bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Perennial Philosophy
Authors: Vann Gerald
Published: July 2007

Mr Aldous Huxley once wrote an essay on vulgarity in literature. But literature reflects human life; and implicitly he has written many books on vulgarity in human life, on the squalor of humanity. The figures of the fifth Earl of Gonister and his companions at the end of After Many a Summer, undying and unliving, intolerable in their sordid brutishness, represent something that recurs again and again in different forms in his works. ‘Vivre?’ he quoted in Vulgarity in Literature, ‘nos valets le feront pour nous’. That disgust with life, and in particular with the corporeal, still seems to lie at the root of his view of reality; and to colour his approach to Reality.

Some critics of The Perennial Philosophy have waxed indignant at the idea of describing as philosophy a book in which Plato and Aristotle are barely mentioned; others have taken the opposite line, and vindicated the author by viewing western philosophy as pseudophilosophy because of its exclusive reliance on discursive reasoning: if the way to knowledge of Reality is humility, poverty of spirit, purity of heart, how can we describe as philosophers, as ‘lovers of wisdom’, any but those who take this way? The truth surely lies midway between these two extremes. As some of the great Christian mystics have shown in their own lives, there are three wisdoms: the natural investigations of reason, the study of theology, the direct mystical awareness of God; and they can each be valid and valuable in their own spheres, and each help and fortify the others.
Art and the Church
Authors: Newton Eric
Published: July 2007

Nothing that an art-critic can say about the relationship between art and the Church can have very much value. By his very nature, the art-critic is bound to tackle the problem from the wrong end. The proper person to speak with authority would be the church-critic, but since church-criticism is not a recognized occupation, and since, even if it were, I would not be competent to undertake it, I can only envisage the problem from the end nearest to me—the wrong end, I admit, but at least an end.

The problem, as I see it, is this. The Church is certainly one among the various employers who recognise that the artist can be of service to them—the manufacturers who use his posters, the writers who use him as an illustrator, the personages who want him to paint their portraits and thereby preserve their memory for posterity. But, oddly enough, the Church is the most timid of them all. Poster designers and illustrators, though not usually in the front-rank of illustrative artists, at least tend to use the current idiom: they are ‘modem’ in the sense that they have learned their language from men of their own generation. But the artists employed by churchmen use, on the whole, an idiom that was developed in Italy in the 15th century, was superseded by the Baroque 17th century, forgotten by the frivolous 18th, revived, diluted and sweetened by the piously sentimental 19th and which survives into the 20th because it has been commercialised and further devitalised by firms of Church decorators.
Paul Harris
Authors: U.M.S.
Published: July 2007

Paul Harris presents a new and very vivid approach to religious painting. He does not see the life of our Lord in the conventional way and his pictures are powerful in their originality. He has the gift of catching real light in paint and does not merely paint in lighter or darker shades. His style was greatly influenced by several years spent with the army in Iraq—many of his figures are brown ar.d move with Eastern grace.

In his picture entitled Adam and Eve there is no angel with a flaming sword : Adam and Eve are driving themselves out of the paradise which their false choice has destroyed. Helplessly they stumble out of their realm, but behind them in the landscape there is no vagueness. It is clear that chaos lias broken out. Xo longer is there an underhung principle of inviolable order, and the hills and trees are frightened. A horse rears and neighs in terror. Yet Adam and Eve still hope they are only dreaming.

The Holy Family is shown to us in a most delightful and unorthodox family group. Our Lady, wearing a brilliantly green frock, is hanging up washing in the garden. The child Jesus, playing at her feet, holds out a flower to her. Saint Joseph, in labourer’s clothes, just stands and watches, resting on a spade and looking very solid and protective
The Catholic Church in Austria Under Foreign Rule
Authors: Stepan Karl Maria
Published: July 2007

The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’, founded by I Charles the Great, was already breaking up in 1804. A decree of Francis I, its last emperor, made its death inevitable. Its underlying principle, the unity of God and the world, the civitas Dei terrena, had lost force and efficacy. But in the Austrian empire it survived the downfall of the Dual Monarchy, and notwithstanding all it lived on through Austria’s First Republic. Not until the 13th of March 1938, when Hitler's swarms imposed the Anschluss, was this last embodiment of a great political ideal eliminated.

The centuries-old unity of spiritual and secular rule had endured nowhere on the Continent of Europe so long as in Austria. Ruling and ruled alike, in the realm of State and Church respectively, saw the continued stability of this alliance as the direct, clear outcome of deliberate policy on the part of State and Church, but also as the only possible working plan for the prosperity of both realms. The throne protected the altar and the Church preached loyalty to the established government as a duty-binding Christian virtue. An acquaintance with these facts is essential if the seemingly special relationship between Church and State, the conditions inside the Church and the life of the Church in Austria are to be understood and correctly estimated.

