bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Martin De Porres: Lay‐Brother (1579–1639)
Authors: Ryan Columba
Published: July 2007

There is so sharp a glare of the miraculous about Blessed I Martin of Lima, and sometimes such a haze of mere emotionalism, that it is hard to see the man as he was, the hard-working, patiently enduring Dominican lay-brother in the flesh. What follows is an attempt to depict him as he appeared to his contemporaries, and is based on ten of the seventy-six accounts given twenty years after his death at the Diocesan enquiry by people who knew him.

The background needs to be realised: a huge old Spanish-style convent, its several hundred religious occupied in all the work needed in a city of the New World: preaching, teaching, care of orphans, children, poor, sick. Lima, even when Martin died at the age of sixty, had existed a bare hundred years, a city of Spanish immigrants or first descendants of the conquistadores, merchants, soldiers, religious of every description. Side by side with these lived the dispossessed Indians, the imported Negro slaves. In the priory were not only religious, but the boys they looked after, and men staying there on retreat or learning a trade. There were Negro servants in the kitchen and the laundry and at all the menial tasks in the place. The Dominicans themselves comprised priests, student-novices (from fourteen and upwards), lay-brothers, and donados (not strictly religious, but ‘familiars’ living in the house). They had their cells; not necessarily small rooms, but places with alcoves and closets off them shared by visitors and children.
Personality in History
Authors: Hislop Ian
Published: July 2007

The title of this essay requires immediate modification. In fact it is concerned with one cultural movement, one historic process, which in spite of constant and recurring crises may be termed continuous. The so-called civilisation of the West,—Mediterranean in origin, and now, at least in a superficial and technological sense, world-wide in extent—provides its historical background. The purpose of the essay is to view the history of this culture in terms of personality.

Two questions at once suggest themselves: What is meant by history? and What is personality? By history is here meant an interpretative inquiry concerned with human activity—a description derived from Collingwood, but not understood in quite the same way. This description has at least the value that it forces the mind to consider the second question. For what is human activity but the exteriorisation of mental and moral processes which have their root in the person? No sooner has this been asserted than a doubt arises: What is meant by saying that human activity is the activity of a person?
Some African ‘Christians’
Authors: Lienhardt R. G.
Published: July 2007

If there is a ‘problem’ of adapting or accommodating African rites and beliefs to Christianity, it is one to which missionaries best know the answers. Students of primitive people are better employed in saying what does happen, rather than in speculating as to what might or should happen. The problem posed in theory, in which abstract African rites and beliefs encounter an abstract Christian teaching, can scarcely be the problem which has to be answered daily in practice. This impersonal encounter between two abstractions then becomes a very personal encounter between two people, one Christian, one pagan. Each is held to his religion by something more than the arguments he could produce for it; while the Christian may sometimes find himself nearer to the pagan than his arguments against him suggest. The difference between them makes for uneasiness, if only because it will not remain constant. Christianity and paganism, in the abstract, have a clear line of division, beyond which they are not required to meet on equal terms. A Christian and a pagan, two individuals, cannot so easily remain each on his own side of a formal division. They are bound to feel the strain of sometimes seeming to belong to different worlds, while at other times belonging so palpably to the same. I think that to try to find common ‘human’ ground between them is to misconceive the difference. This common human ground, in so far as the expression means anything, is given, in the first place. Christian and pagan are not like two slices of bread, one spread with butter and the other with margarine. To start to look for common human ground—human which is neither human-Christian nor human-pagan—is to reject what is immediately there. It is at once to make the relationship between Christian and pagan into a problem, not a relationship.
The Sibylline Books of Tribal Art
Authors: Fagg William
Published: July 2007

It is a charge commonly levelled by administrators against anthropologists—and by the more materialistic and revolutionary anthropologists against their more conservative colleagues (among whom I count myself)—that they advocate the preservation of primitive peoples as ‘museum pieces’, sheltered from the harmful influences of civilisation. There is a grain of truth in the taunt—for many an anthropologist must have wondered at times whether this tribe or that was not better off and happier before the introduction of corrugated iron and political ‘aspirations’— but it is really a gross over-simplification; it is, in truth, not change so much as revolution that is deplored. For the anthropologist has been trained to observe more clearly than most men how a tribal culture may be not merely disrupted but even completely destroyed by the opening of a mine or a plantation or the prohibition of initiation or polygamy; how, for example, the advent of the metal roof may lead not merely to the decay of the thatcher’s skill, but perhaps also to the collapse of a co-operative labour system. Far from being absolutely opposed to change, he understands that there are ways—if we are willing to look for them—of making changes rather as a graft upon the tree of tribal culture than by ruthlessly extirpating it, or inadvertently ringing the bark. So it is that he will sometimes be found seeking, however hopelessly, to retard changes threatened from outside until their promoters are ready, both in their own and in the tribal interest, to take account of research in human nature and institutions; he would be more than human in these days if he did not point to the East African Groundnuts Scheme as a classical and grandiose example of revolution unnecessarily applied to tribal cultures with an utter disregard of the very existence of human problems.
Catholics and The Labour Party
Authors: Walsh R. P.
Published: July 2007

