— Quiblier; in fact, the editor begs for information on the subject. Foreign names among the clergy at that time are only to be expected. Indeed, they are very numerous and sometimes rather startling.
Reading
Authors: Swinstead A.E.H.
Published: July 2007

My Dear John,

When you came to see me the other day, we talked of the books you had been reading since we last met. You were very full of a book by an Indian philosopher, and you seemed, I thought, rather surprised to find that I, who share your interests, was reluctant to read books of that sort. You probably told yourself that I was hopelessly narrow-minded. True, not one of the books you mentioned was by a Catholic; but there were, you thought, many books, even on subjects like mysticism, in which non-Catholics had shown that they had much to teach us. And there was I, quite impenitently ignorant of this, slightly impatient of that. Did I suppose that everything that came from outside the Catholic Church could be condemned unread? Did I think that a Catholic need take no interest in what able and sincere men were thinking and saying? Was I content to be a self-styled pillar of unconsidered truth, and thus to save myself all effort of mind? I think I caught something of this in your mood.

Now, we all like to seem well-read, and I am not deaf to the reproach of being ignorant of the wisdom of the world; but there is something to be said for my point of view. I will put it in the simplest possible way, and say that it is all a question of time.

If my attitude puzzles you, if you wonder a little that a man for whom you, can feel friendship should be so bigoted, your attitude assuredly puzzles me.
Merrie England's Dying Smile
Authors: Reeves John Baptist
Published: July 2007

In his Dedication of the Encomium, Moriae Erasmus writes to More:

.... I have thought good to divert myself with drawing up a Panegyric of Folly (Encomium Moriae). How, you say, what maggot put this into your head? Well, Sir, the first hint was your own surname of More, which comes as near to the literal sound of the name mono as you yourself are far from its meaning: and that, as all men agree, is very far indeed. In the next place, I supposed that this kind of playful wit would be all the more acceptable to you, since it is your habit to be mightily amused with this sort of jocose raillery, and in your ordinary conversation you show yourself to be a modem Democritus; for indeed, while by your singular vein of wit you are very different from the common herd of men, at the same time by your incredible affability and complacent temper, you possess the art of suiting your humour to every kind of company. . . . How unjust it is, if when we allow different recreations to each special way of life we grant no diversion to studies; especially since trifles may be a whet to more serious thought, and things comic may be so handled that a common-sense reader may thence reap more advantage than from a more ponderous and stately disquisition. . . . But why, Sir, do I trouble you with this needless apology, you who are so peculiar a patron (of trifling); for, though the cause itself be none of the best, you, at any rate, can give it honourable patronage.
Malines, 1921–1925
Authors: John Henry
Published: July 2007

The Holy Father’s lately-issued Encyclical with its clear statement of the doctrine of the unity of the Church based upon the primacy of jurisdiction of the See of Peter, comes as an opportune commentary upon the Report of the Malines Conversations now at last published. The plan of these Conversations was to proceed by way of affirmation—to bring forward the points upon which agreement could be reached and to shelve, at any rate for the time being, the attempt to come to any conclusions upon questions where there was likelihood of radical disagreement. As the Report proceeds we become increasingly conscious of the presence of a fundamental difference of outlook underlying such agreement as was reached. To the Anglican representatives the unity of the Body of Christ’ is something desirable but unattained ; to the Catholics it is an existing fact and a necessary presupposition. This is the crux of the whole question. The corporate union of the Church of England with the Holy See, the ultimate object envisaged by the Conversations, were it ever to come about, would not be the re-joining of two separated parts of the Body of Christ, it would be the uniting of a schismatic member to the one and indivisible Body.

This, implicit in the Malines Report, which did not publish negative conclusions, is reiterated by the Holy Father in his Encyclical. And to this the Anglican theologians cannot bring themselves to assent.

Yet for those who see the finger of the Holy Ghost in the perplexing story of the Anglo-Catholic Revival there is much cause for encouragement in the reading of this Report.
The Threshing Floor of Araunah
Authors: Walker Luke
Published: July 2007