In addition, we have the outstanding fact of nineteenth century Freemasonry and its concentric onslaught on this one surviving bulwark of the ‘dark’ Middle Ages.
On Holiday in Styria
Authors: Bethell Ruth
Published: July 2007

In Styria, or at least in a wide region around the Benedictine house of Seckau, the first week-end of August is a pilgrimage week-end to the tiny church of Maria-Schnee, in honour of the Feast of Our Lady of the Snows on August 5th, this year Bank Holiday Monday.

A truck-load of sundry Graz welfare workers—Fiirsorgerinnen proper and Caritas voluntary workers and myself representing the Red Cross and C.C.R.A.—set off on the Saturday morning, made a tour of the beautiful church at Seckau, and then scattered to our various billets. Three of us were staying at a neighbouring farmhouse, the bunch of Fiirsorgerinnen were going two-thirds of the way up the mountain that night, to sleep in a hayloft and have a shorter walk to the top at daybreak. The farmhouse where we stayed was of the indescribably attractive small-holding variety, not lovely, rather poor and cramped, but satisfactory because the people were completely satisfactory. It is a one-man show, with wife and two daughters, one of them a teacher at the village school. The household is overshadowed by the loss of both sons, always a double tragedy in a peasant’s family, and news of the second death, over a year old, had only recently come through from Germany, after the reopening of postal services.

There was a small lake to bathe in and a cool, musical stream running through the orchard—it provided the water supply for the household. There was a charming hospitality, piety in the old sense of the word and good, honest garden and farm produce to eat and drink in exchange for bulkier but tinned British rations.
‘Caritas’ Students
Authors: Lukesch Antony
Published: July 2007

To all young people equally, whether students, young workers, young teachers or others, we say: Look around you, witness the hunger and the poverty, and help in whatever way you can. And to all leaders and teachers of youth we say: Take your young people seriously. Don’t suppose that you can give them as an ideal a sort of game of Red Indians or that Strong Man cult which belongs to a time which is now, thank God, passed. Do not be afraid of introducing them to hard facts, to the need that is all around us and to their duty .to help as Christians. They will understand you better than perhaps you imagine. When you can show them all this clearly, you will have done more for their lives than any amount of book learning can do.

We meet weekly. We begin with Our Father and then we beg St Vincent de Paul and St Elisabeth to stand by us. Then we read a chapter from a book or a paper having direct bearing on our work: we shall doubtless have to find new ways of doing things and we need to be shown how. This summer we took passages from Dostoevsky, from the Gospel, from Novalis, from a book of eleventh century prayers, from Lives of the Saints, from Professor Geramp’s Styrian Folk Tales, from the Letters of St Justinus. In the light of what we have read we discuss our plans.
Religion and Politics in Austria
Authors: Hughes Rosemary
Published: July 2007

A Few weeks ago I heard an Austrian historian—a thinker and a practising Catholic—describe Austria as ‘perhaps the most corrupt country in Europe’. Similar judgments are made by Englishmen in Austria on the strength of the Black Market and the power of the cigarette as a means of getting things done. But in the mouth of an Austrian it has a very different value and significance. Not only does it embody the mood of searching self-criticism which is prevalent among thinking Catholics in Austria; it also recognizes and points to a sickness in the Austrian nation far deeper-seated than the Black Market—which will, here as elsewhere, disappear only when there is a sufficiency of food and cigarettes, but which is relatively a superficial ill. Objective love and inside knowledge are the pre-requisites of a true diagnosis, and these are hard to come by for a foreigner, who may be fascinated or repelled by irrelevant details—the peasant's Grüss Gott, or the incurable unpunctuality of Austrians in keeping appointments. This article is therefore not a statement of personal opinion but a synthesis of the views of one or two Austrian Catholics, whose interpretation seems to fit the facts as they now-appear and in whom self-criticism and an earnest truth-seeking guarantee a certain degree of objectivity.

That Austria was physically incapacitated by the collapse and dismemberment of the old Austrian empire is generally known, though Englishmen are apt to underrate the effects both of economic distress and of the psychological shock of becoming, suddenly, a small nation in turning the minds of Austrians towards union with Germany as a cure for their ills.
The Universe of Sir Edmund Whittaker
Authors: Thomas Ivo
Published: July 2007

As in the lecture room, so in writing. Sir Edmund Whittaker's presentation of his material is made attractive by a certain elegance. It is apt to fill his hearers and readers with at least a temporary sense that new realms of thought have been rendered thoroughly intelligible to them. His Donellan Lectures (1946) were no exception, if we may judge by this book which holds the substance of them. But elegance is the least important quality of an enquiry so serious in its import as to be concerned with the capability of man’s reason to demonstrate that God exists. Hereafter we shall give evidence for what we can only call the scientific levity with which this grave subject is here treated. Let us first express our immense disappointment that the author should handle with such evident lack of understanding, not to say lack of knowledge of what is being talked about, matters that do not pertain to his own science. This is particularly regrettable on the part of one who is so hot against the misdemeanours of philosophers and theologians in their approach to technicalities of physics in which they may be without expert competence. He specifies, grounds of serious complaint against the Aristotelians of the seventeenth century. Today it clearly appears that there are equally serious ones on the other side.

