bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Eastern Traditions in Christianity
Authors: Mathew Gervase
Published: July 2007

When I agreed to speak this afternoon I thought it would be more useful if I spoke to you personally and informally, rather than if I attempted to give a set lecture on so vast a subject. Besides, I would like to begin by making my own standpoint clear, and I can do that more easily if you will let me be personal.

I have great sympathy and great respect for many of those who are working towards reunion. But I have never classed myself among them, partly this is because ‘reunion’ has never seemed to me an immediate and practical problem. Perhaps because, all my life, so many of my closest friends have belonged to different communions and religions from my own, I can realise what a gulf still remains of mutual misapprehension, and how unlikely it is that that will be done away with within a space of time measurable by the historian. And then I have always consciously avoided the use of the term ‘reunion’ since it has seemed to me ambiguous in modern English. Possibly I am here influenced by the fact that, when I was a young man, ‘reunion’ was commonly used in England in the sense of ‘reunion of the Church’, and that as a phrase is incompatible with either the Catholic or the Orthodox conception of the Church’s indivisibility. But the need of mutual charity will always be an immediate and practical problem. All through history in every religion and in.every Christian communion there have been members who have been infected by the spirit of religious intolerance. That spirit of intolerance has been always a father of lies leading to calumnies of individuals and to distorted travesties of the doctrines of others. It has had its roots deep down in the spirit of hatred and has flowered in season into acts of gross physical cruelty.
The Unity of Mystical Experience
Authors: Pepler Conrad
Published: July 2007

First of all I must apologise for borrowing the striking title from Professor Gilson without intending to present the same pattern in the matter of mystical experience as he presented in that of the philosophical. In Gilson’s deservedly famous work, the author traces the swing of the pendulum in the history of philosophy from the pure rationalism which is willing to admit ‘two truths’ rather than accept any tutelage from theology to that attractive over-simplification which he calls ‘theologism’ in which all human thought is made theological. The unity of such experience is to be found in the constant swing of the pendulum along the same path.

It would be possible to show some similar swing in the realm of mysticism from the moralism which leaves no room for passivity with God to the excessive passivity of quietism. We might begin with St Peter and St Paul or St Ambrose and St Augustine, where the seeds of such divergence might be unearthed. But such is not the plan of this paper; for the experience to be considered is not simply European, nor yet even exclusively Christian. And the unity which we hope to disclose is not the uniform motion of the pendulum, but the union of synthesis in the central point of reality.

There can be little doubt that there are men not Christian nor European whose experiences in the realms of religion, to say the least, bear a close resemblance to the experiences described by the greatest of Christian mystics. Writers—and many of them are not writers only for they have set out to taste the experience as well—such as Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard, or even in another direction Ananda Coomaraswamy, have made this abundantly clear in the last twenty years.
The Spirit in Nonconformist Spirituality
Authors: Davis H. Francis
Published: July 2007

It is the object of these papers neither to find differences nor to apologise for them, but to pause for a while to consider how far they really exist. We wish to learn to appreciate something of another’s point of view without sacrificing anything we treasure as true ourselves. Is truth different for different men? Or is it vital to some men and a matter of little concern to others? Or are our differences questions purely of emotion or feeling or of the company we like to keep? If we answer negatively to these questions, then differences between sincere people must be mainly questions of misunderstanding. We cannot hope here to heal a schism, but something will be gained if we can help to remove one stumbling-block. This is worth while, even if the stumbling-block be small or mainly a legacy of the past.

I am confining myself to a doctrine which was at one time considered vital, especially among Methodists. And, though it may be less considered today, it has its intrinsic interest as well as being a doctrine that might be revived in any back-to-the-Reformation movement. I refer to the Lutheran doctrine of assurance of grace, referred to usually by Wesley in Pauline terms as the Inward Witness of the Spirit. I do not know whether the Wesleyans used to regard this as a peculiar Protestant doctrine, but it is certain that Luther himself looked upon it as such. It was to him part of his justification of his big step in rejecting the external authority of the Catholic Church and was further dictated by his desire to gain an interior feeling of peace with God more vividly felt than any assurance such as Catholics normally seek and find in their sacraments. They all felt confirmed in their appeal to assurance by such Pauline passages as the one, ‘The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God.’ They made it part and parcel of their doctrine of justification by faith or confidence that Christ had washed away their individual personal sins.
Euthanasia
Authors: O'Donovan W. J.
Published: July 2007

Lord Ponsonby ofShulbrede ended a debate on Euthanasia in the House of Lords on 1st December, 1936 with these words: ‘If the vote is against me, no doubt the discussion will continue in the country and at some future date will be taken up again’. The subject was in fact re-opened recently by the Dean of St Paul’s, who said, ‘Surveying the arguments for and against, I have come to the conclusion that the proposal of this Society (The Voluntary Euthanasia Legalisation Society) is quite in accordance with the Christian conception of human right and duty.’ The Archbishop of Canterbury has dissociated himself from this opinion. And in the House of Lords debate on the subject last November, the Archbishop of York has expressed the strongest opposition

Euthanasia today signifies the termination of life by painless means for the purpose of ending severe suffering. It is enough to say that easy dying is not quite the same thing as a good death or dying well.