The event in which Araunah’s threshing-floor figures is narrated in II Samuel xxiv, and again in I Chronicles xxi. We are there told that, because David had numbered his subjects, ‘the Lord sent a pestilence upon Israel and there died of the people from Dan even unto Beersheba seventy thousand men.’ But when the destroying angel had begun to strike Jerusalem, David saw him, and he humbled himself and confessed his sin. And ‘the Lord repented him of the evil, and said to the angel that destroyed the people: It is enough; stay now thine hand. And the angel of the Lord was standing by the threshing-floor of Araunah the Jebu-site .... And Gad came that day to David, and said unto him : Go up, rear an altar unto the Lord in the threshing-floor of Araunah the Jebusite.’ So David went up and asked Araunah, who happened to be there threshing, to sell him the threshing-floor so that he might build there an altar to the Lord. Like a true Oriental Araunah begs David to take not only the floor, but also the oxen he was threshing with for the burnt sacrifice and his threshing-drag for wood; he makes him a present,of them all. But David knew what he was meant to understand, and paid Araunah the full value. ‘So David bought the threshing-floor and the oxen for fifty shekels of silver. And David built there an altar unto the Lord, and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings.’ (I Samuel xxiv, 15-25).
The Balance of Power
Authors: Hollis Christopher
Published: July 2007

I have just been reading an extremely interesting book by Dr. McNair Wilson, called Napoleon the Man. The book gives a picture of Napoleon which, the author claims in his preface, has never before been given in the English language. The claim is, I fancy, a just one; although, if he had written his book in French, it would have been hardly possible for him to establish so large a title to originality. For the thesis which Dr. Wilson urges upon us as a new and hitherto concealed truth is very much the thesis which M. Coquelle, in his book, Napoleon et V Angleterre, sets out to refute as the conventional academic interpretation of Napoleon’s character.

However, be that as it may. Dr. Wilson has many very interesting and very provocative things to say, any one of which might be made the subject of an essay. Briefly, his thesis is that Napoleon was the hero of peace and democracy who gave to the world a new gospel. This gospel was temporarily defeated at Waterloo, but it was not then killed. It was the gospel for which England and France fought together during the years 1914-1918 and which eventually triumphed at Versailles.

It would be giving a most unfair impression of Dr. Wilson’s extraordinarily vivid story if I were to pretend that his book was nothing but the statement and defence of a thesis, however interesting. Nor is this essay in any sense intended to be a review of his book.
The Proper of the Mass
Authors: Maginty Edward A.
Published: July 2007

It is one of the happier signs of the times that we have advanced so far on the road of reform in our liturgical music that the Bishops can now order (what, in the past, they could only recommend) that, whenever the priest sings his peculiar part of the Mass, the choir should sing theirs. Yet, on account of certain fixed ideas, the new regulation is more honoured in the breach than the observance. One is that the Kyriale must always be sung to some harmonised setting taken from Cary’s or Fischer’s catalogue. No parochial body but a select choir can sing such a composition and therefore the peculiar business of the choir is the Kyriale. This duty they have always carried out to the best of their ability; but as it exhausts all their energies, any additional work must be ignored as a counsel of perfection. It takes time to absorb such a revolutionary idea as that the Kyriale, which the choir have only recently usurped, is the canonical right of the people; and that the Proper, which the choir have systematically neglected, is their only raison d’etre.

Another fixed idea is that the Proper of Mass, like that of Vespers, if sung at all, must be sung to the official chant. The choir know nothing of this ancient idiom and there’s an end on’t. Now Catholic choristers are sensible men and women, quite as ready as other parochial workers to do the right thing when they know it.
Rustiquel the Rat-Catcher
Authors: Eden Helen Parry
Published: July 2007

It is never safe to take it for granted that you are loved for yourself alone in this world. After all, why should you be? Even Rustiquel the Rat-Catcher had to be disillusioned upon this point. He thought he was the hero of his own story—he who shone only in the reflection of a hidden light. Yet who should be a hero if not a cat? How seriously and courteously he bears himself indoors, yet how freely and blithely he sallies forth to slay monsters and destroyers ! And if this is true of cats in general, how especially true it is of one cat in particular: that is of Rustiquel the Rat-Catcher, who flourished in the City of Paris in the reign of Philip the Fair.

I say ‘flourished,’ but, to tell the honest truth, Rustiquel the Rat-Catcher, though destined to a snug and creditable lot, had a kittenhood as dangerous and obscure as any cat in Paris. In fact, it was not until he reached die lanky, introspective age, when the chasing of his own tail offered more physical difficulties and fewer imaginative attractions every day, that he was rescued from death’ by Master Robert the Scrivener, and presented by way of a love-token to Alis, daughter of Ernoul the Crossbow-maker, which was the foundation of his subsequent fortunes.