It is deplorable that the prestige of great attainments should be lent to 140 pages of misunderstanding that results in continual verbal equivocation. The ‘analogy’ here defined and depreciated is not the analogy of the metaphysician and of the Five Ways.
Liturgy and Spiritual Exegesis
Authors: Bouyer L.
Published: July 2007

The liturgical revival, or more precisely, a renewed understanding of the liturgy, involves a biblical revival. It must be admitted that such a statement is rarely received enthusiastically. The most resolute good intentions (and it is mainly priests we have in mind, and priests who are full of zeal for souls), the most resolute good intentions, seem to falter under such a blow! ‘What?’ it will be said, ‘we must “initiate” people into the Bible? As though it were not difficult enough to “initiate” them into the liturgy alone !’ To this protest we may reply that the fact is already there. Our liturgy, the Roman liturgy, is biblical from beginning to end. Not only is it mostly composed of biblical texts (or at least biblical commentary) but even those parts which are purely ecclesiastical in composition, breathe the same atmosphere, use the same vocabulary, the same forms of thought, as the biblical texts themselves. These arguments will have little weight, however, with many of those who protest against a ‘biblical initiation’ in addition to a liturgical; and it is not difficult to see why.

By ‘liturgical initiation’ they do not understand at all an initiation into the traditional liturgy, for which they have no more taste nor interest than they have for Holy Scripture. What they envisage is rather a quite new ‘concoction’, a liturgy re-made in an emancipated form, intended to ‘make contact with the masses’ by getting rid of everything in our actual liturgy which betrays its biblical or patristic origin.
Agriculture, Divinity and Wholeness
Authors: Todd Kenneth
Published: July 2007

In an increasingly pagan world, it is a truism to say that Catholics must become more Catholic or they will have to compromise their faith to an extent which will prove fatal. The truly Catholic life must express wholeness of dedication to Jesus Christ and an integration of all activities. One aspect of the chronic lack of wholeness in living seems to me to stand out above the rest at the present time and to be of great importance. I refer to man’s dependence on the fruits and hence the well-being of the earth, which have largely ceased to interest the modem educated man except from a scientific and mechanical point of view.

More than enough has already been written on the disintegration of our times, but right action can only emerge from knowledge and understanding, natural and supernatural. First, then, I am going to try and put the problem, as I see it, in its true context. In the book of Genesis we read that man was born in a garden to dress and keep it. Before he fell, man did not have to work by the sweat of his brow, but he did have to keep a garden in as good a condition as he found it. In practice he would have perhaps to keep the divisions between different kinds of plants and to maintain an orderly arrangement in the garden. For, first of all, the garden of Eden was a perfect creation, and not the finest system of husbandry in the world we know can show a garden to rival this paradise of pleasure.
Maurice Baring's Books
Authors: Lochhead Marion
Published: July 2007

In his Round the World in Any Number of Days Maurice Baring says that ‘The most precious of all books are those which seem to do the work for you. You don’t have to bother; you are not aware that you are reading’. His list includes Tolstoy, Trollope, and that most lovable of writers, William De Morgan; to them we might add his own name and work. The easiest and friendliest author of our generation, and one of the most distinguished, has gone, now that he is dead; he can be matched in certain qualities, surpassed in some, but there is—there always will be—only one Maurice Baring. His peculiar charm almost eludes analysis, and analysis appears an absurdly pedantic word to use in talking of one who so deprecated pedantry; but one tries to describe his quality for the mere pleasure of writing about it.

His style is like good manners, unobtrusive, almost unnoticeable, but, like good manners, enjoyable and, also like good manners, part of himself, neither a pose nor an acquisition. In catholicity of taste and. culture he can hardly have been matched among the most scholarly writers of his generation; in this, indeed, he would seem to belong to a more suave and lettered age than ours. But he could never have ‘played the sedulous ape’ unless out of Puckish criticism, as in his delicious drolleries Dead Letters and Lost Diaries, which are so often exactly what the celebrities concerned ought to have said or written.
The Apostolic Ministry
Authors: Davis H. Francis
Published: July 2007

The contributors to this volume, as Dr Kirk tells us in his foreword, ‘found themselves, some six years ago, united in the conviction that the whole subject of the Christian ministry, its doctrine, its continuity, its place in the full scheme of Christian doctrine, was ripe for a fresh survey’. Convinced that one of the most hopeful features of modern religion is the movement towards reunion, and persuaded that the crux of this movement is the doctrine of the ministry, they agreed to collaborate in the production of a constructive historical and theological survey of the origins, meaning and importance of the episcopacy in the Christian Church. The whole is considered with special reference to the interests of the Church of England and to the difficulties in this regard felt by non-episcopal communions. This involves a large variety of subjects of research in the ten essays of the volume. All the essays are by well-known scholars of the Catholic school of thought in the Church of England.
Great Tact
Authors: Foster Kenelm
Published: July 2007

To be asked to speak in praise of St Thomas is an honour which dismays as much as it flatters; for who could claim to be master of such a subject?

