bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Hydrogen Bomb: A Scientist's Description
Authors: Hodgson P. E.
Published: July 2007

There are basically two types of process leading to the large-scale liberation of the energy locked in the nucleus of the atom: fission and fusion or, more simply, breaking up large nuclei and sticking together small ones. In the fission process, a nucleus of uranium or plutonium breaks up into two approximately equal parts, with emission of energy. A few neutrons are also emitted, and these can cause more fissions in the surrounding material, thus maintaining the reaction. Energy is also released if two nuclei of very light elements like hydrogen or helium coalesce; this is called fusion. This process will only take place if the combining nuclei have sufficient energy to overcome the powerful electrical repulsion tending to keep them apart, and this means that the hydrogen has to be at a very high temperature before the reaction will begin. The required temperature is many hundred of times greater than the highest attainable by purely chemical means but it can be produced by a nuclear fission reaction. A fission bomb is therefore used to detonate a surrounding mass of hydrogen. The resulting thermonuclear reaction, as it is called, is self-propagating until the reacting mass is blown apart by the force of the explosion.

It is usual to express the power of a nuclear bomb in terms of the weight of T.N.T. that releases the same amount of energy. The fission bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were equivalent to about 20,000 tons of T.N.T. and since then fission bombs of up to about twenty-five times this power have been developed, together with a wide range of smaller weapons for tactical use.
Wales Since The War
Authors: Wynne R. O. F.
Published: July 2007

Of all the developments that have taken place in Wales since the end of the war, perhaps those most vital to the life of the nation are the efforts now being made to preserve and extend the use of the Welsh language. Until recent years it was taken for granted that the language was such an integral part of the average Welshman’s being as never to be in serious danger, and this in spite of the early defection of whole counties like Radnor and Monmouth and of parts of several others. Now, however, with the immigration which started with the war we find people of English and other nationalities settled not only in the towns and villages but even in farms and homesteads in the remotest parts of the country. In my own village, for example, fifty per cent of the children attending the village school are of English parentage and many of the farms in the valley have been bought by English people. In former days such immigrants were rapidly absorbed into the native population and soon became Welsh both in speech and outlook. Occasionally that still happens, but the trickle of immigration has become a flood and the process of absorption is in danger of being put into reverse. Added to this, there is the influence of television, the wireless, English newspapers and magazines and, by no means least, the increase of rapid transport to cities and resorts, most of which have long been anglicized.
Rosmini and Pius IX, 1848–49
Authors: Foster Kenelm
Published: July 2007

Antonio Rosmini, who died a hundred years ago, has a distinguished but rather singular place in Catholic history. Revered by many as a saint in all but name, founder of the Institute of Charity, a priest corde et animo, he was also, in the judgment of the relatively few who have studied his writings, a very great Christian intellect; while for students of Italian history he has an honourable if somewhat isolated place in the complex national revival known as the Risorgimento. Evidently a many-sided person and yet, just because of this, not one to be easily identified with any particular group or trend in Church or State. And this isolation, so to call it, is reflected in the fortunes of those voluminous philosophical writings which Rosmini himself considered his main life-work, along with the founding of the Institute. Among Catholics they are still shadowed, though less than formerly, by a suspicion of unorthodoxy; while anti-clericalism has hindered, until recently, their influence with lay academic circles especially in Italy. Moreover Rosmim’s literary style, though clear and dignified, entirely lacks the ease and grace and sting which so helped Croce, for example, to win the attention of his countrymen and hold it for nearly half a century. However there are now signs of a change; and in post-war Italy Rosmini’s influence is probably stronger, if still less widely diffused, than Croce’s.
Art and the Imagination
Authors: Sarmiento Edward
Published: July 2007

The pleasures of literature may be classified as arising either from form or from content or else—and it is a classification which cuts across the first scheme—from the intellectual or architectonic element on the one hand, or the sensuous or harmonious on the other. By the pleasures of form one means the qualities of structure in novel or play, the satisfaction of speech sound in poetry produced by all the devices of the art— examples, widely different, are Spenser or Fray Luis de Leon, Swinburne or Jose Asuncion Silva, and T. S. Eliot or Luis Cernuda. By the pleasures of content one means either the incident-interest, the captivation of the attention that makes it impossible to ignore the command: ‘Now read on’, or the philosophical content, by which is meant the extent—if any—to which an author’s content and form contain any understanding of experience, any interpretation: here the pleasure that is exclusively literary is derived from the skill with which the interpretative element is presented or conveyed. The pleasure of rightness of interpretation is, of course, of a non-literary order. But the architectonic pleasure may arise from the form and the content taken together: it is the pleasure that is given by a wide sweep of subject matched by form on a grand scale. The Divina Commedia, the Faery Queen, Shakespeare’s tragedies—all procure us an aesthetic pleasure drawn from a power within the artist’s mind which sees and conveys an apprehension of life on a grand scale, and is not dependent on either subject-matter or form taken by themselves.
The Equatorium of the Planets
Authors: Colledge Eric
Published: July 2007

