bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Church Dormant
Authors: O'Donoghue T. D.
Published: July 2007

'I'HE Church Dormant? . . . I have never heard

J. of it,’ the puzzled reader will say : ‘the Church Militant I know, the Church Triumphant and the Church Suffering I have also heard of, but what on earth is the Church Dormant? Is it by chance a new confraternity for the aged?’

Nothing of the sort. It is merely a pathological condition of the Church Militant. It is endemic, but sometimes epidemic: it is epidemic to-day. It is analogous to certain functional disorders of the human body, which result from over-indulgence in eating or in drinking, or even from neglecting to take sufficient exercise. For there is a curious parallelism between spiritual and material processes, and all experience teaches us that, as the body for its life and weli-being requires a certain amount of hardship and discomfort in its surroundings, so too does the soul,—both the individual soul of the Christian man or woman, and the aggregate soul of the Christian Church.

We are accustomed to speak of the Church upon «arth as the Church Militant, but we do not always realise how necessarily true that description is. In fact, the Church upon earth can never rightly be other than a militant body. She is never so well, and so truly herself as when things are going ill with her, and she is never so powerful as when fighting for her life against the embattled enemies of her Lord. It is significant that the Age of the Martyrs was also the Age of her most rapid extension and development. In later times, with greater general security, and in apparently improved circumstances, she seems largely to have lost her grip, and instead of the ‘general advance’ that distinguished her beginnings, she now either marks time, or else just jogs along, barely holding her own. The Age of the Martyrs is over, at any rate for the present.
Notre Dame du Sourire
Authors: Pippet Gabriel
Published: July 2007

In a time in the golden past, two hundred years or so before Protestantism was misbegot, there stood on the banks of a river a certain fair monastery; a beautiful pale grey building, austere and massive. It hung high up over the water, and deeply rolled the river at its base : in the early morning it swam in mists of palest ivory, what time the sun rose majestic over the hill, and smiled to see so lordly a sight. Though so massive and severe, the building was no wise grim : it shone a pale gem in green meadows and kingly trees.

The dwellers therein were as austere and simple as their dwelling; and they too irradiated cheerfulness, from my Lord Abbot to the latest scrubby postulant: and all met trouble and difficulty with a smile.

All—but one. One there was, as gloomy as a cave at midnight.

One there was as grim as a Donjon. He smiled never—neither did he laugh. He went further! He took scandal at the cheerfulness around him—a grim Brother! Whether he thought on the wickedness of the world, or the severity of the rule, ‘twas the same to him—all things worked together into gloom. A terrible fellow is a scowling Brother. To him a smile was a sin, to laugh a.crime. Saw he a swaggering gay fellow from out beyond, come to see the monastery— his soul shuddered within him : did his eye catch the Guest Master’s smiling welcome on such a one—he gloomed with misery—’ accomplices in crime.’

The very chant of the Office was too gay for him. In sooth a fanatical Brother.

And in his cell at night, he groaned aloud and thumped his chest, and bewailed the levity and brightness of the Brethren. ‘Distinguish between me and those others, Lord!’ he wailed. ‘I am not as they; oh ! deliver me from this house of doom.’
Divorce Law in France
Authors: Gwynn Denis
Published: July 2007

Divorce was unknown in France until the Revolution. But the exponents of the new gospel of Liberty and Equality soon discovered that the system of indissoluble marriage was logically incompatible with their fundamental principles. And so in 1792, the Legislative Assembly decided, after three minutes of discussion, that’ the right to divorce was a necessary corollary of individual liberty, which could not permit of any indissoluble tie.’ On this principle the Assembly authorised divorce by mutual consent, with a minimum of formalities; at the same time it abolished the old system of legal separations. The result of the change was more rapid than anyone had anticipated, and in Paris there were in the years 1793 and 1794 half as many divorces as marriages. Napoleon, who was a convinced believer in the necessity for a strict marriage law—apart from the special circumstances of his own career—made drastic changes in the revolutionary system when he promulgated the Code Civil in 1804. He revived the old system of legal separations and, while he retained the right to divorce by mutual consent, he introduced many formal requirements before it could be obtained, and also insisted upon the fulfilment of certain conditions. Thus, divorce by mutual consent could not be obtained either before two years had elapsed after the marriage (and under the Code Civil a French woman is obliged to live with her husband unless she has obtained either a separation or a divorce), or after the marriage had lasted twenty years. Also no woman over forty-five could obtain a divorce by consent. The consent of the parents on both sides must also be obtained.
Gethsemane
Authors: Moore E. Hamilton
Published: July 2007

Sorrowful, lo, these wonders hight,

And sorrow shall ye see forthright.

Dolores nostros, saith Isay,

He bore, and David, in his day,

Clamavi die et nocte.

Can’st thou forget, Gethsemane,

The Saviour’s tears and agony?

Alone, unfriended, faint, betrayed,

Lowly, with faltering lips he prayed, Transeat calix iste!