Yet to venture to praise St Thomas is already to claim to know him, not completely of course, but enough to recognise, in and through his work, a man distinct from all others and the work itself as an expression of reality differing in certain important respects from all others. But to know anyone is to claim a certain equality and likeness to him; as indeed we must do who dare to represent St Thomas to our generation. Representation is a kind of imitation; if we are not somehow like him inwardly how can we express his doctrine outwardly? Yet, doubtless, all of us would readily admit our inferiority to him, and would think that in this we were the more conformed to his own spirit which was so utterly unpretentious. And no doubt each of us is greatly his inferior in intelligence, let alone in holiness. But there is, I suppose, a special sense in which all of us, however gifted, are bound to be his inferiors; for we are all historically his followers, and heirs to an achievement which cannot in fact ever be supplanted. For workers in the tradition to which he made so extraordinary a contribution, St Thomas remains forever a master.
Kant's Agnosticism
Authors: MacKinnon. D. M.
Published: July 2007

I would like to begin by reminding you of an episode in the history of modern philosophy in this country which is not altogether without significance, and that is the revolt against the Hegelian absolutism which one associates with such writers as Bosanquet and Edward Caird by a very powerful collection of thinkers at once philosophical and theological, of whom perhaps the best known in philosophical circles is the late Professor A. E. Taylor and in theological circles that profound and passionate writer Peter Taylor Forsyth. I mention Taylor and Forsyth together. I knew Taylor: I did not know Forsyth personally, but to judge from the latter’s biography there was very little temperamental kinship between the two men. But both Taylor and Forsyth had this in common, that they welcomed Kant’s intense moralism. I well remember Taylor saying to me: ‘You know, MacKinnon, Kant is a very great moralist indeed. The Hegelian criticism of him is largely irrelevant. Hegel was a man without a conscience and could never understand anyone who took the moral struggle as seriously as Kant did’. Forsyth, too, in his writings found in Kant’s intense moralism—his insistence on the inescapable demand of the moral law—a rock firm to withstand the moral frivolousness that he supposed to be ultimately implicit in the Hegelian attitude; and certainly if any of you have read Bosanquet’s book, Some Suggestions in Ethics (a book well worth reading) you will agree, I think, that Bosanquet does leave little foothold for an ultimate moral seriousness—for the kind of almost existential engagement that seems involved in moral choice.
The Uprooted African
Authors: Synnott Finbar
Published: July 2007

An African becoming a Christian in South Africa passes through a remarkable experience of two complete worlds; two religions wholly contradictory, two social systems as different, and two methods of church organisation adapted to the separate social systems. Most natives are still born in tribal circumstances, either in the Reserve Territories, Zululand, Basutoland, Swaziland and the others in which natives are under their own chiefs and ancient tribal laws; or at least they are born on European farms on the veldt, where their immediate family and social life is the tribal one, although they are not within a tribe.

Let us suppose a heathen becoming a Christian, for most of our adult Christians are still first-generation Christians, and consider his experience.

He is born into a wide sunlit land, an awe-inspiring creation whether it is the limitless, treeless sweeps of the veld or the great black barren ‘Dragon’ mountains. He lives in some sort of an oasis, valley or riverside or near water on the veld. He lives under a burning sun the year round, but with tremendous cold at night in winter, violent short rains and hailstorms, peril of crops and beasts. The earth is not friendly as in temperate climates. Insects are dangerous. There are snakes. It is not a land to rest on the grass, or splash in the water. But it has a stirring beauty, vastness, stillness, wonderful fruits, sudden grass and flowers after a brief rain, a light that is polished and air like wine. You may see red hills in South Africa and a green cloud; it is exotic, and the brown men who live in it love colour.
The Influence of St Thomas on French Politics
Authors: Maydieu Auguste
Published: July 2007