Dr Killick Millard, a retired Medical Officer of Health and secretary of the Voluntary Euthanasia Legalisation Society, has said that ‘patients qualifying for mercy killing—we prefer to call it merciful release—would mainly be cases of incurable and inoperable cancer.’
The Reconciliation of East and West
Authors: Wrighton Basil
Published: July 2007

Père Daniélou has expressed in a recent book his opinion that the theology of the Holy Ghost, hitherto so little developed in the Church, will receive definitive form only when it has been formulated in the thought of India: that this indeed is the providential vocation of Indian thought, just as that of Greek thought has been to express the theology of the Incarnation.

This is certainly looking somewhat far ahead, but it will appear extravagant only to those who are wedded to a narrowly Western point of view. Such a point of view becomes ever less tenable in view of the rapid decline of Western civilisation in our day, and there is no respectable authority for persisting in it.

Human systems of thought, no less than the political systems described by Plato, have each their germs of decay which will eventually work themselves out unless neutralised by the influence of another system. While making due allowance for the influence of divine providence in the Christian thought of the West, we must not forget that grace worked by adapting and combining diverse natural elements, and has in fact so worked in producing the Catholic synthesis that we know, built up as it is with stones from Jerusalem, Athens, Antioch, Alexandria, Rome and many other places.

A thousand years of schism were bound to make our synthesis somewhat lopsided in a Westerly direction. The Latin scholastic element has been allowed to grow somewhat disproportionately and has not been slow in manifesting its peculiar danger: a too rigid conceptualism, tending towards rationalism and legalism.
Buddhism Comes West
Authors: White Victor
Published: July 2007

Westerners who profess and call themselves Buddhists are, and will probably remain, few in numbers— however distinguished and worthy. Organised Buddhism in Christian or once-Christian countries is, and will probably remain, negligible. But a good Buddhist cares little for what he calls ‘names and forms’; and Buddhism is a force which a Christian even in the West can no longer ignore.

It is alleged (such rumours arc hard to check) that in several European countries images of the Buddha outsell crucifixes and madonnas by a considerable margin; it is certain that there are British manufacturers and merchants who will supply you with both or either with detached impartiality. It is astonishing to find in how many British homes—and those by no means only of the more ‘educated’ classes—a Buddha is installed. Of course, to their owners they are just ‘art’ or ornament, as inevitable almost as the Van Gogh Sunflower or the crazy pavement. And, lest there be any mistake about it, the Buddha will, as often as not, be found fulfilling some such utilitarian function as supporting an electric lamp or propping up a row of novels. But, if the owner is deceived, the good Buddhist is not—and the good psychologist will understand him. An image of the Buddha inculcates Buddhism (whether we call it that or no) more effectively and profoundly than many books about it. Even if we set aside the subtler symbolism of Buddhist iconography (and to those in the know, every single feature is charged with significance—the posture, the gesture of the hands, the curve of each finger, the very folds of the drapery), the appeal of a Buddha-image to a modem Westerner is understandable, however little he may consciously avert to it.
Irish Myths and Irish Writing
Authors: McHugh Roger
Published: July 2007

The uneasy relationship between Irish writing and Irish myth a half-century ago may be seen in a controversy carried on by some leading Irish writers in 1899. It was concerned with the question of what the subjects of a national drama should be. To get the setting right one should recall that the year of the controversy was the year of the foundation of the Irish Literary Society, that the Abbey Theatre was still unborn and that a discussion about what directions an Irish dramatic movement might take must have seemed to most people outside the literary circle which had conceived it rather like a discussion between a newly-married couple about what profession their son would follow, if they had a child and if it was a boy and if he lived to become a man.

By that time, of course, the stimulating power of Irish myth and legend had been shown in the early work of Yeats and other poets of the Irish Literary Revival. The controversy began when John Eglinton, one of the best critics of the movement, suggested that this might not be the case with dramatists. ‘The ancient legends of Ireland undoubtedly contain situations and characters as well suited for drama as most of those used in the Greek tragedies which have come down to us’, he wrote, ‘but these subjects obstinately refuse to be taken out of their old environment and be transplanted into the world of modem sympathies. The proper mode of treating them is a secret lost with the subjects themselves.’
Democracy and the Parish in Ireland
Authors: Toner Jerome
Published: July 2007

There are people with a bent for sacramental philosophy and theology who are always awestruck by the amount of earth that mixes with heaven in the Church of God. Heaven has truly folded all its gifts in tissues of earth, and we naturally marvel that heaven should have used the earth so much. There are even those who are scandalised into heresy by this, and begin to talk of God and the soul and the great alone. Yet, one could marvel just as much to see how earth has used heaven or how much the children of this generation have learned from the children of light.