The lost literature of medieval England, as Mr R. M. Wilson and R. W. Chambers before him have shown us, would probably occupy as much space in our libraries as what has survived. The earliest records tell of such losses as that of the Ingeld-lay which Alcuin reproaches the monks of Lindisfarne with being so fond of; and to the end of the Middle Ages we can compile for each century a formidable list of works which have vanished, some through the indiscriminate ravages of time, others, we need not doubt, victims to pious zeal (it was Fumivall who at a meeting of the Early English Text Society complained of a lack of Lives of the Sinners). But yet from time to time sunken treasure Is washed up, to be chanced upon and dragged away in triumph by some more fortunate beachcomber, whilst the rest of us stare after him in envy. This present century is hardly likely to see another so sensational discovery as when in 1934 the lost ‘Book of Margery Kempe’ appeared in the Victoria and Albert Museum to have its contemporary binding repaired, and proved to be not at all the improving but genteel vade mecum suggested by the extracts by Wynkyn de Worde and Pepwell, but rather the spiritual autobiography of one of the crackedest pots in all the annals of religious enthusiasm. Twenty-one years have not been long enough for medievalists to recover from this discovery; and now Dr Price comes along with what may be a new work by Chaucer, The Equatorie of the Planetis, which caught his eye in MS. Peterhouse College, Cambridge, 75.1.
The Arrival of the Resident Diplomat
Authors: Hale John
Published: July 2007

So much of what was once held to have been ‘re-born’ about the year 1450 has since been shown to have been lustily alive in earlier generations that as a result historians are reluctant to attribute any notable changes at all to the period of the Renaissance. It is useful to be reminded by Professor Mattingly of an institution—permanent diplomatic representation—that began and rose to something like its full height between the years 1450 and 1550.

This book is not only about a formative period in the history of diplomacy, but provides a valuable contribution to one of the most fruitful of recent approaches to the past—the study of international relations. The purpose of this study is threefold; to question the motives which led countries to be concerned with one another, to describe the means they employed to get in touch and to negotiate, and lastly to suggest the background of shared ideas against which negotiations .proceeded: ideas derived from the practice of chivalry, which had provided something like an universal gentleman’s code of what might and what might not be done in time of war, the study of civil law, and the continuing pressure of Christian morality formalized in the canons of the Church—three elements which did much to compensate for the lack of formal International Law.
Catechism for Adults: IX. ‘And in the Holy Ghost’
Authors: Hislop Ian
Published: July 2007

At a first reading the articles that come at the end of the Creed seem to be just isolated statements. In fact it is not difficult to discover a unifying principle. The final section of the Creed begins with the words, ‘I believe in the Holy Ghost’. This is the clue, because all the other articles express our belief in the fruits of the creative activity of the Holy Spirit. ‘The Catholic Church’ is the new community, which has corporate life in the Spirit: ‘remission of sins’ is effected through the Spirit; ‘the resurrection of the body’ is the crown, the final achievement of the working of the Spirit.

The first Christians were well aware of this and in consequence laid great emphasis on the relation between the Spirit and the Church, for they recognized that it is through the fruits of the Spirit that the Spirit itself is discerned.

St Gregory Nazianzen wrote, ‘The New Testament revealed the Son and implied the divinity of the Spirit. Today the Spirit dwells among us and makes himself more clearly known.’ It is by living in the Christian community that a man is brought to a closer knowledge of the Holy Spirit. ‘Dost thou believe in the Holy Spirit?’ ran the old baptismal question. It is in the Church, the creation of the Holy Spirit, that the Spirit is discovered.
The Authority of Doctrinal Development
Authors: St John Henry
Published: July 2007

The first part of this article, in the October Blackfriars, was designed to show that, in the Catholic view, Scripture is constitutive of the content of revelation; it embodies the Word of God in inspired writing, while Tradition is regulative of that content; for it interprets the sense of Scripture, and defines that sense by Apostolic authority to be what God’s word to men is and means. This authority, which is exercised both in the Church’s ordinary and in its supreme magisterium, is not the sole regulative element in Tradition, though it is the finally decisive one. The true direction of the developing mind of the Church is continuously maintained, though in a relative and less final sense, by a twofold operation, the lex orandi and the work of the schola theologorum. The former (through liturgy and devotion) draws out the implications of dogma in terms of living, and thus clarifies to the worshipper the full meaning and inter-connection of the truths of Faith. The latter, by the science of theology, brings rational analysis to the elucidation of revealed truth, making use of the researches of various branches of scholarship; philosophical, exegetical, historical and scientific. The function of sound learning therefore is to provide the checks by which human reason, under the guidance of Tradition, assesses new developments in the light of their coherence with the constant teaching of the Church and their consonance with the biblical data, in which the substance of the depositum fidei is embodied.
The Euthanasia of Anglo‐Jewry
Authors: Fogarty Michael P.
Published: July 2007