When I was asked to speak in English before your distinguished society and to trace the influence of St Thomas on French politics. I thought: O, I can do that all right. My English is very bad, but it is good enough for that. I shall settle quietly into my chair. I'll repeat the question. I’ll look at my audience in silence for some minutes, and I'll say: ‘Nothing'. That will be all. That will be the only answer. But after some reflection I guessed that you would not be satisfied with it, you would find it too brief. Then I went on thinking. I remembered plenty of men who had been working with us at the Vie Intellectuelle, men who are now ministers, ambassadors, prefects, chiefs of party, deputies, and so on. I remembered that great lecture in which Jacques Maritain, now French Ambassador to the Holy See. had expounded his theory concerning Catholic and political action. Andre Colin, since a Minister, was present. Georges Bidault, now Ministre des Affaires Etrangèros. was there too, and lie questioned Jacques Maritain, and lie himself gave us his idea as to what French politics should be like. A few years later I also met Maurice Schumann, who lived in London during the war and was ‘le porte-parole de la France combattante at the B.B.C. Every month he would write the chronicle of foreign politics in La Vie Intellectuelle, using various pseudonyms such as Maurice-Jacques, Sidobre, etc. I remembered my great friend, Robert Delavignette.
America and the Japanese (II)
Authors: van Straelen H.
Published: July 2007

Among the many good changes made by General MacArthur I may mention here the destruction of the military machine and the secret societies, the abolition of legalised prostitution, the breaking of the power of the Zaibatsu (the mighty syndicates which controlled Japan’s industry, commerce and finance), the abolition of the feudal land system and the complete revision of the educational system. The Japanese school system was probably the most centralised in the world. The textbooks were always prepared by the Mombusho, the Ministry of Education, and distributed by the Government even to the smallest village schools in remote mountains. These textbooks really needed an overhaul. And as far as I can see the reform goes on in the right way. A normal Japanese patriotism is allowed. Furthermore Japanese history can be taught from the Japanese point of view as long as the truth is told, in short, MacArthur is determined to preserve what is distinctive and valuable in Japan. Special stress is given to one of Emperor Meiji’s rescripts which commands that ‘Intercourse with foreign countries shall in future be carried on in accordance with the public laws of the whole world’.
Ultimates—A Restatement
Authors: Kingston W. V.
Published: July 2007

The temporal and moral chaos, so uniformly evident in the world today, gives clear and undeniable proof of the necessity of moral standards external to, and therefore independent of, the caprice of man. This chaos, of which only the material results are brought home to us with adequate reality, is the direct and unavoidable result of the acceptance of the theory that man is capable of legislating for himself in the moral sphere. Indeed, the deepest of truths is expressed in the oft-quoted statement that the most cogent proof of the divine origin of and the necessity of mankind for the ten commandments is given by the results which follow their being cast aside. In like manner some external, ultimate and unchangeable standards are necessary in the fields of economics and politics, sciences which of their essence have reference to man in relation to his fellows and to the physical world. These must be ultimate and unchangeable because, in his physical nature, man has unchanging fundamental needs; external, because it is by its success or failure in satisfying these very needs and not those invented by the fickle desires of the individual that any political or economic system must be judged. By what standards are we to measure such a system, what gauge are we to apply to its propositions in order that our appreciation of it may be true and our judgment just?
Christianity and Race
Authors: Braybrooke Neville
Published: July 2007

Weathervanes are like historians—not always infallible: whilst often they will register a change of breeze, they will repeatedly fail to detect approaching storms. Moreover although this generalisation is true, the word ‘historian’ is used advisedly: for on the one hand, there are those who colour their deductions with their own political outlook and, on the other hand, those who examine the past with what amounts to the prophetic eye in reverse. At the moment, German history is suffering from a spate of articles, pamphlets and, in some cases, books that belong to the partisan class of writer of the first group, and on no particular body has this ill-fortune acted so much as a stigma as upon the German Catholic Church.

These writers confronted with a subject such as the French Revolution seldom go beyond statistical fact: their income is largely dependent upon shoddy text-books pressed upon the young who, now considered no longer able to digest rows of figures, are treated to the same facts presented by isotype tables. That one of the principal reasons for the Revolution was because French and English philosophy had reached its acme as a science of materialism is not mentioned : still less is it hinted that the counter-blast to this materialism came from Germany.
The Problem of Germany
Authors: Hardwicke Owen
Published: July 2007

Almost anything that one may say about the situation in Germany today is trite and commonplace. It has all been said a thousand times already, and everyone would seem to be quite well aware of what is happening. Certainly many people have by now heard most of the facts; yet comparatively few seem to realise what they mean for Germany. Somewhere at the bottom of this gap in our minds there is the very understandable view that we have enough worries to deal with in our own country at present, and that we cannot spend ourselves wholeheartedly in trying to solve Germany’s difficulties; ‘Who won the war anyway?’ Then of course the older generations have seen all this before; ‘We became too sentimental after the 1914-18 war’, we are told, ‘with the result that on the first possible occasion the Germans armed again and got their own back; do you think we want to let them start again?’ But one does not need to be very worldly-wise to know that an excess of sympathy is always as dangerous as an excess of severity. It is however no cure for emotional stupidity in the past (if this indeed was the case) to refuse to be troubled over present matters which are bound to touch our feeelings, if we are human at all. I have no expert political or economic knowledge, I have no specialised ‘inside information’; I only want to mention one or two of the problems as they strike someone who has seen something of what they mean to the Germans, and who is afraid that the public conscience is insufficiently aroused.
Destinies of Israel
Authors: Brunn E. Zum
Published: July 2007

Anti-Semitism is the most horrible blow our Lord has received in his Passion; it is everlasting, it is the most bloody and unforgivable, for he receives it on the face of his mother and from the hand of Christians.—Léon Bloy.