THE SCOURGING OF OUR LORD

How hath my guilty forfeit shent Thy loveliness, with blows forespent,

Wasted with vigil! Domine,

In Filium tuum respice,

Et miserere ei!

Whence is Thy kingly vestment red As those whose feet the vintage tread? Pitiless, lo, thy foes prepare ....

The furrows of the fatal share ....

Ecce Agnus Dei!

THE CROWN OF THORNS

Fair as a flower on Mary’s breast,

The infant brow her love caressed,

Now languished bears the badge of scorn, And bends beneath the Crown of Thorn; Inter spinas, liliuml Great Caesar’s laurel wreath, I trow,

Must fade, his pomp the worms endow; Time doth all garlands else decay,

Of every Thorn shall weave a ray, Christianorum gaudium.

E. Hamilton Moore.
The Bolshevik Persecution of Christianity
Authors: Bennigsen O.
Published: July 2007

Captain Francis McCullagh, author of an interesting book, A Prisoner with the Reds, has just given us another, The Bolshevik Persecution of Christianity} It is a sincere book which will provide some future historian of Bolshevism with invaluable material. For the last six years a thick veil has hidden Russia from the eyes of the outward world, a veil behind which it was known that unspeakable outrages were committed. Captain McCullagh lifts this veil for us, at least so far as the Churches are concerned, his book dealing exclusively with the Communist persecution of Christianity, which can only be compared to the persecutions in the first centuries of the Christian era. Previous visits to Russia, knowledge of the people and their language have given the author a great advantage over those numerous excursionists to that unhappy country, whose ‘tours’ had been so skilfully organised that they saw only what their hosts intended them to see and brought home glowing accounts of the Marxian Eden. The Methodist Bishop, whose participation in the Congress of the Red Church Cap’ tain McCullagh describes, is an example of such innocent dupes.

It is to be regretted that the author has not moderated some of his judgments, and he is particularly severe when speaking of the Russian Church. It is too early to bring in a final verdict against this Church or her Patriarch. Many believe that the latter’s surrender was due not to cowardice, but to the desire of saving the Church; it is even thought that events have justified his policy and that the old Church is strengthening whilst the Red Church is on the wane.
The New Cure for Religion
Authors: Knox Ronald A.
Published: July 2007

The old, far-fetched notion of religion, which commended itself for so long to the rude intelligence of our ancestors, has fortunately given way, in our own time, to a more reasonable understanding of it. We find it difficult to think ourselves back into that complexion of mind, which conceived of religious truth as a body of philosophical statements and alleged historical facts; as, that grace was or was not indefectible, that it was Paul and not another who wrote to the Ephesians, and the like. Had such facts been demonstrable, is it not certain that in so many centuries of earnest controversy the common judgment of mankind must have resolved the question with ‘aye’ or ‘no’ long before this? And could it be credibly maintained that it might be a man’s duty to resign his benefice, forgo the comradeship of his friends, and find himself a new way of living, merely because he had revised his notions about certain doctrinal points, without abating anything of his general zeal for righteousness? The wonder is, assuredly, not that we should have come to think otherwise, but that so defective an apprehension of religious truth should have so long dominated the superstitious fancy of human kind.

In these latter days, men of emancipated intelligence have set before us a view of the whole question better accommodated to the enlightenment of our times. We are now assured that religion is nothing more or less than an attitude of the mind, or rather not of the mind only but of the whole being, towards it matters not what.
Angelo Ambrogini of Montepulciano, 1454–1494
Authors: Wilkinson Maurice
Published: July 2007

Poliziano alone of the Medicean Academy has lived into modern times for reasons with which he would not be wholly content; for though the first of the Classicists to use his genius on behalf of his own tongue, he regarded his editions of the Classics as more important, as, indeed, in themselves they were. Fortunately, like his patron and intimate Lorenzo, Poliziano was very modern, also he was a born poet, and his easy Greek and Latin made these languages live. His work was no mere imitation of Horace in verse or Livy in prose; he was so saturated in the classical learning and yet so wholly modern that he really embodied the spirit of antiquity in a living person, singularly unlike the higher and dryer scholars of his own and succeeding times. It is possible to have a vast erudition and yet to lack the spirit of the old world, and it is possible to miss the highest scholarship and yet to have a mind informed with antiquity. Poliziano was certainly not the greatest scholar of the Renaissance, but he was the most original and the most brilliant interpreter of the ancient to the modern world.