Happy is the minority that has no history. The Jews of Britain, Dr Neustatter shows in this book, are impossible to count with any accuracy. They carry no identity cards, fill no special column of the census, have no special status defined by law. Once, at the beginning of their community in the seventeenth century, they would have wished for such a status. Luckily for themselves, they were never given it. They have had to contend, says Dr Parkes, with conservatism rather than official hostility or formal anti-semitism. They have increased, flourished, and absorbed what has sometimes been a trickle and sometimes a flood of new immigrants. There were 350 Jews in Britain in 1690, 35,000 in 1850, 350,000 in the late ‘thirties, 450,000 in 1950. One European Jew in 27 was British in the ‘thirties, one in six, after the Hitlerite massacres, in 1951.

Naturally, there have been times of difficulty. The great flight from Russia from the 1880’s to the first World War, which filled up trades like tailoring and the classic Jewish quarters of the East End, threatened to associate Jewry in the public mind with sweating, overcrowding, and undesirable aliens. But the crisis was handled skilfully and passed, thanks partly to the good sense and qualities of the immigrants themselves and partly to the cohesion, good management, and readiness to pay of the Jewish community previously established. The Jewish immigration as a whole has brought great economic benefits to Britain. Perhaps I see these through too rosy spectacles, for who is a Montague Burton Professor to bite the Chair he sits on? But look at commerce alone, think of a few of the Jewish names which have become household words, and it is obvious what the gain has been. Montague Burton is one: Marks and Spencer another: Lyons a third. These are the giants.
Catechism For Adults: X. ‘The Holy Catholic Church’
Authors: Hislop Ian
Published: July 2007

In Christ all things are reconciled to the Father for he makes peace ‘through the blood of his cross, both as to the things that are on earth and the things that are in heaven’ (Col. I, 20). As the second Adam he brings to mankind the forgiveness of God. The work of redemption is accomplished in that the redemptive deed has taken place. In order that the deed may be brought to bear on human beings who live a time-conditioned existence the saving rule of God, established in Christ, is given a temporal character. So that human souls may become ‘holy’ Christ is constituted as the ‘head of the body the church’, for God ‘hath subjected all things under his feet and hath made him head over all the church, which is his body, and the fulness of him who is filled all in all’ (Ephesians I, 22-23). Christ is thus present to men in and by the Church.

The Church is the assembly of those, who believing by faith in Christ, live under the rule of Christ. Christ is ‘in’ the Church in that the Church teaches in obedience to his command. Christ, the head of the body, rules as King and the directive work of the Church, her leadership of man towards God, is a sharing, in the Spirit, of Christ’s supreme governance. Her voice as she represents in each age the teaching of Christ, is the voice of Christ speaking to man. The Church does not only bring teaching and direction, she also brings life to the soul.
The Problem of Communication
Authors: Haynes Renèe
Published: July 2007

The terms in which this essay is written, and the examples used to illustrate various points, are for the most part not specifically Catholic. One reason for this is a desire to present the problem in the idiom of the world with which Catholics want, or should want, to communicate, since they exist partly for its sake.

It looks as though the most primitive forms of communication were non-conscious and non-voluntary. Investigators working on animal communications as they are found in such creatures as sticklebacks, and even in more highly developed beasts like ducks, believe the evidence warrants their assuming that both stimulus and response as shown, for instance in patterns of aggression or mating behaviour, are almost automatic. Investigators conditioned by methods of modem scientific research are of course prone to believe in automatism, since it is a concept which makes their task of abstraction and generalization very much easier than would ideas of spontaneity and of feeling: and the outside observer may conclude that they are tempted to minimize the influence of factors they cannot measure and even sometimes to deny that they exist. It is incidentally fascinating to notice how, when they extend to human behaviour the methods and presuppositions of their earlier work, they seem to rationalize the belief that when man fell he fell away from the glorious liberty of the children of God into an animal automatism; an automatism which, since he is not wholly an animal, set him under the domination of the idea of mechanism and of the machines his brain created, from prayer-wheels to electronic brains and a concept of the State based on the image of a robot Leviathan.
The Authority of Doctrinal Development
Authors: St John Henry
Published: July 2007