Destinees D’Israel was written during those war years when anti-Semitism reached a greater degree of virulence than Léon Bloy anticipated even in his most pessimistic prophecies; and he has foretold only too accurately the great disaster of our time. The Abbé Journet’s book which completes and corrects the ideas set forth in the Salut par les Juifs offers an exhaustive theological explanation of the destinies of the chosen people.

‘Salvation is of the Jews.’ These are the words of Christ to the Samaritan woman. This race has been preferred to others by a mysterious choice, incomprehensible to human intelligence; consequently its spiritual and temporal destinies are for ever dependent on the great mystery of the Redemption. This dependence is made clear in the course of history in a manner always supernatural but varying according to the three successive attitudes of Israel towards its Messiah, first expectation and preparation, then denial, finally acceptance. (This last has not yet taken place, but we know by divine revelation that it cannot fail to come about.)
Roman Afternoon
Authors: Tindal-Atkinson Aelwin
Published: July 2007

When Vespers are over, the afternoon sun and the keen air are themselves an invitation to walk. Today it shall be one of the other six hills of Rome that lie to the north of our convent on the Aventine. As I pass along the road which curves gently down the hillside I see the Palatine; and the heavy ruins of the imperial palaces catch the late sunshine, giving their brickwork a mellowing of gold, in contrast with the dark pines that group themselves along its low hilltop. Away to the right the Alban Hills still carry a covering of snow; and the wind that blows from them has a bite in its breath. The Circus Maximus lies below; and on its far side a tram jolts noisily on its iron track, where formerly the chariots drawn by their racing horses sped along the course beneath the watching eyes of Virgil:

Ut cum carceribus sese effudere quadrigae,Addunt in spatia, et frustra retinacula tendensFertur equis auriga, neque audit currus habenas.

As when the chariots have poured out of their starting-pens, they add lap to lap; and the driver, tugging vainly at the bridles, is carried forward by his horses; nor does the team give heed to the reins. Georgies, I, 512-514.
With Peguy to Chartres
Authors: Speaight Robert
Published: July 2007

The reader taking up this book for the first time may receive a confused impression. To begin with he will find some stanzas of French verse which suggest in their metre the pilgrimage which they describe in detail. It was André Gide who said that the poetry of Charles Péguy was like the repetition of some ancient litany, always similar but never quite the same. He might have said, with equal truth, that it was like the plodding of feet on a hard road, rhythmical and unrelenting; or like the washing of the sea over a shingle beach where no wave is identical but all strike variations of the same theme. Péguy’s verse has a tremendous purpose, and he was never more serious about anything than about this pilgrimage which he made to Chartres. All that he was and knew and felt—his piety and his patriotism and his subtle, involuntary presumption—went into it, and was afterwards translated into the poem he dedicated to our Lady. So much the reader of this book will quickly seize. But then he will examine the photographs, and fresh images will mingle in his mind with the image of Péguy’s pilgrimage.
‘Worker my Brother‘
Authors: Dominic S. R.
Published: July 2007

Some years have already passed since the Abbé Godin in his book France, pays de mission,’ gave us a rather sad summing up of enquiries made into the increasing paganism in French towns. The book was followed by others revealing a similar state of affairs in the country and showing clearly where effort must be made at the present time. It is comforting, therefore, to realise what steps have already been taken to meet the situation; and even if it is only a start we can hope for its success when the seed will grow and ripen.

The name of Père Loew may he familiar to some who have read the short account of his work in En mission proletarienne. Père Loew had previously written a lesser-known book, Les dockers de Marseilles; ou, comment se crée le proletariat; and he also delivered some lectures on the work he has been doing. These lectures were the most striking evidence of the sincerity of his mission; delivered without sentiment or pathos but with the simplicity of truth built on real experience they conveyed a feeling of unspeakable sorrow for the workers.
The Reality of Faith in the Modern World
Authors: Hennig John
Published: July 2007

In the spring of 1939 was asked by the editor of Werklätter, one of the leading periodicals of the Catholic youth-movement in Germany, to contribute to the final number which he had been permitted to publish before this periodical had to cease to exist— to save paper, as it was said. We former contributors were asked to state what we felt was the most important duty of young Catholics of our time. Since soon afterwards I left Germany, I did not receive an offprint of that article, but some while ago a friend of mine presented me with an odd copy of that issue. When I read it again, it struck me that, in spite of the world-shaking events which had taken place in the meantime, the fundamental spiritual situation which we then considered had very little changed.