The Church of God has been a great organisation since it emerged from the underground of pre-Constantine days. Genius such as that of Gregory the Great, Hildebrand, or the Tridentine popes, has contributed to the perfection of this organisation. Yet, remembering the lesser geniuses, one cannot but see that the hand of God was in it all—that wisdom of the most high that sweetly but strongly orders everything, the same wisdom which came to teach us the way of prudence. The very organisation of the Catholic Church has taught us a certain prudence. I do not speak of ordinary prudence, but of regnative prudence. How much of our international law was formed by a consideration of the prudence of that government which by force of its mission must be international and supernational.

The perfection of the parish-system, as we have it now, is due to the reforms of the Council of Trent.
The Visual Arts in Ireland
Authors: White James
Published: July 2007

Michail MacLiammoir has recently referred to the lack of visual sensitivity in the Irish people ‘whose ears had always been its strongest point of aesthetic perception’. Naturally, the storyteller’s art had been the only one to survive the long enslavement. Only the ‘Ascendancy’ had time or money to dabble in the fine arts, and the very nature of the ‘Ascendancy’ clan (those who collaborated with the ruling civil service appointed by England) led them to seek the most superficial portraits or stereotyped landscapes. Nevertheless, way back in our past we had a flourishing school of illuminators and sculptors, and it could not be held with much confidence that we are inherently colour-blind or immune to the suggestivity of lines or forms.

It is a fact worthy of reflection that Catholic clergy and people instinctively reacted against the lovely Georgian styles of architecture in which many of the towns and cities of Ireland were built during the past two centuries. For instance, the Hiberno- Romanesque style owes its popularity in no small degree to the fact that it resembles so little the Georgian manner and, of course, also because it revives the ancient pattern of Cormac’s chapel and other remains of the early Celtic era. It is also felt that the Royal Hibernian Academy carried with it into the 1920’s not only the taint of its origin as a facet of the life which revolved around the society of the Ascendancy, but possessed too, the air of decadence natural to an Irish society which by every artistic standard could only be judged as if it was situated in a suburb of London.
A Norwegian Newman
Authors: Gundersen Borghild
Published: July 2007

In the nineteenth century there lived in Norway a theologian whose religious development shows a striking resemblance to that of Cardinal Newman. Although the Norwegian theologian could not well stand an exact comparison with John Henry Newman, for he lacked the Cardinal’s unique genius, there is, however, a psychological likeness between the two men. They belong to the same kind of religious type. Both went through a very slow process of conversion. Both began as clergymen in their national churches, and both ended after much study and mental toil in the Catholic Church.

The name of this Norwegian was Knud Karl Krogh-Tonning. Unlike Newman, he did not have much influence on his contemporaries or on later generations. Until the present day he has been of no importance to the history of the Norwegian Church. In a way this situation is strange, for he made some remarkable contributions to theological literature.

Krogh-Tonning (born in 1842) was brought up in a very happy and cultivated home. His parents belonged to the Evangelical- Lutheran Church, which is the State Church of Norway. His mother differed from the ordinary Protestants by attributing great importance to the sacraments, and by stressing the ethical aspect of Christianity. Krogh-Tonning has said that his mother was the first to turn his thoughts towards Catholicism.

When Krogh-Tonning had entered the University of Oslo to study theology, he soon came under the influence of two most powerful professors, Gisle Johnson and Carl Paul Caspari. The theological faculty was under the direction of these two professors. However, their influence was not limited to the university.
Ezra Pound Reconsidered
Authors: Neame Alan
Published: July 2007

Ezra Pound was born in the Middle West in 1885: he came to Europe in 1908: he was at the height of his fame in the ‘thirties with the publication of successive volumes of his title-less epic poem known as The Cantos: in 1945 he disappeared from the public eye. This is what happened. From the late ‘twenties Ezra Pound had been in sympathy with the régime in Italy, seeing in Mussolini a practical philosopher after his own heart, ‘ordering’, ‘building’, ‘draining swamps’, ‘renewing the empire’: a creative ruler comparable to his other heroes, Thomas Jefferson, Pietro-Leopoldo of Tuscany, Sigismondo Malatesta, and the Great Emperors and Divine Sages of ancient China. In 1939, having spent seventeen years in Italy, he returned to the United States to warn the American people against Roosevelt’s policy, unsuccessfully urging them to reject it before it led them into war. Back in Italy in 1940, but before Italy had entered the war, he began a series of broadcasts on Rome Radio against Roosevelt, and American ‘usurocracy’. After the declaration of war, he continued the broadcasts with increasing animus; was indicted as a traitor; in 1945 was taken into detention by the invading United States army, and imprisoned alone in a barbed- wire cage in a military prison at Pisa. In this cage, which according to reports available, offered no protection at all, he spent two months, being then sixty yean old, exposed to the variations of the Italian climate and to the ill-treatment of the negro guards who used to while away their time tormenting him with their bayonets.
Retreat Into Reality
Authors: Vann Gerald
Published: July 2007