Erasmus, a far more profound scholar and thinker and human withal, regarded Poliziano’s scholarship as inaccurate; but his conscientiousness is apparent in his collating and editing of Justinian's Pandects from the Pisan MS., a gigantic undertaking, in which he never resorted to emendations unless the text seemed hopeless.
Dupouey
Authors: Devas E. H.
Published: July 2007

Adramatic Critic, at whose feet the world sits every Sunday has lately announced the imminence of the great War Drama. The Napoleonic Wars waited for Hardy. Does this generation need a great war play to focus its war emotions, or to revive its war experiences? The best in this kind are but shadows : in our memories, in letters, in biographies we have reality. It is true that the unifying force may only be personal or egoistic, and that either of these may lack both greatness and permanence. But where the background is eternity, and the protagonist is man’s spirit, the interest can be neither petty nor ephemeral. There must be drama. The letters of Peter Dominic Dupouey were published last year by the Nouvelle Revue Francaise. The writer was a lapsed Catholic, who left the Church in the search of freedom and returned to it by natural reaction and the influence of a Catholic wife. The letters are addressed to her, and introduced by Andre Gide, a literary friend. In the Introduction, Gide quotes largely from Henri Ghéon, another friend, who is perhaps something over-literary and impressionable for English taste. But between them, they give the necessary background.

Dupouey had the advantage over many of us in that the war did not cut across either his profession or his values. As a naval lieutenant, he could only find it a test and a realisation. In the immediate event, he was dissatisfied with blockade and transport service in the Mediterranean, and, when opportunity offered, he volunteered for the Yser.
The Super-Vegetarians
Authors: Standing E. M.
Published: July 2007

There was a time when I used to be a vegetarian, and earnestly ate nut rissoles and marmite sausages. In those days, if I looked at a dish of lamb cutlets, I was haunted by the spectral bleatings of woolly innocents being led to the slaughter; a mutton chop was to me a menace; and if I saw a bottle of Bovril I sighed with genuine sympathy, ‘Alas, my poor brother!’ For were not the animals our ‘younger brothers’? Were they not even as we ourselves—climbing the ladder of evolution to higher and better things? What right had we to cut off their innocent lives before their destined hour had struck?

Then by the hand of destiny I was brought in contact with the Super-Vegetarians. The Super-Vegetarians are a sect of Hindus, usually known as the Jains. It so happened that my work in India threw me into intimate contact with these interesting people. I found them not only interesting, but exceedingly kind and hospitable, and in many other ways unusually charming and refined. In fact their code of ethics with regard to the animal world was too refined for me altogether. I became aware that I was only a beginner in these matters, a despairing amateur in the presence of professionals; I was not even an ‘also ran.’ In the presence of such high and austere consistency I gave up the competition; and, realising the direction in which my ideals were leading, fell back —not without relief—on the flesh-pots of Egypt.
Names
Authors: Hurst Ben
Published: July 2007

By solemn decree of nature the parents of a child control its future. According to the laws of civilisation they are at liberty to mould its soul. Not the least privilege is that of conferring the name with which it confronts its fellows, and which—should it offend the bearer arrived at the age of reason—cannot easily be doffed. Godparents, at Baptism, were formerly left to choose the neophyte’s name; but this courtesy has fallen into disuse, and almost everywhere the parents themselves designate their choice. Thus an infant is early bound, or safeguarded, as the case may be, not only by the blood inherited from his forbears, but by their fancy in Christian names as well as by the obligation of their surname. Too often the ‘Christian’ name is pagan; obsolete and disreputable gods and goddesses enjoying a condemnable vogue. But if Diana and Sylvia are mistakes, the names sought in vegetation, such as Ivy, Violet, Myrtle, etc., are likewise unbecoming when borne by Christians. Such names of flowers and plants are of Semitic provenance, and there is no excuse for overlooking, in their favour, the glorious roll with which the Church provides us.

Whether the surname be a fetter or an asset, the Christian name should be as far as possible in accordance with it, lest the child be from infancy torn in two, subjected to different currents, bewildered between adverse elements. Race, calling, heredity must be taken into account in bestowing names, for nobody should be made incongruous before he can speak. To hear of Marmaduke Murphy gives us a start.
The Staleness of Novelty
Authors: Rope H. E. G.
Published: July 2007

It has been said that ‘Great is advertisement with little men,’ and this is verified in other fields besides that of commerce. The ‘best seller’ is almost invariably trumpeted as a masterpiece of ‘modern thought,’ and small indeed is the number of readers who pause to reflect that ‘modern,’ ‘modernity’ and ‘progress’ are only relative terms. Those of us who are not yet old remember the days when Tennyson was deemed modern. Now he is ‘out-of-date,’ ‘antiquated’ for those who cultivate modernity. In the thirteenth century Gothic architecture was modern, in the sixteenth, Renaissance. And yet the delusion of a machine-ridden world persists that what is proclaimed as truth in the twentieth century must be truer and better than what was proclaimed as such in the nineteenth or any previous century, because more modern. Those who are bemused with the wonder and novelty of eugenics would be mightily astonished if they should come to study such authors, say, as St. Augustine.