The editor had given my contribution the title ‘Die lautere Wirklichkeit’, which I may perhaps translate ‘Reality, nothing but reality’. I still feel that the fundamental duty of Catholics in our time is to realise for themselves and for others that there are things which, though not belonging to the material and sensuous sphere, are real. It is the general characteristic of our age that its conception of reality is no longer derived from the external but from the internal world.
Translation and Interpretation
Authors: Ginns Reginald
Published: July 2007

Monsignor Knox has put us under a new debt by publishing these notes which have already appeared in the pages of The Tablet. Those who read them there will remember how they are marked by that wide erudition and careful thought which we expect of him. As for those who have not seen them, perhaps it is as well to repeat the warning of the author's preface, namely, that some purchasers of the book may be in for a disappointment: ‘the over-worked parish priest who must needs compose his Sunday sermon in a few minutes snatched from the confessional ... a harassed curate, desperately turning over the pages of this book at ten minutes to eleven in the hope of extracting a pulpit message from it’. These notes are not meant for them; they, he says, are quite well catered for by the numerous devotional commentaries that already exist. Here he wishes to concentrate on the well-known difficulties of the Sunday epistles and gospels. He dreams optimistically of a Catholic family arguing hotly across the luncheon table about the meaning of the epistle and gospel they have heard from the pulpit that morning, and eventually deciding to ‘see what Knox has to say about it’.
America and the Japanese
Authors: Straelen H. van
Published: July 2007

The Japanese Diet has made its first use of the power secured to it under the new constitution by selecting Mr Tetsu Katayama as Prime Minister. On Saturday, May 24th, he was formally invested in office by the Emperor and he had a 30-minute conference with General MacArthur. In a wireless address he appealed to the Japanese people for their help in the task of rebuilding the country. What most Japanese—rulers and ruled alike—desired, has more or less become a fact. They can now reconstruct their national life in their own way. MacArthur’s administration has partly come to an end. Now that we have arrived at this milestone in Japanese history, we may survey the hundred years of American-Japanese relations.

Twice in the course of history America has forcibly opened Japan to the world and has brought her into peaceful intercourse with other nations. Twice she has made the opportunity of exerting a tremendous influence on the history and development of the Japanese Empire and the Japanese people.

The first occasion was after her more than two centuries’ long seclusion, and was brought about through the mission of Commodore Matthew Galbraith Perry.

On 24th November, 1852, he sailed from Norfolk, Virginia, in the steam frigate Mississippi. His squadron was assembled in Shanghai, and on 8th July, 1853, he entered the Bay of Yedo with four ships of war. The Japanese were not completely unprepared for his arrival, for in 1844 William II, King of Holland, had addressed a letter to the Shogun warning him of the impossibility of maintaining any longer the policy of seclusion.
Secularization in Education
Authors: Hough J. R.
Published: July 2007

That the majority of American colleges, even those started under strongly Christian auspices, have become secularized with amazing rapidity—within the last fifty or sixty years— is an obvious fact to be deplored or applauded according to the point of view. For the natural sciences which fought against the domination of theology secularization is, of course, a victory and one so complete that not only does religion not dominate, it is not accorded equality. This is the more striking in the highly endowed schools of the Atlantic seaboard because they were founded as theological seminaries, Harvard to ‘supply the spiritual needs of the colonies’, Yale as a Calvinist stronghold when Harvard became Unitarian, Amherst to prepare ‘poor boys to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ’. Until 1800 all of the Fellows of the governing body of Harvard were clergymen; after 1884 no ministers were included. In 1800 the Professor of Divinity at Yale, Dr Wright, was also president of the college; by 1900 such a combination had become unthinkable.

The women’s colleges have a similar history. It is interesting to trace the change in religion at Mt Holyoke, for example, from the dogmatic Calvinism of Mary Lyon (which included a belief in total depravity) to the present day Universalism, a religion broad enough, according to the address given in 1937 by the retiring secretary of the Y.W.C.A., to include Catholic, Protestant and Jew in the worship of the one God, Father of all.

As the theological faculties declined in dignity and influence the scientific faculties increased.
Spanish Civilization in America
Authors: Parker A. A.
Published: July 2007

Don Salvador de Madariaga’s latest work deserves an extensive review, not only because of the importance of its subject, but because its distinguished author justly holds a position of authority among the English public as an interpreter of his country’s history and civilization.