For good or for ill there is every chance that the Labour Party will control the destiny of this country for perhaps fifty out of the next hundred years, and as it is a party that attracts strong support from a large proportion of the Catholics in this country it is important to think of the position of these Catholics within it. In the major industrial centres the majority of Catholics in the working class support Labour; indeed, it was once estimated in the columns of this review by Lord Pakenham that eighty per cent of the Catholic body voted Labour, and even if we agree that this figure is high, the percentage must still be very significant.

Unfortunately most of those Catholics with the ability to write and to project their ideas into the world of thought and of literature tend to be supporters of the Conservative Party, and they in no way represent the general opinion of the Catholic body. When one moves at what might be called the national level of Catholic action one finds that most of the leaders are also Conservative. No one can doubt the right of these writers or leaders to follow the politics they hold, nor can one doubt their ability to write and their ability to give time to the leadership of the Catholic body. They accomplish a magnificent job for the Catholic community, yet it is unfortunate that so one-sided an impression is given of the Catholic attitude towards our political parties.
The Natural Law
Authors: Flynn Thomas Edward
Published: July 2007

The controversy roused by the Pope’s address last autumn to Italian obstetricians was at its height when on a Sunday evening I sat listening to the second of Lord Radcliffe’s Reith Lectures. His scholarly exposition of the natural law seemed to silence the din of ill-informed and sentimental criticism which had assailed the Holy Father’s calm and authoritative statement of moral judgments which were the ordinary teaching of the Church. It was not that Lord Radcliffe stood forth as a champion of natural law; the pleasure one felt was due merely to this reminder of a concept which had been the corner-stone of ethics for a millennium. For the attack on the Pope’s teaching in this particular allocution, like the modem propaganda in favour of birth control and euthanasia, of divorce and artificial insemination, was made in ignorance or in contempt of that fundamental law of nature which in fact governs most of these grave problems. That law goes almost unrecognised outside the Catholic Church. It seems opportune, therefore, to introduce this series of articles in Blackfriars with an account of the natural law and its relationship with law in general.

The word ‘law’ is used in a variety of senses today. It may mean the decree of a legislator, usually the human ruler, regulating the external conduct of the human subject; or it may mean a scientific law, like the law of gravitation, which is regarded as merely the expression of the behaviour of inanimate objects as discerned by a process of induction from observation and experiment.

But the medieval mind took a wider sweep, and subsumed under the name ‘law’ all these various meanings. First of all it considered the eternal law which was the plan of the all-wise Creator for the harmonious progress of the whole universe of his creation.
Play
Authors: Nicholl Donald
Published: July 2007

There is an interesting little paragraph in St Thomas Aquinas’ works which refers to play. He has been describing how every action is performed towards some end, with some aim in view. Then he breaks off, and says that there are some actions which do not seem to be for any end, such as contemplating, playing—stroking one’s beard! Leaving aside the beard-stroking (which St Thomas accounts for as would a modem analyst), he sees close similarities between contemplation and play. That is to say, contemplation does not have any end outside itself, because it is its own end; likewise with play, for although we sometimes play so as to study better afterwards, we also play for the sheer delight which is in the game itself. Therefore there is obviously a close similarity between the playful and the contemplative attitudes: they have no end outside themselves.

St Thomas begins an exposition of Boethius by quoting from the book of Ecclesiasticus (XXXII, 15) where man is told on rising to run first to his home, and there recollect himself and play. St Thomas uses the quotation to explain that he is undertaking this exposition because to contemplate wisdom (the recollection) is itself a delightful game which requires no exterior aim for its justification. Furthermore, he points out, the Scriptures themselves compare the divine wisdom to the delight of play, for in Proverbs VIII, 30, we hear how ‘I was with him forming all things; and was delighted every day, playing before him at all times’. In view of which one is not surprised to discover St Thomas saying that a man may commit sin by not playing sufficiendy.
Typology in The Scriptures
Authors: de Riedmatten Henri
Published: July 2007