That fine and distressing drama of Gian-Carlo Mcnotti, The Consul, does more for us than underline the tragic fatuity of the modem political world: it underlines the fundamental unreality of that world. The baby dies, the husband and wife, unable to reach each other, die: because they and the world are smothered by paper, the ‘forms’ without which nobody can stir, and nothing can be done, and which are never completely obtainable. The hypnotice dance scenes, the dream-sequences, are far less unreal than this ‘real’ world which destroys life and love and all the deep human realities and leaves only an emptiness through which there shrills an unanswered telephone.

That is the pattern of our world, whether the precise regime we live under is expressing a deliberately cruel tyranny, or a benevolent stupidity, or a stupidity which is neither particularly benevolent nor particularly cruel but just subhuman. But when humanity is thus forced into an unreal mould, and debarred from all escape into reality, it will look for escape in further unreality: in drugs or neuroses, in fantasy-worlds of its own making which ape the world it has lost, in destruction—perhaps self-destruction —as a substitute for creation. So the night-club replaces the home; loveless sexuality replaces marriage; toys of one sort or another replace the children who should have played with them; hooliganism, savagery, murder and suicide become more and more common.

Obviously a world such as that cannot endure. It must either end in complete destruction, or it must undergo some radical change.
Catholic Higher Education in America
Authors: Nutting W. D.
Published: July 2007

To understand the position, the accomplishments and the problems of Catholic higher education in the United States, one must first understand the circumstances under which it was set up. The Catholic immigrants coming to the country found there an educational system already established, and established with an atmosphere that was anything but Catholic. American school law was strict in that it required every child to go to school, and American public opinion was becoming constantly more interested in extending the period in which he should remain in school. But along with this legal and social insistence or schooling there went a universal recognition that a parent could choose the school that his child would attend. He was perfectly free, if he so wished and could afford it, to send the child to a private school. There was neither a state monopoly of education as found in France, nor state aid to private schools as has been the case in England.

The American hierarchy had a choice to make. Would they allow Catholic children to be educated in the state schools and run the risk of loss of faith, or would they construct a Catholic school system and raise the money for it themselves? They chose the latter course, and by herculean effort and great sacrifice they built an educational structure whose aim was to duplicate the public-school system, grade for grade, subject for subject, advantage for advantage. This work would have been impossible without the teaching Orders, especially the Orders of teaching sisters.
The American Mind
Authors: Attwater Donald
Published: July 2007

The foreign visitor is commonly warned that New York is not America, and the meaning of the statement is clear. But it is not very helpful. A more relevant observation surely is that New York is very American. To go from New York to Fort Wayne, Indiana, is not to go to another country, or even to meet something different: the difference is only in size and degree. Neither in New York nor Pittsburgh, Boston or San Francisco, Cincinnati or Seattle is the foreigner moved to make comparisons of americanism; in the ‘old’ South and New Mexico ‘regionalism’ is still very marked; but in only a few, a very few, places—Sante Fé, for example, or, I suppose, old New Orleans— does he ask rhetorically, ‘Am I really in the United States?’ It is one of the most astounding things about this astounding country —its unity and uniformity.

The area of the United States is three million square miles. New York is as far from the Californian Redwoods as London is from the Urals, the distance from Galveston to the Canadian border is about the distance from Athens to the North Cape. Some 140 million souls live in this area, originating in every nation of Europe (there were still thirteen million foreign-born American citizens in 1930), and with of course a big African clement. And yet they are ‘We, the people of the United States’ as much as the homogeneous two-and-a-half million of 1776. Neither differences of national origin nor geographical and climatic differences—and they are very great—have produced the deep diversities one would expect: the ‘melting-pot’ melted—and then remade.
Arthur Pollen
Authors: Conlay Iris
Published: July 2007

The English, we have always been told, are incurably literary. When they produce painters their work is illustrative; when they produce sculptors their work is linear. However true this may once have been, the attitude is changing now. Perhaps the very fact that such a statement has become stock has influenced the trend; artists are on their guard and the current art school bogey now is ‘being literary’.