Perhaps none of the great movements of history has been more consistently misrepresented than the Spanish conquest and colonization of America. No culture has suffered more from the ‘whig interpretation of history’ than that of Spain. For at least two centuries there existed what seemed to many Spaniards a conspiracy to belittle and distort the contribution of their country to human civilization. Of late years this tendency has been reversed, and the ‘revaluation’ of Spain’s past, in which English and North-American scholars have played a prominent part, has swept away a great deal of ignorant prejudice. As regards Spanish America in particular, there have been published in both the Americas and in Spain a large number of careful historical studies which make such prejudice no longer excusable. Most of these works will, however, be unknown to the general reader in England, and there is therefore need of a re-presentation and summing-up of the facts.
Minute Philosopher
Authors: Ryan Columba
Published: July 2007

So did I consider myself after the 853 pages in which Lord Russell apparently sets himself to the task of diminishing all the most valuable things of our European heritage. I wanted to pass the book by with a shrug, but the editor wanted a review. So I wrote angrily, but of course anger defeated itself. I cried the editor mercy, but he had old-fashioned ideas of justice and insisted on a review. Then I happened, to read Bishop Berkeley, and in his contributions to the Guardian and in Alciphron I found a curiously familiar figure. Whose was it? ‘Poland's? Voltaire's? Russell’s? Why, yes, it was Russell himself. Russell down to the ground. Not the formidable Russell, Russell the brilliant logician, but Russell the iconoclast, I had almost said the septuagenarian adolescent, Russell the minute philosopher.
Words and Meaning
Authors: Evans Illtud
Published: July 2007

Proper words in proper places make the true definition of a style’. As usual Swift cuts through the jungle of theory and finds the fact. It would be interesting to know whether the ‘Young Clergyman’ to whom he wrote benefited by the definition. Certainly clerical English is one of the most chronic of occupational diseases; the fear that, in Sydney Smith’s phrase, the intellect may be ‘improperly exposed’ leads to the swaddling bands of rhetoric and the safe generalisation. Philosophers often fare little better; and the scholarship of yesterday lies mouldering in a hundred libraries, too often unread because it is unreadable.

‘Style’ is confined by the critics to the work of the conscious artist, for whom words are tools to be chosen, sharpened, used. The scholar, understandably contemptuous of the self-important claims of the professional writer, addresses himself to those who want to learn. And learning is never easy. Yet the business of communication has its grace; and a Locke, a Hume, a Macaulay, a Newman survive in a double immortality. Or, more strictly, in them the idea and its expression are matched.

Stilus brevis, grata facundia, celsa, clara, firma sententia. One does not look for literary judgments in a breviary responsory. But this liturgical praise of St Thomas as a master of languages sums up, with something of St Thomas’s own gracious economy of speech, that union of thought and its expression which it should be any writer’s aim to reach. The identification of style with the decorative tricks of a Pater or a George Moore has confused an issue which is simple.
Some Reflections on Gandhi
Authors: Braybrooke Neville
Published: July 2007

A difficulty constantly confronting the writer of obituary notices is the question of what mood and tense to employ, and it is a difficulty which comes very much to the fore with the death of a man like Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Somehow neither the subjunctive mood nor pluperfect tense comes readily to mind since the bereavement seems too personal and world-wide to allow of such historical impersonality; instead the loss is so great that it seems to call for something less final, less absolute. Better the present indicative, especially as there can be little doubt that his influence in India will grow rather than diminish with the years, and that the effect of such an influence on a country so vast will have repercussions which are not only global, but which internationally will be more or less immediate. Certainly the indecision as to which style to adopt in the tributes paid at his death, and the vacillating already apparent in the numerous leaders and notices over what mood and tense to choose, are proof enough of his importance, even if the true significance of that importance cannot be fully estimated until it is seen how many more similar violent deaths will flow out of that policy which he inaugurated. Upon such a determination must rest the final verdict of history. Yet, irrespective of the level of political home rule and contemporary affairs, there are other and deeper reasons for his prestige; reasons that to be genuinely understood call first for an evaluation of his philosophy since it was from that philosophy that his political actions sprang.
Father Garrigou-Lagrange, Thomism and The ‘New Theology’
Authors: Davis H. Francis
Published: July 2007

I suppose there is no greater and more devoted authority on the classic Thomist tradition than Father Garrigou-Lagrange. For well over forty years he has been writing in defence of that tradition. His first works were written at a time of crisis, when the very bases of faith were attacked by the Modernists. He was an apostle of Thomist realism against the immanentist, evolutionist and phenomenalist philosophies before modernism was condemned by Pius X. Writing now in his old age, long after that struggle of his youth, Father Garrigou feels that there are once again danger-signals of a falling away from St Thomas, and he is as convinced as he ever was that such a falling away will bring disaster to many. ‘Whither goes the new theology?’ he writes at the end of his book. ‘It is returning to modernism.’

In view of the urgency, as he sees it, he considers it timely to give us a constructive and concise statement of the whole system of philosophy and theology of St Thomas. In all controversial questions he takes, as he always has done, the more traditional view, almost always under the guidance of the classical commentator, Cajetan.

An English Catholic, aside from the main stream of Catholic thought, must wonder that there could be any foundation in present-day Catholic thinking for Father Garrigou-Lagrange’s fears. It is more in France than in England that much of the older theological tradition has been questioned in recent years.