In the great pastoral effort of contemporary Catholicism, a return to sources seems to provide one of its most powerful inspirations and also to give some of the finest results. Catholics are re-discovering an interest in the Bible, the Fathers, the Liturgy, an interest which completes and perfects what the return to the texts and teaching of St Thomas has contributed to Christian thought during the last fifty years. But since in this case a purely scientific perspective is not sufficient, what is required being not only to admire but to assimilate, the problem of the approach to, and interpretation of, these sources cannot fail to arise. And, primarily, the problem of how to read the Bible, how to discover anew a constant source of spirituality and of triumphant Christian energy in the Old Testament which modem exegesis seems at first sight to have drained of its spiritual value. A more extensive reading of the Fathers, by revealing innumerable possibilities and resources, has made the problem of the Bible more acute. We know that the Fathers, like the men of the Middle Ages moreover, were familiar with the sacred text through and through; many of them knew it by heart; it formed the subject of their prayers, the theme of their sermons; their language, even when there is no explicit quotation, is of the very warp and woof of the expressions of Holy Scripture. For them the Scriptures truly and unceasingly provide a meeting place with God, a discourse and a lesson given by God to man repeated over and over again in a thousand different forms, but (the point is an important one) directly and totally translatable, in terms of Christianity and the mystery of the New Covenant.
Justice and the Laws
Authors: Slesser Henry
Published: July 2007

In the famous treatise on The Laws of England by Blackstone, published in four large volumes in 1769, there are but two pages devoted to the natural law and the law of nations. It is interesting in these days, when English judges and professors are apt to deride the whole conception of natural law or any law beyond the customary and the legislative, to see how far already the abandonment of any eternal or moral juridical reference had proceeded even in Blackstone’s day. His acknowledgement, perfunctory and abbreviated as it is, constitutes almost the last reference to any juridical principle (beyond parliamentary democratic desire), to govern the making or interpretation of laws in England: the doctrine of the absolute sovereignty of Parliament has become unchallengeable.

Yet, under the heading ‘Of the nature of Laws in general’ Blackstone still writes:

Man, considered as a creature, must necessarily be subject to the laws of his Creator, for he is entirely a dependent being; and as man depends absolutely upon his Maker for everything, it is necessary that he should, in all points, conform to his Maker’s will, —which will is called the Law of Nature; and there are three great principles of this law, namely,—that we should live reputably, should hurt nobody, and should render to every one his due; and to these three principles Justinian has, in fact, reduced the whole doctrine of law.

The constitution and frame of humanity afford a striking proof of the benevolence of the Creator,—the laws of eternal justice being inseparably interwoven with the happiness of every individual; and the human reason not sufficing, of itself, to teach this law, therefore the beneficence of the Deity has aided the imperfection of human reason by an immediate and direct revelation, this revealed law being declared by the Holy Scriptures; and upon these two foundations, nature and revelation, depend all human laws.
After Coulton
Authors: Chew Helena M.
Published: July 2007

It is rather more than thirty years since Dr G. G. Coulton inaugurated the series of ‘Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought’. In the interval between the two great wars a number of notable books appeared, including Eileen Power’s Medieval English Nunneries and Coulton’s own monumental Five Centuries of Religion, of which the recently-published posthumous volume appropriately terminated the series. It is now revived, under the general editorship of the Professor of Medieval History at Cambridge, ‘to present as a single collection some of the work submitted for higher degrees or fellowships by young Cambridge medievalists’. Thus it will provide in some sense a parallel to the Oxford Historical Series.

The first two volumes to appear in the new series are both studies of ecclesiastical estates, and so carry on the tradition established by the late R. A. L. Smith in his Canterbury Cathedral Priory. Mr Edward Miller’s subject is the abbey and bishopric of Ely; while Mr H. P. R. Finberg writes on Tavistock Abbey. In both cases, however, the ecclesiastical is strictly subordinate to the ‘social’ interest.

Mr Miller makes no excursions into the field of diocesan administration, but defines his aim as ‘to draw out of the records of the Church of Ely some deductions about the progress of the lordship exercised by the abbots and bishops of Ely, and about the influence they exercised upon those fragments of medieval society which they had some real power to shape’. Mr Finberg, as he tells us in his preface, is concerned with Tavistock less as a community of men dedicated to the religious life than as ‘an economic unit, a property-owning organisation, a producer and consumer’, seen against the background of that part of Devon in which the estates of the abbey lay.
Four Challenges to Religion
Authors: White Victor
Published: July 2007

Religion is the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity.’ Freud’s famous utterance, tom from its context like that, had all the makings of a slogan. Whether we liked it, or found it thoroughly offensive, it was—like the one about the ‘opium of the people’—difficult, impossible to forget. Whether or not it wins our rational assent, it ‘rings a bell’ of some sort, there is (we feel) ‘something in it’. It will probably survive when the book in which it appeared is quite forgotten. It has already survived devastating criticism of its own premisses.