It came about in this way. Master Robert, one of the youngest and neediest of all the five-hundred scriveners of Paris, was hastening back to his garret one winter evening, with a couple of tallow candles in one hand and a small eel-pie in the other, when he saw certain scholars of the Sorbonne, always an ingenious and ill-disposed crew, playing a cruel jest on an inoffensive cat.
The Economic Philosphy of Mr. A. J Cook
Authors: Huray C. P.
Published: July 2007

No one, I think, has ever ventured to compare Mr. A. J. Cook with William Cobbett. If we are to judge by the daily press, Mr. Cook is not a popular man among the ruling classes, among the middle classes, nor even among the working classes. Not the ignorance of journalists, but the policy of newspaper owners—a remarkably small class, and daily growing smaller—is responsible for the abuse heaped upon Mr. Cook. If he has not been compared with William Cobbett, it is not because Cobbett is less well-known than he ought to be, but also that his views would be as unpopular to-day as are those of Mr. Cook. Cobbett has not yet been dead long enough for his views to be regarded dispassionately by the majority, and a century hence Mr. Cook will still have his critics. But his critics will not then be malicious. He will still be branded as an ‘agitator,’ but common sense will show that British miners and not Russian Bolsheviks were his paymasters.

The Rural Rides show Cobbett to have been a keen observer, not only of nature—for he was a born farmer —but of that continually changing thing which we call the social organism. Observation of the present led him to study the past: from the effect he traced the cause, and to this we owe his History of the Protestant Reformation, which showed that upheaval to have been in this country an economic rather than a religious movement.
Protest And-Not Catholic
Authors: Pope Huge
Published: July 2007

It is IN the course of the debate in Parliament on the Revised Prayer-Book many startling things were said, but few things can have been more startling than Sir Henry Slesser’s speech.

‘The question of Rome and the question of doctrine are two separate and distinct matters. I need hardly remind the House that when the jurisdiction of Rome was repudiated in England, so little change was made in the sacramental doctrine of the Church of England that the much vexed question of transubstantiation remained the doctrine throughout the reign of Henry VIII. Therefore when we talk about Reformation, we must ask whether we mean the cessation of the Papal jurisdiction in the reign of Henry or the introduction of the German doctrine in the time of Edward VI, because they are not one and the same thing. When we come to the reign of Queen Elizabeth, when the present settlement was really achieved—though, I remind the House, achieved by Act of Parliament without the consent of Convocation—the Book which was then the Book of Common Prayer was so designed, I believe, that it was capable of both the interpretations for which the parties are contending to-day.’

In other words there were two reformations, one a repudiation of the Papacy under Henry, another a reformation of doctrine under Edward and Elizabeth; these were not, as one has always supposed, two aspects or successive steps in the one reform; ‘they are not one and the same thing’ because the doctrine of transubstantiation survived the former but not the latter.
The Coming Elections in France
Authors: Gwynn Denis
Published: July 2007

As the time for the general elections in France at the end of April approaches, the Catholics are once again faced with a situation of real anxiety; and several recent indications of the attitude which they are adopting in regard to the elections deserve close attention. There is no denying the seriousness of the danger to which the Church may be exposed if the elections should produce results at all resembling those of four years ago—when the Bloc National was overthrown and M. Herriot came into office, pledged to revive immediately the old campaign of persecution against the Church. Much has happened in the meantime, and it may be useful to summarise briefly the main factors which have altered the situation.

Four years ago M. Poincaré went to the country after he had successfully carried out the threat of occupying the Ruhr—which other Governments had not dared to enforce, in their efforts to make Germany shoulder the costs of war damage. M. Poincaré put the threat into effect, with the backing of a great majority of the Bloc National Parliament, in much the same spirit in which last year he succeeded in restoring the value of the franc, by strong action and by a bold appeal for patriotic support, when all other politicians had failed to control the situation. But whereas M. Poincare’s efforts to save French credit have for various reasons succeeded, his policy in the Ruhr was disastrous not only to French finance, but to his own political position.
Philip Fletcher, K.C.H.S.
Authors: Clayton Joseph
Published: July 2007

At seventy-eight Father Fletcher, constrained by the infirmities of age to the retirement of Twyford Abbey, was persuaded to set down his recollections. It was forty years since he and Lister Drummond had started the Guild of Ransom—taking for their models ‘two old orders for the redemption of. captives from the Moors, viz., that of Our Lady of Ransom (de Mercede) and that of the Trinitarians, both founded in the thirteenth century. . . .’ For forty years Father Fletcher had been identified with the work of the redemption of England from heresy. It is appropriate that his autobiography should be called the Recollections of a Ransomer ; appropriate, too, that the responsibility for the book, since its author did not live to see it through the press, should be upon two of Father Fletcher’s old friends—Mr. G. Elliot Anstruther (‘one of the best speakers, indoors and out, that the Catholics of this country possess’), and the Rev. William A. Spence. Simplicity, our editors note, and rightly, as the distinctive quality of Father Fletcher’s style; Le style, c'est Vhomme mime. It is the simplicity of a large-hearted man, a great lover of England and its people, of Ireland, of little children and the poor, that is revealed in these recollections, as it was revealed to all who knew him. Preeminently a man of prayer from boyhood : at sixteen, at his confirmation in the Church of England, ‘prayer and praise became a delight to me, and religion took possession of me and became first, instead of a long way behind.’
Verglas and Pollen
Authors: Michaelson Alexander
Published: July 2007