Our two acknowledged contemporary masters, Graham Sutherland and Henry Moore, are examples of the break-away from the literary. Illustration had bitten deeply into Sutherland in his early days. His Samuel Palmer-like observations ask to be clapped between the pages of a book; but this was only a stage in this artist’s development which, quite soon, he left behind. Henry Moore never seemed even to need to push off from the literary bank before he was swimming vigorously in mid-stream. From the outset he seems to have grasped the essential quality of sculpture—the necessity to conceive it solid, and he has never been tempted towards the linear.
H. D. C. Pepler
Authors: Sewell Michael
Published: July 2007

Harry (Hilary) Douglas Clarke Pepler was born on January 14th, 1878. His father, George Henry Pepler, who came of an old Wiltshire family, was a partner in Messrs Diplocks, Brewers, of Eastbourne. The family were Quakers, and Hilary and his brother (now Sir George Pepler) were educated at Bootham School, York. At the age of fourteen Hilary was apprenticed to Sir Reginald Hanson, Bart., as a Merchant Taylor in London; but after a time he entered the tea trade. Then followed a post with a firm of wholesale grocers in Cannon Street. With £250 inherited from his grandfather, he next bought a pewterer’s business and set up as a maker and caster of pewter, employing eight men. But his machines were out of date and eventually he sold the business to a competitor from the United States. During this time he shared rooms in London with Harry Mennell (one of the Quaker branch), through whom he became very friendly with the children of Wilfrid and Alice Meynell at Palace Court, where he often saw Francis Thompson.

In 1903 Pepler met Clare Whiteman, who was studying art under Herkomer at the Bushey School of Art, and they were married in the following year. For some reason, he then decided that his vocation was land surveying, and after his marriage he spent a year at Tunbridge Wells learning this business. His own comment, in some manuscript reminiscences, is: ‘Good heavens, I was a rolling stone’.
John Gerard, Jesuit
Authors: Anstruther Godfrey
Published: July 2007

Had Fr John Gerard been a highwayman instead of a Jesuit his name would doubtless be familiar to every schoolboy, for his exploits are far more exciting than those of Dick Turpin or Robin Hood, and have the additional recommendation of being authentic. It is strange that such a thrilling autobiography should have been allowed to remain out of print for half a century, and Fr Caraman is to be congratulated not only on making good this deficiency, but on producing an edition that may be read as easily as a novel. The former editions edited by Fr John Morris, s.j., had obvious shortcomings. The homely Latin had been turned into solemn, Victorian prose with a mock-Elizabethan tang about it quite unsuited to the original. The text was so interlarded with notes that one could never be sure whether one was reading Gerard, or his editor, or some spy’s report. Fr Caraman has extricated the text from these encumbrances, and put the notes at the end of the book. He has translated Gerard’s brisk and unstudied Latin into exactly the sort of colloquial English that it demands. He has brought Gerard to life in a remarkable way: at last we can fully appreciate his simple piety, his sense of humour, his love of field sports, and his amazing courage. Those who do not know Fr Gerard should read his narrative straight through as they would a novel, and then turn to the notes, and see how almost every incident may be checked and amplified by reference to State Papers and other sources.
Zulus on The Rand
Authors: Wood Valentine
Published: July 2007

Recently I was standing on a bridge crossing the main approach to the new railway station in Johannesburg: below, the last touches were being given to the fifteen new platforms, while gangs of natives were busy with pneumatic drills, cranes and trucks, already demolishing the old station, and singing shanties as they worked. In the skyscraper flats all round thousands more natives were busy cooking their masters’ dinners on electric stoves: others were handling goods in the warehouses, working as pump-boys at filling stations, setting up linotype for tomorrow’s edition of The Bantu World, or, several thousand feet underground, were manning mechanical plant, and lashing the reef rock from a gold mine.

In all outward appearances, South Africa is as modem, progressive, and industrialised as any country in Europe or America. But it is also a country of contrasts and seeming contradictions, of bright lights, hard outlines, cruelty, and laughter. As soon as the observer says Chicago has nothing on Johannesburg, he must immediately ask himself, is this not in truth darkest Africa? To ignore that question would be almost as foolish as to ignore the question, whether Paris could have a culture which was independent of neon fighting.

For the thousands of Africans who are riding bicycles, delivering refrigerators and patent medicines, who, in a word, are caught up in the techniques and efficiency of our mass-producing age, have roots in an older culture whose coherence and whose hold on them are only just crumbling. The good old days of law and order and of values they could understand are still there in the reserves, even if clouds presage the approach of night.
The Dying God
Authors: White Victor
Published: July 2007