Freud’s critique of religion, perhaps reflected indirectly, perhaps thoroughly misunderstood and distorted, is part of our modem heritage. Believers or unbelievers, we can hardly have escaped its impact. Comparatively few can have studied, tested, examined it for themselves, but it can be all the more impressive for that. This was no case of a specialist trespassing outside his own field to express opinions on subjects about which he is no authority. When Freud said religion was a neurosis, he was presumably talking about what he knew. He was a pioneer discoverer of causes and cures of neurosis.

An obsession of humanity or not, religion was certainly something like an obsession with Freud himself. The subject seems to have fascinated him; in his books he can never leave it alone for very long. Perhaps it is ungracious to subject Freud’s writings to his own technique of psycho-analytic investigation, yet it is difficult to avoid doing so; and we begin to suspect that his anxious, sometimes tortuous, theorising about religion tells us more about Freud than religion. But that is hardly our business; we must consider what he says on its own merits, rather than his private motives for saying it. And it may be worth while to reset the slogan in its original context.
A Note on Religion as a Perspective
Authors: Sarmiento Edward
Published: July 2007

An essential aspect of Ortega’s philosophical outlook is his theory of perspectivism. According to this, every activity, every philosophy, for that matter, every individual point of view, constitutes a unique and irreplaceable perspective on reality. With this in mind, we may examine the following paragraph from one of his most fundamental works, En torno a Galileo (1933), in which he studies the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and from Christianity to rationalism:

It is possible that in making this matter clear to ourselves we may discover that the confusion of the scientific perspective with the vital perspective is not without its inconvenience; it is a false perspective just as it was false to make of the religious, theological perspective the vital perspective. We shall see, in fact, how life does not tolerate being supplanted by either revealed faith or pure reason. For that reason the crisis of the Renaissance was brought about, for that reason a new crisis, dark, enigmatic, has opened before us.

(Obras completas, V, 66-67; italics mine.)

I think that, carefully considered, there may be no objection to make to this view. The fundamental desire of man is life—life is the only thing which, in the logic of which man is capable, is without an ulterior justification: life justifies itself. All values, truth, goodness, beauty, justify themselves by the objective requirement of their external correlative and by the subjective demand of the human nature which creates them in the sense of acknowledging them. Truth acquires its raison d’être by the obligation it is under, in order to be itself, to conform to the reality it describes and because the man who utters it is unable (in the simplest meaning of the words) to live without truth.
The Ethical Basis of Medicine
Authors: Carpenter Hilary J.
Published: July 2007

Ethico-Medical controversy, as exemplified in the recent furore created by the Holy Father’s pronouncement on the natural right to life of the unborn child, is no new thing. More often than not the controversy revolves around problems that are sentimental in essence (the word is not used in any pejorative sense), and which are based upon false antitheses. As the eminent physician and neurologist, Dr F. M. R. Walshe, has acutely observed, ‘all these antitheses arise from the unguarded use of abstraction, and from a false simplification of the welter of things and processes we encounter when we seek to build a philosophy of medicine. If we are to achieve a philosophy we must escape from the fragmentation of ideas that comes of thinking too exclusively in the static terms of classifications.’ Dr Walshe is not concerned in this oration to consider the particular false antithesis of ethics and medicine; he is dealing with medicine in terms of ‘art in science’; but his terms of reference are most significant. ‘The truth is surely that every successive layer of thought in the analysis of nature . . . stops at a halfway house when tracing its ideas back to their basic elements, and is content with ideas of a generality sufficient for its immediate purpose. Yet each remains a field of discourse in its own right; one of the many layers in the palimpsest of natural knowledge, each of which has its own distinguishable intellectual content. Medicine is no exception to this rule. For philosophy alone there is no halfway house, for its ideas aim at a supreme generality. ... Yet we must surely aim at the highest degree of understanding of the foundations of our thoughts and actions. ...’
Four Challencges to Religion
Authors: White Victor
Published: July 2007

It may seem odd to count the psychology of C. G. Jung as a challenge to religion. It is more usual to complain that, as Freud doffed the physician’s coat for the professor’s gown, so Jung, still more incongruously, has assumed the clergyman’s surplice—if not the robes of the magician, the prophet, the mystagogue. Yet I think that the friendliness of Jung presents a far more serious and radical challenge to religion as we know it than did ever the hostility of Freud.

For Freud, religion was an obsessional neurosis. For Jung it seems to be rather the absence of religion that is at the root of most present-day neurosis among adults. Already in 1932 he wrote: ‘During the past thirty years, people from all the civilised countries of the earth have consulted me. . . . Among all my patients in the second half of life (that is to say, over thirty-five) there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given to their followers.’