In this final article we shall examine and contrast the verdict of two traditions upon one of the most far-reaching and divisive of all doctrinal developments, the cultus of our Lady and the Saints; the tradition of historic Christendom in East and West, and the tradition of the Churches of the Reformation. The development of Mariology, which is of course a part of Christology, from the virginal conception and the divine Motherhood, clearly grounded in the New Testament, to our Lady’s perpetual virginity, her Immaculate Conception and her corporal Assumption, together with the universal mediation of her merits and intercession, is viewed by the Catholic and Orthodox Churches upon precisely similar principles; the later developments being regarded as implicit in New Testament doctrine. It is true of course that since the definition of the Immaculate Conception was promulgated by Pius IX, Orthodox theologians have unanimously denied what they formerly treated as an open question. Dr E. L. Mascall has remarked on the suspicion of the West that the real objection is not so much to the dogma itself as to the mode of its promulgation. He goes on to suggest the need for a deeper investigation by the Orthodox of the nature and transmission of original sin, with a view to clearing away misunderstandings concerning its bearing upon the doctrine as defined.

This universal tradition of the cultus of our Lady, a wholly developed doctrine, found in the Scriptures in seminal form only, was rejected at die Reformation in deference to the insights of the Reformers, who claimed not only to set right abuses, but, on the strength of those insights, and in opposition to the authority of the Church’s Tradition, to decide what were abuses, and what were not.
The Latest in Catechisms
Authors: Drinkwater F. H.
Published: July 2007

Few intellectual groups within the Church have deserved more gratitude from their fellow-Catholics than the Catechetical Society of Munich. It came into existence towards the end of the nineteenth century; a few kindred spirits among the clergy—Stieglitz, Weber, and others—gathered themselves round a periodical, Katechische Blätter, still happily flourishing, and from 1898 onwards had the conscious aim of improving the prevailing ways of teaching religion to the young. They were well aware of the educational psychology of those days, Herbart and suchlike, and they soon evolved the needed applications of it to the teaching of religion. Their Munich method, as it was called, made a point of properly organized lesson-units, instead of just ploughing steadily through a book of questions and answers. They may have seemed a shade pedantic perhaps in their insistence on the regular elements of each lesson—aim, presentation, explanation, questioning, application, expression-work and so forth. But the distinctive feature of Munich was to start from something concrete, some narrative or at least some picture, but preferably from some Scriptural story, and work up from that to the explanation of the doctrine concerned and if necessary to the relevant catechism- answer. Other methods had used Scripture for ‘examples’; Munich started from Scripture. As time went on, and the liturgical movement made itself felt especially in Germany, together with a deepening theology, the Munich catechists welcomed the new insights and incorporated them into their plans and material. Gradually the present generation of pioneers, in Germany and elsewhere, has come to see that catechetical renewal is not merely a matter of methods, of introducing a few more pictures or stories or activities, but involves reconsidering the content of the instruction itself.
Religious Translation
Authors: Hill Edmund
Published: July 2007

In his collection of articles ‘on Englishing the Bible’ Mgr Knox has discussed the literary problems of translation with great thoroughness, shrewdness, and wit. But the translation of religious texts poses what might almost be called a special theological problem that he has not, I think, really considered. It is true he has devoted a whole article to the discussion of the theological contents of the words justice and scandal in the New Testament; and he remarks on the difficulty of dealing with words like grace and faith, which subsequent theological history has given a precision they lack in the Scriptures. But it is just here that he fails to locate the translator’s theological problem in quite the right place. He is concerned with investigating the precise meaning of the word just ice or grace in any given text, and then finding the best way of expressing it in English. That is the literary preoccupation of any translator of any work, sacred or profane. The peculiarity of words in religious contexts is that in the very originals they are translations, of divine realities into human terms. Revelation itself is a work of translation, culminating in the translation of the eternal Word into time-bound flesh.

MGR Knox considers all the various meanings that the word tsadiq-dikaios-justus has in the Bible, and concludes quite rightly that no one English word, be it just or righteous, really covers them. But if it comes to that, did the word tsadiq really cover them? The point is that the word’s various theological meanings are constructions by analogy on its social human meanings, and it is important that the analogy should not be lost in translation.
From Slum Dwellings to Council Housing Estates
Authors: Waters Bridget Mary
Published: July 2007

Poverty and unemployment, slums and dirt were the conditions best known to those who worked amongst the under-privileged in 1925. In London and all the big cities families lived in houses that were dismal and insanitary, houses where a bathroom was an undreamed of luxury, where, as likely as not, hot water was to be obtained only from a kettle on an open fire. Walls were damp and crumbling and many women waged perpetual warfare against the ‘steam tugs’, as the Londoners called the bugs which tainted the air with their sickly smell. Families who had a four-roomed house to themselves were fortunate, for many were housed in large tenement buildings where lavatory accommodation was shared between several families and every drop of water used by the top floor tenants must be carried from upstairs a tap in the yard. In such buildings it was not unusual for babies to be bitten by rats or mice and for girls who were working in the exclusive shops of the town to be forced to keep their clothes in large paper bags that could not be invaded by the bugs at night. A bed to oneself was unheard of privacy in these overcrowded homes; there were few facilities for personal cleanliness and the family washing was done at the public washhouse. Cooking facilities were little better, and as there was no space for the storage of provisions food had to be bought in small quantities from day to day. Many spoke scornfully of the thriftlessness of the poor who had no knowledge of the conditions which forced them to live in such a hand-to-mouth fashion.
Architecture and Natural Harmony
Authors: Foster Kenelm
Published: July 2007