‘It is, however, one thing for married persons only to come together for the sole wish to beget children; this is not sinfull: it is another thing for them to aim at carnal pleasure by cohabitation; this, as being attempted only in the marriage state, involves only venial sin. For although propagation of offspring is not the motive of the concumbency, there is still no attempt to prevent such propagation, either by wrong desire or evil appliance. They who resort to these, although called by the name of man and wife, are really not such; they retain no vestige of true matrimony, but pretend the honourable designation as a cloak for their criminal conduct. Having also proceeded so far, they are betrayed into exposing their children, which are born against their will. They have an abhorrence of nourishing and retaining those whom they begat with dislike., This infliction of cruelty on their offspring, so reluctantly begotten, unmasks the sin which they had practised in darkness, and drags it clearly into the light of day. The open cruelty reproves the concealed sin. Sometimes, indeed, this lustful cruelty, or, if you please, cruel lust, resorts to such extravagant methods as to use poisonous drugs to secure barrenness; or else, if unsuccessful in this, to destroy the conceived seed by some means previous to birth, preferring that its offspring should rather perish than receive vitality; or if it was advancing to life within the womb, should be even deprived of it before it was born. Well, if both parties alike are so flagitious, they are not husband and wife; and if such were their character from the beginning, they have not come together so much by holy wedlock as by abominable debauchery. But if the two are not identical in such sin, I boldly declare either that the woman is, so to say, the husband’s harlot; or the man, the wife’s adulterer.’
Robert Keable
Authors: Huray C. P.
Published: July 2007

Robert Keable is, in a sense, a literary enigma. Prior to the publication of Simon called Peter, which definitely established him as a leading: novelist, his claims to literary achievement amounted only to a small collection of missionary tales, of a combined Anglo-Catholic and spiritualistic flavour, in the more or less obscure pages of The Treasury. The reverential and almost priestly touch which pervades these stories is entirely absent from the novels which have brought him fame. And therein lies the enigma.

In the preface to his latest novel, Recompence, which is a sequel to Simon called Peter, Mr. Keable refers somewhat bitterly to the reception given to his first work by the religious press, although, he says, ‘it was written sincerely and simply as ever pen was set to paper.’ That may be,—but the assumption that he was a Catholic convert, made by his critics in the Anglican press, though untrue, was not unwarranted. Catholic critics, too, felt that his reverence and respect for their dogmas and practices savoured of impertinence, placed side by side with views of immorality all the more interesting in that they were unconventional. The secular press, without probing beneath the surface, welcomed the book as a piece of stark realism, an exposure of the degradation of moral values due to the war.

It seems inevitable that critics should identify authors with their principal characters and regard a novel as a more or less biographical work. Hence it appears that Mr. Keable is Peter Graham in Simon called Peter and Recompence, Chris in The Mother of all Living and Paul Kestern in Peradventure.
Catholicism and Economics Part II
Authors: Dawson Christopher
Published: July 2007

I

The infant Church was born at a time when the greatest state that the world has ever seen was attaining to its full development. The whole civilised world west of the Euphrates was united under a single head. The age of civil war, of social unrest, of the exploitation of the conquered peoples was at last over. Everywhere new cities were springing up, trade was flourishing and population increasing. It was ‘the hour of the prince of this world,’ the apotheosis of triumphant material power and wealth.

And yet the whole splendid building rested on non-moral foundations—often on mere violence and cruelty. The divine Caesar might be a Caligula or a Nero, wealth was an excuse for debauchery and the prosperity of the wealthy classes was based on the institution of slavery—not the natural household slavery of primitive civilisation, but an organised plantation-slavery which left no room for any human relation between slave and master.

The early Church could not but be conscious that she was separated by an infinite gulf from this great material order, that she could have no part in its prosperity or in its injustice. She was in this world as the seed of a new order, utterly subversive of all that had made the ancient world what it was. Yet though she inherited the spirit of the Jewish protest against the Gentile world-power, she did not look for any temporal change, much less did she attempt herself to bring about any social reform.
Will France Go Anti-Clerical Again?
Authors: Gwynn Denis
Published: July 2007

The result of the French general elections has been to overthrow not only M. Poincare, who had the goodwill of the great Catholic soldiers like Foch and Castelnau and Gouraud and Mangin, but also M. Millerand, who has been particularly connected with the restoration of diplomatic relations with the Vatican. They are now replaced by a group of politicians who have been regarded by those Catholic generals, and by most French nationalists, as their determined and dangerous enemies. These new leaders of France have, moreover, stated quite clearly in their public manifestoes that the immediate rupture of diplomatic relations with the Catholic Church is one of the principal planks in their programme. Their attitude in this respect is all the more disquieting because a rupture with the Vatican is almost the only part of their policy which they can bring into operation at once without fresh legislation. Their record in regard to the Vatican is, moreover, consistent and logical, and they have demanded so often in recent years that diplomatic relations with the Pope should be broken off that they cannot be expected to forget their previous declarations on the subject. It is, unfortunately, a question upon which they also feel very strongly, just as the Labour Party here felt strongly on the question of recognising the Bolsheviks; so that the rupture with the Vatican would seem likely to be their first public action, just as the recognition of Moscow was the first action of the British Labour Government.
Catholicism and Economics Part III
Authors: Dawson Christopher
Published: July 2007

I.