‘MR Whistler is, for all I know to the contrary, an artist who has the suffrages of his brother artists, a great painter in the judgment of those who live by painting, but if he had not followed the example of Mr. Oscar Wilde his name would be comparatively unknown. He had the wit to see that genius must in these days wear the crown of eccentricity. . . . He developed a little group of characteristics which pleased the fancy and impressed themselves on the memory of society. First, he cultivated a lock of hair sprouting from amidst his tresses and fashioned after the model of a feather. Next, he substituted for a walking-stick a staff .... exaggerating his American twang [he] invented a species of Yankee dialect hitherto unknown. In this he made it his business to utter grotesque antithetical incoherences, and to ramble on in a maundering monotone from theme to theme. Some clever things he contrived to say, for he is undoubtedly an exceedingly clever man. Concurrently with this he imported a novel mode of painting.

‘The critics were divided in their opinion. Some said it was genius, others said he was a daub. Society (being already prejudiced in favour of the man) now welcomed the artist, and saw in everything which came at long intervals from his studio the transcendent gifts of a great original. . . . From the artist he rose to the oracle. Having induced many gay and lively persons in London society to believe that he was the sole painter of the period who had the slightest notion of the rudiments of art, it occurred to him that he might as well explain from a public platform what these were.
Middle Class Education
Authors: Richings Ronald
Published: July 2007

From time to time Educational Authorities have set up Committees whose members have individually and collectively advocated a liberal school syllabus to produce a definite and desirable result: but it is often convenient to invite and publish criticism; one can go one’s own way afterwards without disturbance. Education may have two aims : either it can endeavour to produce good citizens; or it can turn out a product malleable to the industrial tools. The first course is called ‘liberal education’ ; the second is simply called ‘education,’ and it is the mode generally employed in modern schools.

The Charlotte Mason and the P.N.E.U. schemes are still in experimental stages, and are for the most part confined to elementary and progressive preparatory schools. There are other schemes of an unorthodox nature which receive less and less attention as time goes on. It is true that ideas promulgated by these systems are adopted in many secondary schools, but in the main they are included for purposes of variety or as links between two grades of teaching.

There is little possibility of boys being educated entirely in schools offering a liberal education, for few such academies exist, and those few labour under the stigma of ‘freaks’ ; parents must be very confident of their son’s future who send him to stigmatised establishments when the employer attaches more importance to the employee’s credentials than to his potentialities. And it is impossible for the sons of impecunious parents to gain such an advantage, because when pupils in elementary schools sit,
A Saint among the Theologians II
Authors: Whitacre ÆLred
Published: July 2007

II

(3)The Acts of Blessed Bobert Bellarmine during the controversy de gratia.

In a preceding paper, we were concerned to show firstly what was the real mind of the theologian, Bellarmine, concerning the theories and teaching of his confreres, Lessius and Molina; and, secondly, how his own treatise called Controversies came to be altered and mutilated in order to be brought in line to some extent with the new theories. In the following pages, which are concerned with some of the moves in the heated debate between Molinism and the traditional Thomism, it is necessary to bring into light certain activities of Bellarmine, when the theological consensus in Rome was becoming more and more convinced of the necessity for passing condemnation upon the dangerous ideas then being promulgated. The account will largely serve to reveal the zeal of obedience which Blessed Robert Bellarmine gave to his superiors, and the extent of his efforts to shield the good name of his fellow religious from public condemnation.

After the third examination of Molina’s Concordia by the commission appointed by the Holy See, approximately sixty different passages taken from that work, were reduced to twenty, in which the whole of the doctrine condemned as heretical, erroneous, temerarious, and dangerous, was compendiously gathered together. It is said by Fr. Brodrick (vol. ii, p. 55) that as the examinations of the Concordia increased in number, so the numbers of propositions condemned decreased;
Dialogue
Authors: Gray John
Published: July 2007

— Have a norange.

— Mon premier est un métal précieux;

Mon second est un habitant des cieux;

Mon tout est un fruit déicieux.

— Yes ; there’s truth in that, and scarcely exaggeration. (John, fetch the N.E.D., article ‘orange.’) It’s too great, really; too round, too golden, too juicy, too Brangwyn, too coster’s barrow, too abundant.