How did it come about, this diametrically opposite evaluation of religion—by two psychologists who once worked together in close harmony and considerable mutual admiration? Their early differences, on the surface at least, had nothing whatever to do with religion or philosophy. Jung was every bit as sceptical of both as was Freud. Theirs were wholly professional differences, concerned with the interpretation of actual psychological facts, and with what was, and was not, therapeutically successful.

The coming rift was already visible in Jung’s Wandltmgen und Symbole der Libido, written in 1911. Jung still accepted, even stressed, Freud’s ideas about the origin, and the illusoriness, of religion. But he recognised that traditional religious beliefs and practices (whatever else they may have been) had in fact functioned as a sort of mass-therapy, or at least as a preventive against the sort of neuroses that afflict modem man.
John O'Connor
Authors: Albert S. M.
Published: July 2007

When Monsignor John O’Connor slept peacefully in the Lord in his eighty-second year on the day which also saw the death of his late Majesty King George the Sixth—Father John would have chuckled at the coincidence— Blackfriars and the Dominican Order lost an old and staunch friend.

His first contacts with the Order are not known to the present writer, but he once quoted something which had been told him in 1894 by an old novice of Father Tom Burke. Many well- known members of the English Province were his friends, among them Fathers Bede Jarrett, Hugh Pope and Vincent McNabb. Some of them may even have been a little disconcerted and embarrassed by the familiarity with which he spoke or addressed them by their Christian names. Until the outbreak of the last war he used to invite one of the Friars to his parish every second year to conduct a parochial retreat, thus bringing the Dominican habit to a part of the world where it was otherwise seldom seen. It was unforunate that the death or absence of his friends left the Order unrepresented among the hundred-and-fifty priests who attended his funeral.

Though a great admirer of the Order, he never became a tertiary. He was too much of a free-lance for that. And while he held St Thomas Aquinas in high esteem and considered himself his disciple, he could hardly be called a thomist in any strict sense of the word. Nor did he claim to be a theologian: ‘reasoning on revelation’ was how he described his ruminations and declarations on theological topics.
Infant Rights
Authors: Wayne T. G.
Published: July 2007

When the mother’s hfe is menaced, and the birth bears a threat not a blessing, is the baby then an aggressor, and accordingly to be disposed of as neatly as possible? Intervention to that effect, is it not demanded by plain common- sense, clear responsibility, a humane scale of values? The Christian Church, however, can never consent to the direct destruction of innocent human hfe—notice the qualifications direct and innocent, through the use of force to repel aggression is approved. Nevertheless our present question, which cannot be summed up in a single brutal or sentimental statement, has been charged with anxiety and misrepresentation: on one side, the Pope has been accused of preferring the unborn baby to the mother, and of a characteristically clerical unconcern for ordinary human tragedies; on the other, materialism and paganism can be too readily ascribed to some of his critics, and their reluctance to go to extreme lengths not allowed for.

Let us begin by recognising how rare is a classical case of Mother v. Child; their relations, from beginning to end, should be for the health of both, and indeed so they are, when the physical, psychological, and moral rules are observed. Women are well designed by God to be mothers. We speak of an ‘expectant’ mother; and certainly she can look forward with happy confidence to the birth of her child. The situation is not abnormal, the condition not pathological, the business not a dangerous operation. A woman when she is in labour hath pain, because her hour is come; but as soon as she is delivered, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a child is born into the world.
Four Challenges to Religion
Authors: Frazer
Published: July 2007

Perhaps Frazer’s own theories about the origin and development of religion hardly constitute a present-day challenge of any sort. There is ample evidence that he grew increasingly dissatisfied with them himself, and few students of the subject today would care to subscribe to them as adequate to account for all the facts—even for all the facts which he himself collected, let alone the enormous quantity which have been gathered since his time. It is not, however, of Frazer’s own theories in particular, or even of his own findings, that I propose to speak; I take his name rather as a symbol, for it is that of the leading representative of the widespread dissemination of the comparative study of religion. Comparative religion was studied before Frazer, and it has been studied since. Yet it was Frazer’s great work, more than any other, which aroused the interest of non-specialists. Jane Harrison recalls how, ‘Among my own contemporaries J. G. Frazer was soon to light the dark world of savage superstition with a gleam from The Golden Bough. The happy title of that great book ... made it arrest the attention of scholars.... Tylor had written and spoken; Robertson Smith had seen the Star in the East; in vain; we classical deaf-adders stopped our ears and closed our eyes; but at the mere sound of the magical words “Golden Bough’’ the scales fell—we heard and understood.’ But it was not only to classical scholars that Frazer’s work opened new worlds; and soon it was to become common knowledge that the beliefs and practices of Christian Europe were by no means so peculiar and unique as had been commonly assumed. A nodding acquaintance, at least, with other people’s religions became part of the equipment of any educated man.
The Black and the Red
Authors: Beales A. C. F.
Published: July 2007

Mr Blanshard has been at it again. This time he appears in the arena astride not one adversary but two: the twin steeds of the Vatican and the Kremlin, the Black International and the Red. His thesis is that there is a triangular war going on, between Communism and Democracy and Catholic power (he implies some distinction between Catholic power, which is his chosen concern, and Catholicism, which quite evidently is not)—a struggle in which each of the three is fighting the other two simultaneously, and in which there is room for only one ultimate victor.