In any period men’s thoughts about the past tend to harden and simplify into conventional praise or disparagement. This in turn, as fashion and then prejudice, affects the present and the future; until a new generation finds it an intolerable cliche. It is then criticized and perhaps discarded. Modem scholars cannot stomach the old cliches about the Renaissance. To go further back, Voltaire’s generation sneered at Dante, whom it did not read, and thought Gothic a style for barbarians; and both these views, with their implications, had become conventional, not to say stale, by the mid-eighteenth century. When, with the new century, the tide turned, the motive was largely religious; a revival of Christian piety, a new interest in theology. But the new outlook could be equally one-sided. Pugin thought Gothic the only Christian style in building and Ruskin thundered against the neo-classical style of the Renaissance—‘pagan in its origin, proud and unholy in its revival, paralysed in its old age . . . an architecture invented, as it seems, to make plagiarists of its architects, slaves of its workmen, and sybarites of its inhabitants’. And from this attitude, become in turn a convention as stale as neo-classicism, we inherit (do we not?) much highly unpractical ugliness. Nor is the association of prayer with pointed arches quite dead yet.

The present century’s slow movement away from Gothic in ecclesiastical architecture has not however implied any loss of interest in the Middle Ages on the part of scholars or indeed of the educated public in general. Far from it. Never have the philosophy, art and literature of the Middle Ages been so thoroughly studied or keenly appreciated as in recent years.
Wales: The Land of the Strangers
Authors: Ballard‐Thomas David
Published: July 2007

The Welshman’s premium as a music-hall joke is at a low ebb. Instead he is becoming a curio, an oddity to be discovered on a walking holiday in the Welsh mountains or during a stay at one of the remoter resorts. Strange things emanate from the land of Wales—the hidden meanings of a Dylan Thomas, the mystic spirit which captures the soul of a David Jones even before he sets foot in the country, the suspect magic in the oratory of a Lloyd George, the religious fervour of a rugger crowd swaying on the touch-line. For those who have the courage to penetrate there might be a glimpse of a woman in a tall Welsh hat (specially provided by the Tourist Board), the music of miners going to their work, the lilt of a language as old as Taliesin and as dark as Eryri. There is a growing feeling that there are strangers in our midst—their very name of Welsh means that.

The attitude of the outsider is normally one of two extremes— it is either an unstinted adulation based on an acquaintance with the great names of Wales or else one of a slightly contemptuous indifference based on a few unpleasant encounters with Welshmen and an impatience with a nation which has no right to survive beyond a quaint desire to preserve an archaic language and a tradition which, rich and picturesque though it might have been, is now only of use to the antiquarian.

The right of a nation to have its tradition and its culture recognized is a fundamental Christian value. Belief in the Incarnation does more than breed a respect for the sacf edness of the individual, for the individual implies the context into which he is inserted, the society in which he lives. Salvation is worked out here and now. It is dishonest to want to be someone else—and being ‘me’ means being me as member of this nation with its tradition and temperament, its culture and character.
The Life of Faith
Authors: Andrew Beck George
Published: July 2007

To any believer in God it may be taken as a truism that all existing things are as he, the Creator, made them. There is a permanent and vital link between all created beings and the divine intelligence and will—which is only another way of saying that God is the first and universal cause. Nothing which exists escapes the divine causality. As the philosophers know, first among the causes is the final cause; the end hi view decides the course of action. God in creating had an end or purpose. Every creature exists for a purpose and this purpose is achieved by the attainment of its end, by the realization in each individual of his own nature.

This is true in a special way with regard to human nature. The end for which human nature exists is the knowledge and the love of God. Hence there is an ordering of human beings to God as to their final end. St Thomas speaks of this as a contemplation of divine things: ‘aliqua contemplatio divinorum’, and sees it as the natural perfection of human intelligence.

I

Were mankind committed to this order, the order of human nature and the natural knowledge of God, there would be no question of the life of faith. But man has been translated from die order of his own nature to a new order by which he is made, in St Peter’s words, a sharer in the divine nature. He is lifted into a new order of being which is so much above his own nature that it is a super-nature, and the order in which this activity takes place is known to us as the super-natural order.