— Augustine consecrated it in an able image.

— Looking at it as segments compact in the cortex. We think of it as a bag of juice; a potable lawn-tennis ball. (What’s it say, John?)

— ‘Orange, orenge, narancia, arancia, naranza, naranja, laranja; mediceval Greek, nerantzton.’

— Push on.

—1 The fruit of a tree {see sense 2) a large, globose, many-celled berry (Hesperidium) with sub-acid juicy fulf, inclosed in a tough rind, externally of bright reddish yellow colour.’

— Thattledoo.

— Globose. That dates Dr. Murray’s early education.

—You can hear the governess’s voice : ‘The form of the earth is oblate spheroid; in other words, like an orange. Now if I were to take a knitting needle,’

— pin, she meant, but don’t let her go on. The earth, an orange; a globose fruit (which is what the

N.E.D. means);

— (Look up ‘berry,’ John)

— the association is impressed in our minds.

— Should you think ....

— ‘Berry. Any small globular or ovate fruity not having a stone'

— Thattledoo. Should you think that geodesy and the orange are practically contemporaneous?

— 1497. For bering the appill oreynzeis fra the schip.

— It was regular merchandise in the middle ages; but I see the globose berry growing more delectable and less of a medicine as time passes ....
Leslie Stephen and Some Agnostics
Authors: Michaelson Alexander
Published: July 2007

‘HAVE you never heard of Cupid and Pish!’ exclaimed once, with a contralto’s disdain, the English Alboni, Madame Patey (nee Whytock), when General Clark Kennedy ventured to inquire why she called her favourite dog Pish? The Dog Pish could well be the Patron Dog of the Rationalist Press, of blatant atheists like Sir Leslie Stephen : they turn on the orthodox or would-be orthodox believers and exclaim : ‘ Have you never heard of Cupid and Pish, of physical pain and moral deformity, of avoidable suffering, of Torquemada and Galileo and Voltaire and Calas and Noah and the morbid imagination of diseased nuns, of Cupid and Pish?’ Saint and theologian and ignorant Catholic know what can be known concerning Pish. . . .

On a top shelf Leslie Stephen’s Essays on free thinking and plain speaking gathers dust between Buchner’s crass Kraft und Stoff and Pétrone (that Manon Lescaut of antiquity for precocious schoolboys) close to poor George Tyrrell’s later volumes, Swedenborg’s Conjugial Love and Spiritual Diary, and the Scottish Criminal Trials.

In my boyhood I devoured plain atheistic cake like Buchner and Leslie Stephen: without bread, what was I to eat?

‘ The ecstasy of evolution over,’ (ecstasy: did I not startle my mother when I declared I would not care to live unless I believed in Darwinism; but ecstasy soon over!) I accepted the magic lantern theory of life. Fantasmagoria, yes, but I did not worship, I had no cosmic emotions, still less admiration for moralism. I did not brood or regret, I had so much to expect, I had to grow up.
Archbishop Walsh and Cardinal Manning
Authors: Gwynn Danis
Published: July 2007

Mgr. Walsh has added one more to the small number of volumes which provide the authentic materials from which the history of the Catholic Church in England and in Ireland during the past hundred years will have to be written. He promises a second volume to deal with the pastoral work of the great Archbishop who, during nearly forty years of rule in Dublin, played an important part in obtaining the reform of the Irish land system, and after many years of patient effort against innumerable discouragements helped to win for Ireland its National University. He became its first Chancellor, and the photograph of him taken at the time, which is reproduced in Mgr. Walsh’s biography, shows him still vigorous. But his labours on the Statutory Commission of the University brought on a nervous breakdown, which left him a physical wreck for the remainder of his life. For the last ten years he took very little active part in public affairs. He died when the Black and Tan regime in Ireland was still rioting unchecked; and when the first tentative efforts of Sir Alfred Cope to bring about a settlement by negotiations, in which Archbishop Walsh himself took part, had not yet shown any hope of peace.

But though the Archbishop died a broken and disillusioned man, he had seen great improvements in the position of the Irish Catholics during his own lifetime, and no man had done more to bring them about Not only because of his ecclesiastical position, but by his intellectual abilities and courage, he was one of the most important public men in Ireland during the nineteenth century.
Increase of Food or Decrease of Population?
Authors: Ginns Reginald
Published: July 2007

Readers of The Daily News were recently given a scare in an article on a book which treats of the world’s food supply and the increase of population. The alarming conclusion was to the effect that within a measureable space of years the world would be faced with the prospect of starvation for many of its inhabitants, unless remedies were immediately devised to avert the danger. It is hardly necessary to say that ‘a constructive method of birth-control’ was among the suggested remedies.