In my last talk I drew attention to some of the striking similarities between—on the one hand—the traditional Christian rites of Holy Week, and several incidents in the Gospel narrative of the Passion and Resurrection of Christ, and—on the other hand—the so-called pattern of the Dying and Rising God which emerged largely as the result of Frazer’s researches in The Golden Bough. Fifty years or so ago, it seems to have been widely supposed that these discoveries of similarity between Christian and pagan mysteries, collected by scholars like Robertson Smith and Frazer, popularised in tendentious paper-backs by writers like Grant Allen, somehow made nonsense of Christianity. And it must be admitted that they did make nonsense of a great many nineteenth-century ideas about Christianity; at least they made it impossible to regard it just as some sort of transcendental ethic, dropped ready-made from the sky, without roots in the earth, in history, without relevance to the basic and perennial needs of human society and the human psyche, or to the forms and forces that shape them. But I remember when, as a boy, I read one of those books published by the Rationalist Press, it had just the opposite effect on me to that intended. The Christian Scriptures and the Catholic rites to which I was accustomed, without losing their wonted sense, gained a quality and a sense of which my pastors and catechisms had told me nothing: a sense of solidarity with creation, with the processes of nature, with the cycles of the seasons. Dramatisations of the processes of vegetation they might be, but had not Christ himself drawn the analogy between the Christian self-sacrifice and the grain of wheat which must die if it is to bear fruit?
Videtur Quod Non
Authors: Foster Paul
Published: July 2007

I had just switched on the light in my reputedly haunted room when the door of the cupboard swung slowly and purposefully open and a heavy thud behind it proclaimed that the skeleton therein had decided to take action.

It was a suitcase, precariously balanced on a mound of junk, that had, by its pressure, forced the door open at last, and the hollow sound of its falling was a proof that the policy of keeping a room tidy by throwing everything into a cupboard and slamming the door shut is no policy at all. It is a short cut, and a short cut is often an evasion of responsibility. Tidiness is not order.

Among the results of the fall of man, this attempt to take a short cut back to Paradise is perhaps the most disastrous in its consequences. Mankind was scarcely on the hither side of the flaming sword when it was first essayed, and Cain murdered Abel in order to obtain an illusion of order by destroying the evidence of a righteousness superior to his own. Abel’s sacrifice was visibly accepted, Cain’s rejected. The Lord God showed Cain that the cause lay in his own bad will. ‘If thou do well, shalt thou not receive? But if ill, shall not sin forthwith be present at the door?’ Cain found the rebuke to his pride intolerable. He murdered his brother to remove the offending evidence of his own inferiority. Whatever his previous sin had been, he committed a far graver one to erase its consequences. It is the classic picture of fallen humanity failing to acknowledge its own perversity and sinning more deeply still in order to create an illusion of being in a state of justice. Slam the skeleton into the cupboard and close the door firmly.
The University Apostolate
Authors: Wheeler Gordon
Published: July 2007

It is safe to say that the new conception of the University Apostolate, outlined in papal pronouncements and in the deliberations of Pax Romana, the international organisation for Catholic graduates and undergraduates of the universities of the world, constitutes one of the most important aspects of Catholic Action in our age. This article does not concern the Catholic Universities but solely those of the ancient secularised or the modem ‘red-brick’ variety which share the same fundamental problems. For they lack the integrity—to use Newman’s own expression—which the Church alone can give them. There is no need to diagnose the problem more fully than that, for in this age of introspection it is generally recognised. There is an ever-increasing concern, for example, over the dangers of specialisation. There is a general recognition of the fact that true university education is in danger of being lost in the pursuit of technicalism. The high-blown pride of secularisation has broken under it and there is a chastened search for the right solution.

The Church therefore has a tremendous opportunity in the middle years of this century, for her role is no longer a merely defensive one. As Cardinal Pizzardo said at Mariastein in 1949: ‘Pax Romana today can no longer limit itself—after the manner of old-fashioned Catholic Action—to protecting Catholic university people against the dangers of their environment; it must on the contrary develop in them a spirit of apostolate and conquest.’ The present Pope, speaking to the men of Italian Catholic Action in September 1947, said: ‘Not only defence but conquest. ... He who limits himself to being always on the defensive, slowly loses ground.. . . Do not isolate yourselves... . Imitate the Christians of the first centuries! Only thus, through ever-renewed action and penetration in the pagan world can the Church grow and make progress.’ And Cardinal Suhard, the late Archbishop of Paris, outlined this new approach in his now world-famous pastoral letters. It is summed up in those catch-phrases: the apostolate of ‘like to like’ and of ‘community to community’.
The Lollard Bible
Authors: Colledge Eric
Published: July 2007

The year 1950 marked the centenary of the publication by Forshall and Madden of their monumental edition of the Lollard Bible; and since then two works have appeared to remind us how many problems their edition and the scholarship which has been founded on it have failed to solve.

Professor Margaret Deanesly can claim special authority for her lecture, and our respectful attention, for it comes as an agreeable echo of her pronouncements, thirty years ago, in The Lollard Bible, upon almost every matter connected with this field of study. Her major work received Coulton’s imprimatur, and although it shows her, as do all her writings, as an impartial, generous and urbane figure, it served further to show that the facts were on Coulton’s side, in his vast and unedifying conflict with Gasquet, when he contended that St Thomas More, writing that he had seen English Bibles, ‘fair and old’, in the houses of his friends, who used them with the approval of the Church, could not possibly be referring to an orthodox, post-Wycliffite translation, because no such new translation was ever made.