The establishment of such an economic order is demanded not only by external circumstances but also by a human need.

In almost all the industrial countries the wage labourer is thoroughly disaffected. For almost a century he has been fed on the doctrines of political liberalism. He has been taught to believe in democracy, in the equal citizenship of all, and it is not surprising that he should have come at last to demand the application of these theories to his daily life— that is to economic matters. Hence the determination of organised labour to acquire a fixed standard of life, secure from the fluctuations of the international market. Hence too its tendency to look for the satisfaction of these ideals to Socialism, which had its birth at the time when the prospects of the working classes seemed most desperate, and which has shown itself ready to step into the place of the old governments in the political disintegration of Europe that has followed the world war.

The Socialist doctrines, especially in their ‘Scientific’ Marxian form, in spite of being a conscious revolt against the prevailing economic theories, nevertheless took over from the older economists their materialistic outlook, and their faith in the operation of unmodifiable economic laws. They simply added to these fundamental conceptions a theory of historical evolution, by which they taught that the capitalist system was a necessary stage in the development of the individual handicrafts of the past into the scientific socialised industrialism of the future.
Genteel Spirits and Fashionable Apparitions
Authors: McQuilland Louis J.
Published: July 2007

Before the days of ‘Mr. Sludge the Medium,’ fashionable folk had a sentimental leaning towards polite correspondence from vanished friends, who had gone to a better, or, at least, another world, Proof of this is afforded in a delightfully languishing volume, published in 1824, the work of Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe, entitled Friendship in Death, in Letters from the Dead to the Living, with a frontispiece illustrated by two radiating tombstones. The volume is dedicated to Dr. Young, and the lady writes with great humility:

’ I have no design in this Dedication, but to express my gratitude for the pleasure and advantage I have received from your Poem on the Last Judgment and the Paraphrase on part of the Book of Job. The author of these letters is above any view of interest, and can have no prospect of reputation, resolving to be concealed: but if they prove a serious entertainment to persons whose leisure hours are not always innocently employed, the end is fully answered.’

The retiring Mrs. Rowe will give some entertainment of a non-serious kind to the frivolous but harmless. Letter II, for example, from a Gentleman who died at Constantinople, to his friend in England, giving him an account of his death, is ingeniously diverting. Altamont tells his crony, Beville, how he passed away, and awoke in a genteel world, where his ladylove welcomed him with all the grace of a woman of fashion :

’The first gentle spirit that greeted me in this new region was the lovely Almeria; but how dazzling! how divinely fair ! Ecstacy was in her eyes and inexpressible pleasure in every smile. With an inimitable grace she received me into her ethereal chariot, which was sparkling-sapphire, studded with gold; it rolled with a spontaneous motion along the heavenly plains, and stopped at the morning star, our destined habitation.’
‘A Gentleman-Saint’
Authors: Hughes C. M.
Published: July 2007

In this year of Byron’s centenary, Leigh Hunt’s name inevitably recurs. His relations with Byron are told and re-told, and ‘the common weakness of throwing the principal character into a high light by darkening the shadows around those who surrounded him’ at times relegates Hunt to the outer darkness. He is ‘sly and venomous’ according to one critic, who on Byron himself is admirable. It is not, however, our intention to discuss the Byron-Hunt episode. A severance of friendship is always a tragedy. And an attempt to justify the one at the expense of the other is only to accentuate the tragic note. We can afford to forget that they ever ceased to be friends. We may leave Byron in his ‘high light,’ but we would fain dissipate somewhat the shadows that surround Leigh Hunt’s name, not by putting forward a reasoned defence of the man and his actions, but by recalling one of his Essays wherein he describes his discovery of a Saint. The genuine appreciation of goodness and virtue which the Essay exhibits may help us to see him in his true light—to see him, perhaps, as Shelley saw him :

One of those happy souls

Which are the salt o! the earth, and without whom

This world would smell like what it is—a tomb;

Who is, what others seem.

The essay is to be found in The Seer; or, Common f laces Refreshed, a collection of Hunt’s Essays published in 1841.
The Love of the Soule
Authors: Martin M. Gregory
Published: July 2007

[While the name and the story—a spiritual romance—of Blessed Edmund Campion are known to all, we are probably less familiar with the name of his contemporary and friend at Oxford, Gregory Martin, one of the notable scholars of the day, who spoke the word that under God converted Edmund Campion.

Martin, after giving brilliant promise in his studies, left Oxford in 1569 to accept the post of tutor to the sons of the Duke of Norfolk, but resigned it in the following year when the duke’s household were ordered to conform outwardly to the new religion.

Before leaving England to practise his religion unmolested in Flanders, he made his appeal to his friend Campion, entreating him to abandon the idea of a merely worldly career, to choose the better part, and to accompany him into poverty. The pleading prevailed, in that as we know, Campion turned his back on Oxford and entered the Society of Jesus.

