bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Wishing Wells
Authors: Fagan John F.
Published: July 2007

Mr. Wells’s latest book, The Fate of Homo Sapiens, is a pedestrian effort, and to those who revel in his peculiar vein of imaginative prophecy it must come as a distinct anti-climax. Nevertheless, it is an important book, for it is based on the distilled essence of Mr, Wells’s thought during the whole of his career; one feels that it is the final revised edition of his opinions. Here is the bare skeleton of Wellsianism, stripped of everything that its author considered superfluous. The Fate of Homo Sapiens is probably the most topical of Mr. Wells’s books. He has ceased to look for the laws that govern the course of human history and to map prodigious cities of the future. The period of analysis is over, criteria have become fixed, and he now looks out on the world of to-day fully confident that he can both diagnose and cure.

The book is primarily an essay in sociology, an attempt by Mr. Wells to sum up the present state of man in the light of his own principles. It is as such that it must be judged. Some of the reviews in the Catholic press gave the impression that it was merely an attack on the Church; this overlooks the more positive elements of the book, which will probably come to be regarded as the official handbook of Wellsian thought.

Briefly, The Fate of Homo Sapiens is an outline of Mr. Wells’s social philosophy, together with a series of sketches showing how the modem world helps or hinders (usually hinders) the dawn of greater happiness for all.
Houses of Hospitality
Authors: Fitzsimons John
Published: July 2007

Not long ago those interested in the forward movement in Catholic social teaching and practice were interested to read From Union Square to Rome, which was Miss Dorothy Day’s account of her conversion to the Church. The story ended with her safely within the fold, and all who read the story and who knew of the work that she had undertaken; were anxious to hear more of it. The American Catholic Worker was always interesting and enlightening, and recently have been published Peter Maurin’s Easy Essays. But until now there was no full-length story of the work being done in New York nor of the dynamic spirit which keeps it going. Last month, however, the gap was admirably filled by House of Hospitality/ again by Dorothy Day; and I have no hesitation in saying that this is one of the most important books not only of this year, but since the publication of the encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891. A bold claim indeed, but one which I hope to substantiate in the course of the article.

What immediately puts this book in a class apart is that it is written by someone who has lived and is still living it. It is about the poorest of the poor, the destitute, about the workers and their struggles, not for prosperity, but for the right to be recognised as something more than chattels. It is written from the inside, not by a fur-coated investigator, not by a commission of statistically-minded civil servants, not by a bien pensant slumrner, but by a woman who is one with the poor, the destitute and the outcast.
The Example of Christ
Authors: Mathew Gervase
Published: July 2007

The knowledge that Christ was both God and man must be the central fact in the life of every Christian. Because He was a man, He has given an example for us to follow; because He was God, He has given us the strength to follow His example, and for every Christian the central lesson to be learnt from Christ is to love, to give and to endure.

Looking back over two thousand years, the details of Christ’s life on earth can seem very far away. The setting can seem so very different from anything that we have known; the barren, stony hillsides of Judea, the crowded market places, the small white flat-roofed houses, the groups of orientals moving slowly along the dusty roads. Yet so many of the details are commonplace enough. The birth in poverty, the childhood in a poor household, the years as a workman, and then apparent success, apparent failure, death. All that could have happened, all that has happened, in any country, and in any time. The setting alters, but the rhythm of human life and the problems of human choice remain the same. Everything that is fundamental, the capacity of loving, the power of giving, the will to be alive, joy and agony and death, remain unaltered since Christ lived at Nazareth. Yet if only we could see it, they are no longer the same as they were before the Word took flesh and dwelt amongst us. The life that we know, and the death that we know, confronted Christ. He was man as well as God. He lived and died.
De Regimine Principum and Its Historical Background
Authors: Gumbley Walter
Published: July 2007

This well-known treatise of St. Thomas Aquinas on the principles of good government was addressed, there seems little doubt, to Hugh II, de Lusignan, king of Cyprus, who died in 1267 at the untimely age of seventeen years. On the death of the promising youth the Saint discontinued his work, when he had reached the fourth chapter of the second book; but the task was completed, not altogether unsuccessfully, by one of his pupils, Ptolemy de Lucca, a Dominican who lived to become bishop of Torcello and died in 1327. St. Thomas included fifteen chapters in his first book, and Ptolemy added twelve more to the second, and completed the whole work by adding two more books, one of twenty-two chapters, the other of twenty-eight, so that of the whole work De Regimine Principum as it appears in the collected works of St. Thomas, Ptolemy’s share is sixty-two chapters out of a total of eighty-one.