Now this is the sort of scare that has an influence on the minds of many to-day who, through unavoidable ignorance of the true facts, are overawed by any quack who claims to speak in the name of what is called Science—a much abused word ! Science, if it be really science and worthy of our acceptance as representative of objective truth, ought to be a sure and evident knowledge of things. But many of the statements and conclusions of your modern scientist are nothing of the kind. They are, to say the best, no more than theories or hypotheses : to say the worst, they are often no better than myths which the scientists of to-morrow will throw aside as childish.

And in the case of the problem of the food-supply and the population, the scare-mongering scientists cannot even claim the support of their fellow-scientists. The fact of the matter is that there is plenty of evidence, theoretical and experimental, to prove that the feeding of the world, both present and future, in itself presents no extraordinary difficulty, provided that the artificial restrictions induced by modern financial control be removed.
St. Thomas on the Incarnation
Authors: Walker Luke
Published: July 2007

Though the following pages are concerned with the Fourth Book of the Summa contra Gentiles, we may be allowed first to mention the fact that the English translation of the Third Book has now appeared. It is sufficient here to say that, as in the case of the former books, the translation has been carefully done, and it both reads well and is reliable. One would think it would not have been difficult to publish the whole of this Third Book in a single volume, and we think it regrettable that it should have been published in two, for, thus divided, it costs the no small sum of twenty-four shillings. The work itself, of course, would be worth any price asked for it; but, in fixing a price, more consideration might have been had for the many would-be purchasers who will now find it beyond their means.

There is a difficulty in the way of the translation of the Fourth Book, and it is that we are still without a critical text, that book not yet having appeared in the Leonine edition of the works of St. Thomas. It is to be hoped, however, that it will not be long before we are given a translation of it not below the level of the translation of the other books. For it is concerned with such high themes as the Trinity and the Incarnation, and St. Thomas supplies just such a treatment of them as we need to-day. Nowhere is the robust, vigorous common sense of his genius more in evidence.
The Gospel and the Gospellers
Authors: Ward Maisie
Published: July 2007

GK. Chesterton has said rightly that Protestantism never emphasises a truth except by means of denying some other truth—which is, I suppose, the reason that it shows to-day a reaction against all its first positions. Faith alone has changed to works alone, no temporal punishment in the next world has changed into no eternal punishment, the Bible an entirely divine document has become the Bible an entirely human document. In all these instances the reformers asserted that they wanted to emphasise a truth which the Church was neglecting; in all these cases their successors are trying to affirm another truth forgotten or denied by them.

In some ways the most interesting instance of this see-saw is the case of the Bible, and we need not go back three hundred years to study in this matter the earlier attitude of Protestantism. We can study it in the remoter parts of America or the suburbs of London and Birmingham in the persons of Fundamentalists and Four Square Gospellers. At many a C.E.G. Platform do they heckle, and in the Protestant Alliance magazines they state also their simple creed : ‘the pure word of God without note or comment.’

Yet is it really so simple? Without entering into the question of why the hecklers contradict each other, and contradict Catholic teaching as well, we may ask one question that insistently suggests itself : If the word of God requires no note or comment, why do they write or preach? When a crowd of ‘Hot Gospellers’ gathered in the Albert Hall to listen to Aimée Semple Macpherson,
Edward Martyn
Authors: Burke John
Published: July 2007

George Moore said of Edward Martyn:

‘There is nobody like him. He is more wonderful than anything in literature.’ This inspired thought becomes vivid in Denis Gwynn’s story of Edward Martyn’s life. The memoir is compiled from extracts, chaotic in their confusion as they were left, from Edward Miartyn’s own writings. The result, however, despite the incompleteness of these papers, is the most enlightening story of the state of Ireland in a period when Edward Martyn contributed to its public life by his work of reform. They were the most vital movements of a reform in Ireland, which might never have existed or begun but for him whose courage, perseverance, learning, independence of mind and indifference to criticism, ridicule and hostility made him the most remarkable instance of what one great man of such qualities can do in the public service of his country.

Religion, literature and art always meant much more to him than politics and he had by nature and by grace an aristocracy of mind, a strong mind which estranged him from many literary friends. Religious by a native instinct, he the layman, was truly the ‘uncloistered monk,’ and he chose to live as a hermit, shunning the world : he lived in a garret, whitewashed and bare, in the tower of his ancestral castle of Tulira. Magnificent in his generosity, he would give all his possessions in the interests of education and the uplifting of his country, and to none was he more bountifully lavish than to him who would be the disciple of his idealism.