Martin went to Douay, there presided over by Dr. Allen and was ordained Priest in 1573. He then went to Rome to take part in the foundation of the English College—but in 1578 was recalled to Rheims. There his great work was the translation of the Bible from the Vulgate into English, the version which came to be known as the Rheims Version. Martin died at Rheims, 1582. His death was a blow to Dr. Allen and the College; for he was not only a fervent Catholic, but a ripe scholar, and one with the intellectual modesty that characterises the true scholar—one of Oxford’s most distinguished sons.
What of Erasmus?
Authors: Brennan R. Edward
Published: July 2007

There is a saying that Erasmus laid the egg which Luther hatched. I have often wondered just how much truth there is in this expression. Opinion seems to vary. Some Catholics have read into it the condemnation of Erasmus as a secret heretic inwardly gnawing at the very vitals of the Church. Few perhaps until late years have made any honest attempt to interpret the great Humanist’s position in the light of his own explanations or by reference to the times in which he lived. No one wants to condone the faults of Erasmus, and heaven knows they were many. But let us not overlook the good points in his character, or the excuses for the bad ones.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Erasmus occupied an enviable place among the esthetes of the new Humanistic learning. He may be taken as a fair example of the critical attitude of mind in which many of the best and most loyal Catholics approached the religious problems of the age. Alive to all the abuses that prevailed among his fellow-ecclesiastics, Erasmus is perhaps injudicious at times in the manner in which he insists upon reform. But after we have sifted the matter to the bottom, we shall find that in most cases his ideas are just. He demanded a thoroughly literary education for the Churchmen of his day to put them in touch with the leading spirits of Humanism. Had they possessed this knowledge, there is little doubt but that the tide of religious affairs could have been changed for a saner direction.
The Cambridge Summer School
Authors: Jarrett Bede
Published: July 2007

From August 4th to August 9th, the annual meeting of the Summer School of Catholic Studies at Cambridge took place. Each year this Cambridge Summer School has devoted itself to a particular subject, which it has set itself to study and explain. Previously the Religion of the Scriptures, the Eucharist, the Papacy, had been so treated; this year, in accordance with the desires of the Pope, expressed in his encyclical Studiorum Ducem, the principle matter discussed was St. Thomas Aquinas, his Life, Times and Teaching.

The solemn opening of the School was made in the impressive Church of Our Lady and the English Martyrs with a sermon by Father Martindale, S.J. In an interesting way Fr. Martindale examined the break-up of thought and life that had taken place since the sixteenth century, its dissociation of part with part, in matters intellectual and spiritual, in culture, and, especially, in the principles of action. Saved as Catholics were from spiritual and doctrinal separation, they yet remained caught in the cleavage of politics and culture, and severed therefore in large measure through Protestant and over-nationalised party narrowness from proper contact with each other. To bridge this gulf betwixt nations, sciences, and religious groups was the ideal and hope of many; but it could be effected only by a common possession of principles, and these in turn must depend upon a common philosophical basis and a common faith. Both philosophy and faith sprang from the teaching of Christ. The statement of this teaching by the Early Church Fathers held Christendom together for two hundred years, by St. Augustine for another eight hundred, by St. Thomas from the thirteenth century till the Reformation.
The Dry-Rot in the Capitalistic System
Authors: Worts F. R.
Published: July 2007

The critics of the economic system of modern industrial and commercial life are legion. Since the famous attack of Marx, this so-called ‘Capitalistic System” has been continually assailed and defended with an ever-increasing power of learning and ‘judgment born of experience.’ From every angle and vantage-point Capitalism has been viewed from without: while from within its many secrets of good and evil have been dragged forth into the light of day either for admiration or for shame. Of the many far-reaching truths concerning its nature which we have thus slowly discovered, perhaps the chief is the most alarming—its incalculable strength. So deep and strong are its roots—avarice and coveteousness, so enormous is its growth—its jungled strength covers the earth, so dominant is its influence—no civilised people can escape it, that it can and does defy the legion of critics to check its growth or lessen its influence. As some monstrous, hydra-headed giant of the fairy story, Capitalism smiles horrifically upon its millions of victims, who see nothing more in the smile than the hope of their present safety. And up till now, there is no sign of a ‘Jack-the-Giant-Killer’ in the legion of critics.

To add to the volume of criticism of this economic system seems gratuitous. Yet there does appear to the writer some good reason for hoping that its gigantic monstrosity is not so strong as it looks, and indeed even to-day a weakness, latent but radical, in its system, is being slowly exposed.
A Hymn of St. Thomas Aquinas
Authors: Phillimore John Swinnerton
Published: July 2007

Several hands have attempted versions of Adoro te; it would be impertinent to add another attempt without a word of prefatory justification. My object has been to supply what doubtless others also have desiderated, such an English rendering of these twenty-eight lines as will sing naturally to the plain chant melody in the Vatican edition.