In this recent lecture, Professor Deanesly presents the Lollard Bible to us not as Coulton saw it, as a great act of charity that Christ’s hungry might be fed, but rather as an instrument of Wycliffe’s policy, the grand design being the replacement of canon law by an English text of the Scriptures as the authority to which he might appeal. Wycliffe the Poor Preacher she regards as a romantic invention; and she shows us to him instead as an adroit and agile theologian, a trained controversialist, a don high in the esteem and secure in the protection of his university.
The Apologetic Problem Today
Authors: Ryan Columba
Published: July 2007

The classical acceptance of the term ‘apologetics’ comprehends in general whatever bears upon the defence and justification of religion. And in the specifically Christian and Catholic context this becomes particularly a question of establishing the reasonable credibility of the revelation made by Christ and mediated by the Church. Hence the traditional treatises de Revelatione and de Ecclesia. But there is no question in the present paper of engaging in any discussion of these venerable themes. The problem is the more general one of communication in a certain context. It is the problem, namely, of communicating the Word of God to the contemporary mind. This is the perennial concern of every apostle. The solution brought to it will determine the whole course of his apostolate. And the first necessity of all is to recognise that the problem exists, and is novel with every new generation. Perhaps never so novel in its implications as in our own time.

By ‘communication’ I mean simply the ‘getting across’ of something to others. But it is in a particular context that we have here to do with communication—in the context of the Word of God vis-à-vis the contemporary situation. First, therefore, we should avoid the mistake of supposing that to ‘get across’ the Word of God is like ‘getting across’ anything else. For, strictly, it is not we who ‘get across’ the Word of God. He himself alone speaks to the faith of men. Nevertheless, he does use us, reasonable beings, as communicative instruments, and there is the problem of how we shall render ourselves apt tools to this work. We do, also, even in our own right act dispositively upon those to whom he, by our instrumentality, addresses his Word, and so prepare them for its reception; and this imposes upon us a problem of approach.
The Enigma of Savonarola
Authors: Foster Kenelm
Published: July 2007

For my part, I am not sure my mind is not made up one way or the other . . . but to conclude, I say this: if he was good we have seen in our day a great prophet; if bad, a very great man. . . .’

So wrote Francesco Guicciardini, the Florentine who, as a boy of fifteen, may have seen Savonarola hanged in the Piazza della Signoria. Guicciardini was one of the cleverest Italians of his time and one of the most coolheaded of all time, and his mind was never cooler than when he penned his judgment on Savonarola. The dilemma it expresses can hardly be avoided unless one entirely disbelieves in ‘prophecy’. Certainly Guicciardini, for all his cool detachment, believed that God could still send prophets into the world; he used the term seriously; which may not have been the case with his near-contemporary and fellow-citizen Machiavelli who wrote off the ‘unnamed prophet’ as a failure. But even Machiavelli said ‘of such a man one should speak with reverence’; which, coming from such an observer, is a notable, if perhaps ironical, compliment to Savonarola, and is also valuable evidence of his reputation, in undevout circles, with the generation which followed his own.

A great prophet or a very great man: the Church has so far not resolved this dilemma by allowing or disallowing, finally, and officially, the first alternative. Certainly the name of Savonarola has been largely restored to favour. Nobody now calls him a heretic. His works are not on the Index. He has had public and recent praise from high authorities in the Church, for example from the Cardinal Archbishop of Turin and from the late Master General of the Dominican Order.
The Communist View of Science
Authors: Richens R. H.
Published: July 2007

The scope of this paper is the relationship between Marxism and science, and I shall deal principally with biology, both because it is the science that has been most affected by the impact of Communism, and because it is the one with which I am best acquainted.

To begin, we must go back to the writings of Marx and more particularly of Engels, who was, much preoccupied with scientific questions. It is convenient to distinguish three groups of ideas in these writings, which may be described as materialistic, dialectical and ethical. In common with those whom Marxists call vulgar materialists, people like Büchner and Moleschott, Marx and Engels affirmed that mind is an epiphenomenon of matter—the Marxists say a reflection of matter; they are therefore realists asserting that matter exists independently of human cognition; they believe in strict causal determinacy operating according to physical law; and they deny that God exists. The dialectics comes from Hegel but most of the fundamental notions occur in the Greeks. The most important dialectical principles are firstly, the unity of opposites, which asserts the fundamental interrelatedness of all the objects composing the physical universe, secondly, the idea that change and development follow from the conflict of dialectical opposites, and thirdly, the notion that qualitative change supervenes upon the accumulation of quantitative, changes. The relation of the preceding notions to the ethical tenets of Marxism has always been obscure. For the present purpose two only of the latter need be considered, the notion that knowledge should be utilised for social well-being, and the notion, seldom explicitly stated but constantly implied, of equality in rights between all sorts of human beings. These two notions have obvious religious affiliations, which however need not be discussed here.
Communism in Russia Today
Authors: Frank Victor
Published: July 2007

One is always tempted to view the Communist order, as it exists in Russia today, as something essentially static. But Communism does not differ from other orders: it is subject to the same eroding process of time.