This is the order of grace in which we are favoured by God— by which we are in a state of grace.
Reflections on the Medieval Church
Authors: Foster Kenelm
Published: July 2007

To the eye of faith, and so of theology, there is no authentic Christianity apart from the Catholic Church, and the Church has an inward pattern or design centred on Christ. I say ‘inward’ to imply that this pattern is not visible to the historian as such. History can only show the development of the Church as an institution making certain claims: to interpret these historical data in terms of that pattern is the work of theology.

The pattern might be represented by two lines drawn from a central point. The point is Christ, both Saviour and Word; the lines are a line of ‘grace’ passing through sacraments to the souls of men, and a line of truth passing through faith and teaching to their minds. Grace and truth combine in Christ, and of this fulness we have all received; but grace in one way and truth in another. Life and light, identical in Christ, reach us through distinct media within the one Church: grace through the sacraments, and supremely in the Eucharist; truth through faith and the Church’s articulation of the faith and in the rules wherewith she applies it to the details of conduct. In both communications the Church, we believe, is necessary. But the manner of her mediation differs in each case.

Where sanctifying grace is concerned the Church is purely God’s instrument, in the most limited sense of the term. Her task here is simply to effect the sacred sign, to consecrate, for example, the host and administer it; the rest—granted the recipient’s response—is all God’s work. The Church here is a mere vehicle of a divine action; and this in virtue of the power conferred on every priest at ordination. And so limited is the human share in this sanctification through the sacraments that the priest’s personal moral quality makes no difference at all to the degree of grace transmitted.
The Religious Orders in England and Wales
Authors: Evans Illtud
Published: July 2007

All religious orders, however much they may vary in their origins or in the work they do, are based on a single— indeed a simple—idea: namely the search for Christian perfection. To begin with, this meant an individual’s going apart, often into the desert or a cave, where he might devote himself wholly to prayer and contemplation. The very word ‘monk’ means a solitary. But in the fourth century in Egypt the monks began to organize themselves in communities: the movement spread, and gradually a rule of life developed by which the communities were bound. The most important of them was that of St Benedict, bom in 480 in Italy, and the Benedictine rule became the dominant force in the growth of monastic life in the West.

The Rule of St Benedict, which is still followed today by the thousands of monks and nuns who bear his name throughout the world, is a sane and moderate document which provides a charter for a life to be lived in common. Its motto is ‘Pax’, the peace that comes to those who follow Christ. For it is, in St Benedict’s words, ‘a school of the Lord’s service’, in which the monk is to leam to prefer the common good to his own interests, and that common good is seen in the faithful following of Christ. The Abbot is Christ to his community, and the monk’s principal work is the Opus Dei: the work of celebrating the solemn liturgy, the praise and glory which it is man’s chief privilege to offer to God. Manual work is to be the monk’s other occupation, and the ordinary business of tilling the fields and running a house is seen to be itself a means of serving God in silence and simplicity. Labour itself is made into something holy.
Monopoly and the Just Price
Authors: Jackson J. M.
Published: July 2007

When Parliament passed the Monopolies and Restrictive Practices Act in 1948, it acted on the belief that monopolies were capable of harming the public interest, although they did not necessarily do so. It provided for the establishment of a Commission which would, at the request of the Board of Trade, investigate the behaviour of particular monopolies, and would report whether or not these monopolies were behaving in an anti-social manner. If they were acting contrary to the public interest the Government might make an Order requiring the monopoly to amend its behaviour, although in the majority of cases it has, in fact, chosen to rely upon reaching an informal agreement with the monopoly. The Monopolies Commission has completed eleven such investigations, and the Government has already acted upon most of the Commission’s reports. About the middle of 1955 the Commission completed its first report on a ‘general reference’. In the case of such a reference the Commission was required to consider the general effect, over the whole of industry, of specified restrictive practices. The Act made no provision for Government action on such a report, which would therefore have no effect unless industry voluntarily amended its practices in the light of the Commission’s judgments, or unless the Government made the report the basis of new legislation. The Government has now introduced a Bill to deal with the practices covered in this report.
Complicating Simple Things
Authors: Graef H. C.
Published: July 2007

There is a sarcastic German saying of which I am often reminded when reading certain German books: ‘Why do it simply, if it is also possible to make it complicated?’ Dr Urs von Balthasar, the distinguished thinker, who has unfortunately already complicated the simplest of saints, St Teresa of Lisieux, now does the same for another modern Carmelite, Elizabeth of the Trinity; and his friend, Adrienne von Speyr, even succeeds in giving us a book of highly involved and not a little pretentious meditations on our Lady. There is no doubt that we are in need of thoroughly theological and unsentimental treatment of ‘devotional’ subjects, and both these books supply this. But they are unhappily vitiated by this deadly tendency to read non-existent profundities into the most normal events and attitudes, and to bandy about concepts of Kierkegaardian ‘dread’ and existentialist ‘vertigo’ where they have no meaning whatever.