St. Thomas’s hymns to some appear doggerels. And certainly they are severely stript of all adventitious ornament or poeticism. But there is one merit that cannot be denied to them by the most envious critic : an immense significance. They are so crowded with meaning that each may be called a little Summa of Eucharistic theology, with a variation from the festal didactics of Lauda Sion—appropriate to an Office—to the devout personal effusion of Adoro te. Eucharistic theology reduced within the strict dimensions of verse, and, more particularly, of ‘singing-verse.’ The verse form serves both for economy of bulk in expression and for a mnemonic device. The virtue of good doggerels is that they are not easily forgotten, and I cannot believe that St. Thomas was not deliberately making a mnemonic compendium of the simplest statement of Catholic doctrine about Transubstantiation. Perhaps he was at the same time executing a lyrical impulse to give to this truth the most chastened and disciplined form of verbal beauty. Lyrics or doggerels, it beats me to decide which they are.

Anyhow, the peculiar quality of this hymn makes a peculiar problem for the translator—and all translators of Latin hymns travel a road that is milestoned with the skeletons of predecessors who have failed horribly—for two reasons.
Art and Love
Authors: Gill Eric
Published: July 2007

I.

According to the teaching of the Catholic Church, and this teaching is necessarily true, for the Catholic Church teaches with the authority of God Himself, the reason of man’s existence is that he may know, serve and love God. Every activity of man must be directed to those ends, otherwise man is false to himself, for he is acting against his nature, and false to God, for he is acting against his Maker.

For such a creature as man, then, the work he does is not primarily that he may earn the food he eats, the shelter he needs and the food and shelter for the children he begets. Food and shelter are not the ends for which man works. On the contrary, man’s work is the end to which food and shelter are the means. We say that man’s work is the end. That is to say, it is the immediate or proximate end. The ultimate end, the final end is God. All food and shelter are things to help man in his work; all work is to help man to his God.

Now under the stress of an irreligious and therefore an ill-organised society, these things are forgotten or denied; God Himself is forgotten or denied, and men think of themselves as working merely in order to live. Food and shelter are proclaimed to be the ends for which men work and, being reduced to the level of a means to merely earthly existence, work is degraded and derided. This is indeed the curse of Adam; for Adam sinned when he ceased to contemplate his God.
The ‘Materialism’ of the Labour Movement
Authors: James Stanley B.
Published: July 2007

The attack made on the Church to-day is, not merely different from, but, the exact opposite of, that made in the sixteenth century. What was then an offence is now a recommendation; what was then a mitigating circumstance is now a stumbling block. At the time of the ‘Reformation’ the accusation was one of superstition and materialism, though the latter word was not used. Our opponents posed as more spiritual in their conception of worship. Speech took the place of corporeal action. The pulpit replaced the altar and the preacher ousted the priest. The sacramental idea was almost completely lost.

It is startling to turn from these criticisms to the censure of Catholicism, and, indeed, of all forms of religion, current at the present time. Other-worldliness is the favourite charge. We are said to divert the attention of the democracy from those material interests in the understanding of which lies its hope of salvation, and to fix it on an unreal heaven and hell. Dogmas are derided because they lead to what are regarded as unprofitable discussions concerning abstruse matters remote from everyday needs. It is we now who are too ‘spiritual.’

This wave of materialistic thought finds the old-fashioned types of Protestantism entirely unprepared. The preacher addresses himself to empty pews. The exhortation to face the possibilities of the Future Life falls on deaf ears. Even the moral idealism that is adopted as a substitute for doctrinal truth fares no better; it is stigmatised as bourgeois ideology.
God-Made and Machine-Made
Authors: Gray John
Published: July 2007

It is not superfluous to praise the divine gifts much and often. Certain weapons, the sledge and its derivatives, among which the wheel with its derivatives, are given man together with his environment, a true revelation by the Beneficent. At a chosen moment, as a civilization unfolds, man is allowed to economize his powers, to increase and multiply those things which, rightly used, lead him through rational to the uncreated Beauty. The moment is that of mechanical invention.

This new thing—I call it new with necessary reservations—is so familiar that only the observant detect it. To the many, turning on the tap or the electric light, travelling by the railway, are underivedly natural processes; the postage stamp hardly differs from a leaf.

Yet, blind and deaf men, think of a bridge, a beautiful concrete bridge, and the white ribbon crossing it in long and splendid curves, marvellously engineered; and the exquisite vehicles speeding upon it, so fair and swift, so strong in their sweetness, that they have to brake down at villages. 10 MPH brings tears to the eyes. What seems to be a word ‘yomph’ means ten miles an hour. There is exultation in the word if it is remembered what blows rained on the buttocks of the war prisoner marching to Shusan the Palace before the driver got two miles an hour out of him. You read at the foot of hills : ‘Loosen the hame rein,’ ‘Give him his head.’ I have never read, ‘For God’s sake carry her bundle or her baby.’
The Church During the Renaissance
Authors: Leibell J. F.
Published: July 2007

The epoch known as the Renaissance is the most complex in all history. Various forces were at work moulding the national, economic, intellectual and moral life of the people. Religion was not the least important of these factors. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the Church was the sole means of civilization for the nations. From the time of Charles the Great, Church and State had worked hand in hand, with but little friction. Under the sway of Gregory VII and Innocent III, the temporal power of the papacy was secured. Philip the Fair and the exile in Avignon weakened papal rule. Pope after pope tried to protect and increase the so-called Donation of Constantine and the estates of Matilda of Tuscany which formed the bulk of the Patrimony of St. Peter.