But though in this book there are two horses in the ring,where in Freedom and Catholic Power there was one, it is really the same turn all over again. The net result is but a deeper denigration of the Catholic Church, by (this time) comparing it for three hundred pages with a Marxist institution whose blackness none of his readers except Communists will any longer doubt. The parallel is of course fascinating (there is never a dull moment): provided you are content for it to have extent without depth—for he never addresses himself to the problem of why, fundamentally, the Church execrates Atheistic Communism, nor vice versa. To him they are both primarily power machines, and anti-majority-rule. It is as easy as that. And parlous plausible.

In one respect there is more restraint than last time. There is none of the bombast about nobody being able to refute a single fact or quotation. On the contrary, his preface saddles responsibility for any mistakes upon himself rather than upon his consultants: though he is freer with the names of the ex-Marxists among these than of the ex-Catholics: ‘Unfortunately it would not be wise to mention all of my friends in Italy who have helped ... to show me the seamier side of Vatican policy’.
The Fallibility of Dr Salmon
Authors: St John Henry
Published: July 2007

Many years ago, when I was unsettled about the Anglican position, I read Salmon’s Infallibility with great care. It had been recommended to me as ‘a devastatingly unanswerable criticism of the validity of the Roman claims’.

Though I did not realise it then, this book was a determining factor in my decision to become a Catholic. I had read at the same time Wilfrid Ward’s Life of Cardinal Newman and Newman’s own Essay on Development, the classical exposition in English of the doctrine of tradition. I saw at once that the infallibility which Salmon was attacking was not the infallibility which the Catholic Church claims and which had been defined with greater precision by the Vatican Council. I realised, too, that when Salmon wrote of tradition he meant something different from the tradition so clearly analysed and cogently expounded by Newman.

I knew that according to Catholic theology reason can go so far as to show the consonance of revealed truth with knowledge acquired by reason, and even to infer that what is revealed is true and should be believed. The assent of faith however is supernatural and cannot be produced by such knowledge, but is wholly dependent on the word of God in revelation. It was plain that Salmon had no clear conception of this distinction and was in constant confusion about the respective functions of faith and reason.
Powder Treason
Authors: Anstruther Godfrey
Published: July 2007

Even before his accession King James is said to have given a verbal promise to Thomas Percy, the future conspirator, that the Catholics would be granted some degree of liberty. There is, in the very nature of things, no written evidence of this promise, and the King later denied having given it, but the Catholics firmly believed that some assurance of toleration had been given. But by the beginning of 1604 all hope of toleration for papists was gone. On 19 February, James I protested ‘his utter detestation of their superstitious religion, and that he was so far from favouring it, as if he thought his son and heir after him would give any toleration thereunto, he would wish him fairly buried before his eyes’. And fairly buried he was in 1612.

On 22 February, 1604, a proclamation was issued ordering all Jesuits and seminary priests to depart the kingdom before 19 March. On the same day the fine of £20 a month for recusancy was again put in force, and was made to include the whole period since the King’s coming, thus negativing what little relief had been granted.

On 24 April, a bill was introduced in the lower house, classing Catholics with forgers, perjurers and outlaws, and disabling them from sitting in parliament, while an ‘Act for the due execution of the statutes against Jesuits, seminary priests and recusants’ made in this session, not only reenforced all the laws made in Elizabeth’s reign but even added to their severity. On the third reading of this bill Viscount Montague courageously denounced it, and the following day found himself in the Fleet for his ‘scandalous and offensive speech’. Further proclamations followed and on 16 July the bloody persecution broke out again when John Sugar, a priest, and Robert Grissold his servant, were executed at Warwick.
What is History?
Authors: Hislop Ian
Published: July 2007

In a recent paper Professor John Macmurray has attacked illegitimate extensions of the use of the word ‘history’. He contends that strictly speaking the solar system cannot be said to have a history, though we can speak of a history of astronomy. This is so because history is concerned with what men have done, why they did it and their doing of it. He is not, I think, suggesting that one cannot carry on fruitful discussions in one sphere by making use of simple analogies drawn from another; as for instance, when the search for significant new resemblances leads us to speak of ‘x’ as if it were ‘y’, and in this way to talk about the unknown on the analogy of the known. Examples of this method are the ‘clock’ and ‘pump’ analogies of the seventeenth century, or the more recent use by biologists of ‘government offices’ and such like as concepts of illustration. All this is not denied, but the ‘as if’ is stressed, for the danger of this kind of thinking is that it tends to confuse the picture or model with that which it is intended to exemplify.