The Communists themselves firmly believe that the ‘contradictions’ inherent in the capitalist order are insoluble, and that, sooner or later, they are bound to bring about the downfall and disintegration of the bourgeois society. They admit the existence of certain conflicts in their own society, but claim that these conflicts are merely the natural outcome of the eternal struggle between old and new elements. A closer scrutiny of these conflicts reveals, I think, that their character is far more serious than the Communists would be prepared to admit. Indeed they constitute a grave danger to the continuation of the regime as we know it. Four of these conflicts—one in the sphere of foreign policy and three in that of domestic affairs—may be usefully considered.

The contradiction which exists in the field of foreign policy is a comparatively simple one. The Soviet Union tries to pursue two contradictory aims at one and the same time, that of expansion and that of isolation.

The expansion is an essential element of the Communist doctrine of the world revolution. This expansion requires a great number of Soviet citizens to be stationed abroad. Their stay abroad implies close acquaintance with the outside world} the penetration of certain ideas and attitudes alien to their original Communist attitudes. At the same time, ever since 1948 at least, perhaps even earlier, there has been the doctrine of isolationism, the doctrine that the bourgeois world, the non-Soviet world, is an evil thing against which the citizens of the Soviet Empire ought to be guarded.
Some Recent German Books
Authors: Nicholl Donald
Published: July 2007

It has lately been complained that Catholic publicity in England lies in the hands of middle-aged adolescents; our continental brethren, on the other hand, seem to grow in youthful generosity as they come to maturity. At least that is true of the authors contributing to the Christe Heute series edited by Hans Urs von Balthasar and admirably produced by Johannes Verlag, Einsiedeln. Perhaps the most salutary of the new volumes for English readers—who so readily equate the Faith with medievalism—is Das Experiment Europas by the Viennese historian Friedrich Heer. Heer courses over European history like a spring gale, blowing aside Catholic, Protestant and Liberal prejudices in order to reveal the diversity of gifts and beliefs in the rich European tradition; he says, for instance: ‘without the Enlightenment our scientific sobriety, freedom of conscience and civic rights would be inconceivable’. That is but one instance of the refreshing judgments which one encounters on every page. A similar élan characterises Balthasar’s Schleifung der Bastionen, the crumbling bastions are, of course, those of the medieval city, and Balthasar sees their fall as providential, the impetus towards the catholic mission. His reflections on ‘tradition’ are particularly interesting and valuable, as showing that it means almost the opposite in the Christian tradition from what conservative social theorists mean by it. And it is in the light of this principle that he ventures to assert: ‘The future of the Church depends on whether lay people are to be found who are prepared to live directly from the Gospel teachings and transform the world in the light of them’. One layman who seems to be prepared to do this is Francois Mauriac, whose Der Stein des Anstosses also appears in this series. Although this collection of discursive observations has little shape, it leaves us feeling that we know Mauriac personally—and, more important, says many things which are always being mentioned in conversation amongst Catholics but are scarcely ever breathed in public. It is for the health of the Catholic community that these opinions should be expressed, since our very salvation depends on our not meriting the taunt of André Gide: ‘Catholics do not love the truth’. (Two other recent volumes in the Christe Heute series are Hugo Rahner’s Der spielende Mensch—a revised version of his Eranos lecture—and a collection of de Lubac’s essays on the spiritual sense of Scripture.)
The Sanctity of an Inquisitor
Authors: Weatherhead Benet
Published: July 2007

One day when the blessed Peter was making his way through the country about Milan he happened on two men sowing their fields, of whom one was a Catholic, the other a heretic. The Catholic before beginning his work called on God to help him, but the heretic invoked the devil, whom as the maker of the visible world he believed to have the government of the earth and its crops; and when they heard one another each condemned the other for the perversity of his faith. The blessed Peter who by the will of God was passing that way drew near. . . .’ The outcome is hardly in doubt: St Peter prophesied, and when in time the field of the Catholic bore a plentiful crop and the heretic’s none, the heretic was convinced by the miracle and became a Catholic. But St Peter was not always as confident as on that occasion. Another day he met a heretic who challenged him to a disputation. St Peter, unprepared, was momentarily overwhelmed by his subtleties and went into a church to pray; even there, before the Lady altar, he was visited by doubt and trepidation, and it required the voice of the Blessed Virgin herself to reassure him.