During the fifteenth century there was a change among the people in their attitude toward the Church. The economic growth of cities, the increase of commerce resulting from inventions and discoveries, the strengthening of central governments and the rise of national kingships, lessened subserviency to papal authority. But above all, the intellectual Renaissance developed an independence of thought which in many cases led to a change of dogma.

The continent was dotted with universities which had grown up under papal patronage and enjoyed exceptional privileges. This was particularly true of the University of Paris. Within the walls of these seats of learning, Aristotle was honoured and St. Thomas Aquinas taught. Scholastic deductions had much to do with the intellectual activity of Copernicus and Columbus.
The Rejected Virgin
Authors: Vincent William
Published: July 2007

It was finished. As far as his narrow workshop would allow, the artist stepped back, brush still in hand, to look at his work.

It was full sunset, and the crimson rays stole through the open window, filling the untidy room with a warm glow. Opposite the window the brilliantly-coloured, sharp-cut statue stood out in bold relief against the glowing light. The artist gazed at it with critical pride. It was his great work, the tour de force of his many struggling years. Not that he wanted public recognition for his masterpiece; but he was glad that in his own eyes he had justified himself as a cutter of wood and stone. These things, dead to most men, he had learnt to touch with reverence and treat with patience. They had their moods almost like human beings; moods that commanded respect and consideration. Undue liberties were not to be taken with them. Humility had gradually taught him how to approach them, and in return they had yielded obediently to his touch.

When the commission had come to him from St. Faith’s to carve a statue in wood of the seated Madonna and Child, he knew this was to be the supreme test of his art. He thanked God for the privilege of such a holy subject, and chose the piece of birchwood with loving care. His thoughts turned to the Mother and Son. She was to be a Queen on her throne, with the Little King standing on her knees.
Stazned Glass
Authors: Williams M. Meredith
Published: July 2007

The little church of St. Peter the Apostle at Edinburgh, which has been so richly blessed in many ways, has lately been adorned with two windows, the work of Morris and Gertrude Alice Meredith Williams. These windows dazzle not only the eye, but the understanding; for it is difficult to believe what is here so evident, that modern artists have vindicated skill and courage even in competition with the great glass which is among the highest achievements of man. Mr. Meredith Williams has been good enough to put his signature to some remarks on the early glass which he and his gifted wife have specially and deeply studied, and the hopes there are of emulating what has been done in the past.

The windows are small, namely, seven feet or so in height. They are situated in the Chapel of the Madonna and back the north. The chapel has the choir chamber above it, and is separated from the church by an arcade of two arches opposite the windows. If this description is clear, it is evident that the jewel lights have an unparalleled position; and that ‘the eyes of a panther in the dark’ are severely outclassed by them.

The subject of the work is loaded as full as it can carry. The borders contain a multitude of emblematical matters; angels, the summit of creation next to the Immaculate Herself, are justly in much evidence; that Jerusalem which is above, and is our mother, appears as a Gothic town in the upper parts; instruments of the sacred Passion are figured,
Produce, Prospects and Prosperity
Authors: Cooper Gordon
Published: July 2007

Although, in the distribution of mandated territory, considerable ingenuity was utilised in reconciling vested and imperial interests, the general public were not particularly interested in the matter, and in consequence very little publicity was given to the question. This is to be regretted, in that, in the opinion of the writer, that question more vitally affects every inhabitant of the British Isles than any scheme of Reparations, any theory of Balance of Power, or any dream of a League of Nations. If this opinion, and the grounds upon which it is based, can be sufficiently advertised, there will be possibly more attention paid to what is one of the greatest practical problems of the peace than has hitherto been the case, and more sympathy displayed in the struggles of those who, in bad climates at times, and under bad conditions always, are endeavouring to retain in a healthy condition those industries that will in the future become more or less the life-blood of the Empire.

As the standard of living improves in temperate climates, the cost of production of raw materials in those regions increases almost proportionally, retarded only by the small economies that machinery, improved methods and co-operation in the provision of power can effect. The use of substitutes from the tropics is therefore essential, if the standard of living is not to retrogress under economic pressure. Imperially speaking, then, the conservation and development of our tropical assets is a paramount duty. Whether that duty has not been seriously neglected in the past may be an open question, but that it is entirely overlooked at the present moment—Exhibition or no Exhibition —is a tragically patent fact.