There is a further point to be made. It is helpful, though in some cases dangerous, to use ‘pictures’ which stimulate the formation of partial exploratory hypotheses. It is less helpful, and even more perilous, to commit oneself to a master ‘picture’, for in doing so we become impatient of distinctions and unscrupulous in our manipulation of evidence. For Professor Macmurray history is an enquiry into the past actions of human beings. This statement, which seems so straightforward at first sight, is in fact very difficult, as it raises the question of what it is that we study when we study history.
Vocation and Vocations
Authors: Bennett J.
Published: July 2007

Monsignor Hudson of Coleshill worked out a neat equation which is still valid for religious engaged in social work: ‘A religious vocation’, he said, ‘is good, efficiency is also good, but the two together equal perfection’. He was one of the pioneers of the training of religious in orthopaedics. It is interesting to reflect that religious communities devoted to nursing and education have no particular difficulty in submitting their subjects for training in accordance with State regulations, and the fruits of this policy are to be seen in our nursing homes and hospitals as well as in our schools and training colleges.

In other sections of social work, whether for example for the old or for children, the need to develop a particular technique and submit to training is only now coming into prominence. We have come to realise, rather late in the day maybe, that the mere housing of people, good as an emergency measure, is only the beginning of the problem of adequate care. It has been taken for granted that anyone, particularly any religious, was adequate to meet the needs of the case. But today we are being brought to realise that something more is needed if we are to achieve effective work and that there is no contradiction between training and religious vocation. A moment’s reflection shows that religious teachers and religious nurses are none the less good religious, perhaps even better, because they are good teachers or good nurses, and similarly in all other sections of social work there need be no antagonism between professional proficiency and religious vocation.
Case‐Work and The Family
Authors: Smith Nancy Hugh
Published: July 2007

Social work might be described as the natural human response of one human being to another who asks for help, and case-work is a (very inadequate) name for the attempt to give the individual person in trouble the individual remedy he requires. A ‘case-worker’ is the substitute for the ‘good neighbour’ of a simpler society. In a small community the good neighbour steps in during a crisis with advice and help, able to provide an objective point of view, and ready to step out again when no longer needed, without disturbing the fundamental independence of the person concerned. In a community where everyone knows each other and social ties are firmly knit, this works very well; it was not till the growth of industry and the development of large towns where rich and poor were segregated into different areas that the system broke down.

The social workers of the nineteenth century found themselves complete strangers in experience and outlook to the people they were trying to help. To be the good neighbours they desired to be—intimate, wise, accepted friends— they had to evolve a technique based on principles which would enable them to help without patronage or sentimentality. They called this technique ‘case-work’. It came into being in 1869 with the Charity Organisation Society (now the Family Welfare Association) from which all other family case-work societies have developed.
Child Guidance
Authors: Burns Charles
Published: July 2007

This has been called ‘the century of the child’; and with justice, because never before has there been such intense interest shown in the world of childhood. This interest, and the knowledge that has resulted from observation and study during fifty years and more, has found application in our day, which has seen the tragedy of homeless children and disturbed homes to an unparalleled degree. There have been set up, all over Europe, children’s colonies, schools, hostels of a new kind for orphan, abandoned and delinquent children. Congresses and Committees are constantly discussing these problems. Books and articles on the subject are innumerable.

In the world of education too there has been an evolution, almost a revolution, of which we are hardly aware: the almost purely intellectual or instructional idea has given way, or is giving way, to one which has more regard for the whole child—body as well as mind, the senses and the imagination as well as the cognitive faculty alone. There is far more stress on doing and making; on music, painting and drama: on things, so to speak, as well as just facts. The application of this to the teaching of religion and the escape from the tyranny of the mere catechism is something so obvious and fruitful that, to Catholics, it should hardly need saying.
Education and Industry Today
Authors: Hall Patricia
Published: July 2007

During the last half-century, industry has increasingly recognised that it is actively and directly concerned with the education and training of all who look to it for a career. Many in industry today have jobs with little intrinsic value in them, done often solely for the wages alone. These men and women neither like what they do nor do what they like. Now a few are realising that no political or economic rearrangement will remove that attitude to work: we shall have to rediscover, with Eric Gill, that ‘the artist is not a special kind of man but every man is a special kind of artist’. Perhaps then we may restore to work a sense of worthwhileness and find the desire once again to make well whatever needs to be made, and the humility and confidence to do the seemingly little things superlatively well.