‘Originality’ was the sin of this son of Adam, but fortunately or unfortunately he could not hide it.
The Universe According to Sir James Jeans
Authors: Edge W. L.
Published: July 2007

For the invisible things of him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.—Romans I, 20.

There is a Roman road going from Cambridge towards the south-west; six miles out of Cambridge it passes between the villages of Harlton and Little Eversden, climbs a hill and drops down on the other side to the Ermine Street. A hill, a little over two hundred feet high, is usually an insignificant feature, but in Cambridgeshire, with its great expanses of open fields, things appear different; and one has only to ascend a mere few feet up the slope to command the whole of the plain towards Cambridge, with the chapels of King’s and St. John’s Colleges on the horizon. The view is of great charm; its predominant features are breadth, serenity, quietness and repose; there is just the plain of large fields, broken by the clumps of trees surrounding a few villages, with church towers rising from their midst, and the road stretching out between low hedges. There are many times when the view is not only charming but beautiful; one such time is on an autumn evening when it is growing dark, with a clear sky overhead and a white-grey mist creeping over the fields. Such an evening was Tuesday November the fourth, of last year. I remember it vividly, for I was out on the low hillside until five o’clock.

Perhaps I should not have remembered the day so exactly but for the fact that Sir James Jeans was to deliver the Rede Lecture at half-past five.
A Book on Buchmanism
Authors: Gilby Thomas
Published: July 2007

The cinema hoardings proclaim, if not so insistently now as a few years ago, the advertising value of the words sin and sinner. The devil is not regarded as a bore—at least by his nodding acquaintances. Vice is thought interesting, and virtue dull. Perhaps it is the fault of the novelists whose villains are more likeable than their heroes; perhaps because the notion of immorality is restricted now to the more exciting forms; perhaps because some of our vices have the reputation of virtue. These are the deadly vices, the deadly-dull. Virtues gone flat. Or, as St. Thomas says, the vice that looks like virtue; false prudence, for instance, and religiosity, and deadness to sense.

Anyhow, there it is, sin is definitely news. You remember how people flocked to the Albert Hall to hear The New Sin expounded. Only to be mocked. Similarly, the title and opening of a recent book on Buchmanism rouse the same attention. ‘It comes to grips with an unlovely subject,’ we are promised. ‘And’—the superb assurance—‘solves its riddle.’ But only to disappoint. (Pouf! call those sins, said the Borgia courtier squaring his shoulders, now if you really want, etc., etc.). Perhaps it is a back-handed compliment, but the Catholic literature of conversion is decidedly more thrilling, and does more than skate on the conventions. François Mauriac or Julien Green will point the contrast.

Making allowance for the fact that vice is often unprintable, and noticing the Buchmanite recognition of the pervasiveness of sin, this book still leaves the impression that the sins that matter are the indulgences That Spell Inefficiency.
In Search of Democracy
Authors: Prince J. F. T.
Published: July 2007

Mr. John Strachey’s book The Menace of Fascism (already reviewed by Blackfriars) is interesting perhaps as an objective phenomenon rather than for any very startling contents. The author thinks quite clearly: he sees in Fascism the triumph of the Capitalists over the inept op position of Labour; he is justly apprehensive of Fascist State-Absolutism; he is logical enough in suspecting that perfervid nationalism (in that it means a hatred of internationalism, and selfish market-hunting) will lead to War. Does the Means Test and the Trades Disputes Act justify the sniffing of Fascism or Nazism? It is early to say, and we have no business with prophecy. Catholics will be (as they have been elsewhere) the first and most obdurate opponents of encroachment upon Democracy—true democracy, that is to say, the only sort of democracy that matters. It is about the nature of democracy that we quarrel a little with Mr. Strachey. His book is prefaced with well-authenticated instances of the recent brutality in Germany, shootings and beatings, the stripping and whipping to death of a woman, and other (one fears) rather representative atrocities. These things Mr. Strachey very justly deplores; and Catholics have not been and will not be outdone in generous denunciation where it is necessary. For all that we have a difference with Mr. Strachey. Very simply it is this. We do not believe that he goes deep enough. Personally I am not moved very urgently to quarrel with Mr. Strachey in his dislike of Fascism. I could, I think, make my copy of the Menace of Fascism even more valuable by cramming its fly-leaves with data about Fascist prisons, for instance, and what goes on in them, what sort of people are sometimes put in them, and generally what sort of things happen to you if you fall out very badly with the Fascists.
A Catholic Housing Programme
Authors: Foster Thomas
Published: July 2007

Catholic Action is in fashion at last. For many years a small band of writers and lecturers have been urging their fellow-Catholics to get ready to take their places in the world-movements all around and to help in all spheres of life: political, social and economic, as well as religious. Furthermore, their emphasis has been that Catholics should take part in these activities not just as individual human beings, but specifically as Catholics, with the force and prestige of the Faith behind their endeavours. Many years have elapsed since this suggestion was first put forward by the Holy Father, but it is only of recent times that much attention has been paid to it by the Catholic community in general. Indeed, it has taken several years of hard times to demonstrate to Catholics at large that there is a specifically Catholic attitude to social ills and remedies for them which the Church alone possesses.