Dr Balthasar’s book has been ‘translated and adapted’, and this means presumably that some of his more recondite observations have been cut out, which is all to the good. But unfortunately the translator, A. V. Littledale, has kept far too close to the author’s highly idiosyncratic style and frequently reproduces even his word order and his substantival adjectives and verbs, an inadmissible procedure that makes the reading of the book unnecessarily exhausting. To give but a few examples of this ‘translation-English’: ‘The man of faith lives from the standpoint of his eternal election by God.’ (p. 27). ‘Faith ... is the making present to the mind of our origin and end . . .’ (p. 28). ‘Her perception that the execution of the Father’s eternal plan is the work of the Holy Spirit, is the angle from which Elizabeth came to view the whole of revelation; her perspective directs itself primarily to the Spirit.’ (p. 107.)
Reflections on a Survey of the Catholic Population of Aberystwyth
Authors: Fogarty Michael P.
Published: July 2007

The Newman Demographic Survey in Wales started, unlike that in England, with a direct poll of the people of a Catholic parish. It had been hoped to parallel the work done in England on the records of parishes, dioceses, and certain public services. But it turned out that Catholics can be traced, when the public service records in question are kept in the form usual in South Wales, only by digging so far into the files as to violate professional secrecy. And there are many small parishes, above all in Menevia, where the danger that even the most discreet digger into ecclesiastical records may stir up gossip is greater than in,, say, Westminster. So a direct poll it had to be, and last winter a pilot poll was duly taken in the parish of Aberystwyth. Aberystwyth was chosen because it was isolated and with a small Catholic population; a manageable first sample, and with the advantage of containing a University College with an active and enthusiastic Catholic Society. The Bishop of Menevia gave his consent, and the survey was duly carried out by the Catholic students, led by Dr E. T. Nevin, Lecturer in Economics in the University, and with aid and comfort from the Very Rev. Fr Maguire, o.carm., Chaplain to the University Catholic Society. The survey forms were drafted at Cardiff in collaboration with Dr Nevin, and were duplicated at Cardiff. They were given out after Mass on Sunday, January 23rd, 1955, accompanied by a letter from Fr Maguire, at each of the Mass centres in the parish. Parishioners were asked to return them the following Sunday. In addition, other known Catholics were contacted at home. This was simple enough in Aberystwyth itself and the other small towns. In the open country, in the weather of February 1955, it was often a case of Dr Nevin leading his merry men (and girls) in a Good King Wenceslaus act up the snows of Plynlimmon. ‘You see that corner?’ said one farmer as the enumerators’ car turned for home. ‘I’ll be interested to see if you get round it.
Recent Work on Walter Hilton
Authors: Colledge Eric
Published: July 2007

We still know less about Walter Hilton than about any other of the great medieval English mystics, yet what we know is enough to show us that in his own age and during the fifteenth century he was more highly esteemed by students and practitioners of the spiritual life than perhaps any devotional writer of the times. Richard Rolle’s sensational works had earned for themselves the immense popularity which they deserved, but there were many who came to deplore this popularity, and it is evident that the influence of Hilton was regarded as both a salutary corrective to Rolle’s extremes, and as in itself beneficial. In the present century this development of later medieval thought has been again obscured, partly, though quite involuntarily, because of the new impetus to the study of Rolle given by Miss Hope Emily Allen, in her immensely scholarly if labyrinthine Writing Ascribed to Richard Rolle, and in her admirable little edition, English Writings of Richard Rolle. In this second work, published in 1931, she presented one solution to the problem which confronts everyone who wishes to edit a text which achieved a large circulation in the Middle Ages. Had she attempted a complete collation of all the surviving manuscripts (no less than ninety-three separate texts of the various English writings which she edited were known to her), she might well have been still engaged in the task. Instead, she took for each treatise or poem two or three of what she considered to be the best manuscripts; and so for the last twenty-four years we have been able to read good, early versions of Rolle’s own words largely free from the welter of footnotes with which most of those who are engaged in such scholarly pursuits still encumber their works.
The Religious Orders in England and Wales
Authors: Evans Illtud
Published: July 2007

At first sight it may seem strange to call some orders ‘active’ and others not. In one sense the contemplative orders are the most active of all: a Cistercian monk who rises at two in the morning, and spends many hours in prayer but as many in hard manual work, could scarcely be called idle. But in die technical sense those orders called ‘active’ are deliberately concerned with the works of active charity—whether spiritual (as in missionary work) or temporal (as in the care of the sick or in educating children). They, like all religious orders from the very beginning, are concerned with the following of the counsels of the Gospels in an organized life according to rule, but the monastic features of stability and a liturgical structure, as well as the characteristic organization of the frairs, are sacrificed in order that dieir particular active work can be more effectively pursued.