During the last five years, firms, industries, associations, universities, colleges and government departments have individually, or in varying forms of collaboration, made large plans for the education of those associated with industry. Thousands of education and training officers have appeared and innumerable courses and handbooks of every description prepared.
Human Reproduction
Authors: Brocklehurst Mark
Published: July 2007

The members of a Committee of the British Medical Association, in giving evidence before the Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce, have recendy made proposals to add new grounds for divorce. The surprising thing is not the audacity of these marriage reformers, but their timidity. If it is true that the ancient Christian institution, in all its rigidity, is out of date and unworkable in the modern world, then the new circumstances should be studied and really sweeping changes made. The alarming increase in divorce makes it abundandy clear that all this tinkering with the ancient institution does not make it more workable, but less workable. And yet it is to preserve the institution that the changes are made. The committee say that they wish to stress the necessity for ‘permanent and stable partnerships in marriage’, and maintain ‘that the greatest possible number of sound family units is essential to the nation s health and wellbeing’, and would support ‘every effort to ensure that marriage as an institution is both stable and permanent’. Without wishing to call in question their sincerity, it must be pointed out that it can only be utter confusion of mind and blindness to the realities that can lead people, who value marriage for what it should be, to take steps that have produced, and will produce, results that are the exact opposite of their hopes. Marriage is indivisible. On no grounds whatever is there any sense or soundness in trying to make it more permanent and stable for some by making it less permanent and stable for others. They are only two views that have any prima facie case for consideration, and the ‘easier divorce’ policy is not one of them.
Introductory Remarks to Modern Logic
Authors: Thomas Ivo
Published: July 2007

It is a feature of much contemporary philosophical writing that an amateur of the literature finds himself unable even to think he understands it because of the extent to which the writers draw on the technicalities of modem logic. Usually such a reader does not know where to turn for enlightenment, and very frequently on being given some references to introductory books he finds himself baffled by an austere and technical exposition of the very technicalities that he wishes to understand. These few pages contain some preliminary remarks addressed only to such investigators.

Formal logic is, and so far as it has remained true to itself, always has been, an exact science. The syllogism, we once heard a theologian remark, is not an essay in vers libre. There are indeed degrees of exactness. Aristotle, who founded the science so far as concerns its European development, laid it down as a principle that phrases equivalent in significance should be interchangeable, but what phrases these might be is left to be discovered from Iris usage and forms no part of his system. We find for instance the sentence ‘all medicine is science’ treated as a substitution in the scheme for a sentence ‘B belongs to all A’ it having been stated that ‘A’ is to be replaced by ‘medicine’ and ‘B’ by ‘science’. Correct substitution produces ‘science belongs to all medicine’, and we are left to infer that Aristotle deemed this equivalent to ‘all medicine is science’. Modem standards of exactness are more demanding. A modem logician would have stated the interchangeability of ‘B belongs to all A’ with ‘All A is B’, if he desired to have both modes of expression in his system.
Newman's Cause
Authors: Davis H. Francis
Published: July 2007

This year happens to mark a double centenary of Newman, that of his Discourses on the Idea of a University in Dublin, and that of his Sermon on the Second Spring. But we do not need the excuse of a centenary to speak about Newman. Rarely, if ever, has it happened in the course of history that the interest in a man’s personality and appreciation of his importance as a thinker have grown so fast and spread to so many countries as has been the case since the 1920’s with regard to Newman. Before 1920 his was a great name, perhaps the greatest name of the nineteenth century, certainly the greatest since the Reformation as a religious thinker; but he had suffered the misfortune of being ‘adopted’ by modernists and immanentists, and had been so widely misinterpreted by men as brilliant and seemingly authoritative as Bremond, that his present triumphal progress must have been unthinkable. In 1929, when I presented a thesis to Fribourg University on his Essay on Development., many there were who warned me that it was a dangerous subject to choose. No less a man than Cardinal Lepicier, who incidentally had read Newman widely, had uncompromisingly accused him of heresy in the Essay on Development and the Grammar of Assent. I remember thinking I could justify my hardihood by the consideration that, where cardinals disagree and neither is condemned, it could not be disrespecful to defend one against the other.
Did Savonarola Disobey?
Authors: Lupi Antonio
Published: July 2007

On 21 September, 1452, Girolamo Savonarola was born in Ferrara, the third of seven children. His father came of Paduan stock, his mother, Elena dei Bonacossi, from a noble family of Mantua. The centenary has naturally given rise to renewed interest in the great Dominican whose character has always been so much debated, who has been so much admired and so much condemned by Catholics and Protestants alike.