Yet this is almost as far as things have gone. There is much talk about Catholic Action—and there, far too often, the matter ends. When pressed for some practical confimation of our brave speaking, we can only point to one movement—the Catholic Land Associations—and even this is in its infancy. Already, indeed, we have done far too much pointing in this direction. One swallow does not make a summer, and while the Catholic land movement is a welcome development (welcome even if we disagree with it, because it is something practical at last) it can only be regarded as the beginning of Catholic social action. Far more is needed before the Catholic solution to our social problem is appreciated as it deserves by the nation as a whole.
The Pseudo-Science of Economics
Authors: Humphries Silvester
Published: July 2007

The philosophers of the eighteenth century created a study of the social order in its economic aspect. The fruit of their researches was developed in the nineteenth century under the name of Political Economy, which was included among the sciences. Precisely to what extent, if any, there is an ‘economic science’ is a topic worthy of examination; and by the publication of M. Vialatoux’s Philosophic Economique many suggestive lines of thought are presented.

The mental background of the founders of economics— Stewart, Petty, Locke, Adam Smith in England, and the Physiocrats in France—was the work principally of Bacon and Descartes. The former asserted the value of inductive logic in the formation of sciences, thereby following Aristotle (whose work it was his ambition to consummate); he formulated a new abstraction of the sciences, based on the method of knowing, not on the object known (thereby deserting Aristotle and founding the peculiar heresy of English philosophy).
The Dangers of Demi-Fascism
Authors: Shove Herbert
Published: July 2007

In a previous article’ I tried to make clear the distinction between Fascism and ‘Statolatry,’ logically inevitable if we properly understand the twin Fascist principles of the Corporate State and of the priority of civic duties to civic rights. But amongst those calling themselves Fascists there have unquestionably been ‘statolaters,’ avowed or implicit. These may be classed as Demi-Fascists, representing as they do the maximising of one half of the Fascist creed with a corresponding minimising of the other.

From an undue stressing of the corporate idea we may arrive at a worship of the State on a kind of pantheistic basis. If the highest authority is an extension of myself, then both it and myself are participants in the Godhead. But the essential difference between God and a creature is that from the very conception of Divinity it follows that Divine rights have no co-relative duties. Might and right are identified. Thus the true Fascist denial of natural civic rights is neutralized and the result is a mentality extremely dangerous both to the citizen and the world. To the citizen because the condition of his citizenship becomes one of increasing the might, whether it be in wealth or dominion, of the State. To the world because the policy of such a State must be world conquest. It is God's right to exercise universal dominion, and since only your own State is God —or, at any rate, your God, to whom you owe service— it follows that no other State has a right even to exist, save in so far as its existence redounds to your own power.
Between Middle Ages and Humanism
Authors: Sturzo Luigi
Published: July 2007

Dante belongs to two epochs—to what, chronology apart, we call the Middle Ages, and to the tendency known as Humanism. The De Monarchia belongs to the Middle Ages that are passing away, the Divine Comedy to the Middle Ages that live on, to dawning Humanism, and to the legacy of the Middle Ages to Humanism.

It is one of the commonest distortions in our historical outlook, and one of the hardest to correct, to consider Humanism as a negation of the Middle Ages. Such an attitude supposes the two epochs in utter antithesis, the second a revolt against the first, a total opposition of values, implying sheer discontinuity between the Middle Ages and Humanism. There are certain historians who go so far as to cut the whole of the Middle Ages out of the process of thought, joining up Humanism to Greco-Roman thought, art and culture, and taking primitive Christianity into account only in so far as showing the influence of Alexandrian philosophy. On the other hand, not a few Catholic apologists not only extol the Middle Ages beyond the warrant of realities, but minimise the negative aspects of that civilization, which they see as entirely and solely Christian. They too admit a discontinuity between the two epochs, with this difference, that they do not believe the thread has ever been joined up, in spite of the tentative of the Counter Reformation, or that, less effectual, of Catholic Romanticism.

Apart from their various controversial aspects, hinc et inde, this conception rules out any sociologico-historical interpretation of human process.