Strictly speaking these orders are not orders at all, since they do not take the solemn vows that are the mark of the monks and the friars. But this is a technicality of the canon law which scarcely concerns our present purpose in describing their work. For the active orders first came into being, as did the monks and the friars in their time, to meet a need of the Church and were constituted to meet that need. The Reformation was an immense challenge to the Church, and it was soon evident that new methods were needed to win back people lost to Catholic allegiance and to stimulate the spiritual life of the faithful. It was the Jesuits most of all who were to be the instrument of the reform within the Church that was to be the answer to the Reformation which had caused so great a breach in Christian unity.
Father Huddlestone and South Africa
Authors: Synott Finbar
Published: July 2007

Father Huddlestone has become a great centre of controversy, and it is most important to sort matters out carefully when considering his book. It describes his experiences, particularly in the ‘black spots’ of Johannesburg, and gives views in judgment on South Africa and race relations in South Africa.

Most of the book is in the form of incidents showing the effect of discriminating laws on the African. As regards narrative matter, it is factual; although selected, it is not exaggerated. What he says of the African’s hardships under the Pass Laws, the housing shortage and permit restrictions, the summary methods of the police and partial justice in magistrates’ courts, is all a matter of daily experience in South Africa. What he says of the tsotsis, gangsters who terrify the locations, is particularly good. In a system that stifles ambition, and provides no outlet for the animus of young men, they turn sour on society. Their crime list makes terrible reading, and seeing, if you are near it. But it is a social symptom rather than a moral matter. I have even known one who might be a sort of martyr for principle. He made one promise to his mother, never to use a knife. An argument at cards —and he was stabbed and killed outright, and curiously enough on the feast of his patron saint. Had he had a knife and practised with it he might be alive today. The descriptions of the broken careers and mental struggles of the more educated, their despair and frustration, are true. Father Huddlestone has put his finger on the chief problem for a priest: ‘God forgive me. I find myself giving advice that in those circumstances I could not follow ... it needs heroic virtue.’
Rembrandt at the British Museum
Authors: Shirley Maria
Published: July 2007

Rembrandt’s art reveals a unique reverence and appetite for life which originated in an entirely different attitude and vision from the extrovert thirst for sensual excitement animating the tavern scenes by Jan Steen and other Dutch painters. Rather he evinced an insatiable curiosity about reality, about matter informed by spirit, and if he depicted genre scenes they indicated a pervasive intangible quality beyond the facts of their immediate physical appearance. The acuteness of his observation enabled him to translate the most complicated forms and structures—struggling children, wild beasts, carriages—into drawings where their particular essentials are seized with an inimitable assurance and spontaneity: a single calligraphic curve defines the receding plane of an upturned nose, a bold prolonged oval stroke the thrust and fulness of an abdomen. Like Constable he was an intuitive rather than a scientific draughtsman: that his results are objectively convincing is a triumph of optical and manual coordination.

However, it is not mere technical virtuosity which provides the key to his perennial fascination. His oeuvre represents a continual and gradual elimination of superfluities in an unending quest for visual equivalents of the fundamental mystery which lies at the heart of all human experience. Contrary to the usual pattern of responsiveness, his sense of wonder increased with age, and compassionate wonder became the ultimate theme of his art, culminating in the painting of the ‘Prodigal Son’ with its universal and personal hope of Divine mercy.
Reinhold Schneider—A Note
Authors: Heynemann Marie
Published: July 2007

On September 23, the annual Peace Prize awarded by the German Book Trade will be presented to Reinhold Schneider at St Paul’s Church in Frankfort on the Main. This prize was founded in 1949/50, and has been given every year to an author of any nationality or religion who by his life and work has contributed to the future peace of the world. Albert Schweitzer and Martin Buber, Hermann Hesse and Carl J. Burckhardt were previous prizewinners. Anyone who knows Reinhold Schneider’s life and work would agree that he deserves the award as fully as his predecessors.

On May 13 of this year Schneider kept his fifty-third birthday; it is also the birthday of the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, one of his favourite historical characters. He was born in Baden- Baden of a Protestant father from the Erzgebirge, and of a Catholic mother from the shores of Lake Constance, he himself being baptized in the Catholic Church.

According to a short sketch in his book Erbe im Feuer (‘Heritage in the Fire’), his childhood was a happy one, although rarely can parents in the twentieth century have shown so little understanding of their son’s vocation and gifts as Reinhold Schneider’s father and mother. Schneider senior was an extremely taciturn man: father and son rarely spoke to one another. When he died rather young of an incurable disease, the author’s mother married a Catholic physician in Baden-Baden with whom Schneider’s relations, although good, have again not been based on any profound understanding on the elder man’s part.