I have no intention of giving here a resume of the book whose principles are so well known to students of St. Thomas; I merely wish to indicate the broad historical background in which it was composed.

St. Thomas, we have to remember, was an Italian, and by birth a subject of his distant kinsman, the Emperor Frederic II; being born in the kingdom of Naples, then an appanage of the Imperial a-own. Under Frederic’s harsh rule the Saint lived out his youth, but after joining the Dominicans found peace under the just and therefore tranquil government of St. Lewis IX of France.
Francois
Authors: Norman George
Published: July 2007

‘Under this simple baptismal name have appeared the documents of a short life which might have been that of a Saint or of a man of genius, perhaps both.’

It was no less caustic a critic than André Therive who made the statement and wrote six columns in Le Temps to prove it.

François really needs no such tribute; the facts are self-evident. Even our national temper which view's with shrinking, if not with actual dislike, additions to the category of precocious prodigies of sanctity, or even of genius, might be vanquished by this record—in letters and rough notes—of the boy whom Auguste Valensin presents to his contemporaries.

François, to begin with, was not a child-saint. He had the ill-health which often helps towards sanctity but so gaily and carelessly borne as scarcely to appear. Obviously he had the seeds in him of a profound spirituality, but Andre Therive only uses the word holiness—‘a little strong ’ as he thinks it—in the most tentative way.

Then François is anonymous. We know scarcely anything concrete about him beyond his name, his profile in an admirable portrait-study as a boy of about twelve, and a later one; we know that his people were rich and we may guess that his home town was Lyons. This anonymity adds to the story a quality of elusiveness, and one might almost use the debased word glamour, from the lack of those data on which normal English biography is founded.
Metaphysics Without Ontology
Authors: Kelly Bernard
Published: July 2007

The above title outlines Professor Collingwood’s project for the reinstatement of metaphysics in answer to Kant’s question, ‘How can metaphysics become scientific?’ Since metaphysics has hitherto been a mistake about metaphysics, it was time something should be done about it.

In the books called Metaphysical ( = the next after the physics = much the same kind of title as ‘Collected Works,’ vol. viii), says Professor Collingwood, Aristotle undertakes two tasks. The first is the study (First Science) of the presuppositions of the ordinary non-metaphysical sciences; the second is the construction of a science (ontology) of pure being, and therefore (natural theology) of God. As first science metaphysics is logically presupposed by all the other sciences, although from the learner’s point of view it is approached only when the other sciences have been to some degree mastered. As last science (wisdom) it will be the ultimate goal of the scientist’s pilgrimage, and the most explicit name for it will be theology.

The first chapter of Professor Collingwood’s book is a condensed paraphrase of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. The second separates the two tasks mentioned above and argues, in continuity with Berkeley, Kant, and Hegel, that a science of ‘pure being ‘is a contradiction in terms.

The grounds of this conclusion are already visible in the paraphrase of Aristotle in his first chapter (p. g). Speaking of the system of the subordination of the sciences, he says: ‘At the base of the system of universals there are universals which are infimae species, not giving rise to any further sub-species.
Contemplation and Culture
Authors: Pepler Conrad
Published: July 2007

In these last months England, individualistic, active, bustling England, has been called upon to defend for Europe, and for the world, the precious treasure of Christian Culture. That culture has, however, been handed down to us, not by an active, utilitarian philanthropy characteristic of all that is not mere self-seeking in England to-day, but by the tradition of Christian contemplation incarnate in the contemplative orders of the Church, and in particular in the Order of St. Benedict. England has become permeated with that American pragmatism which discountenances contemplation as useless, and at best she retains a certain attachment to ‘useless’ knowledge and to art only as the remnant of the pagan classical period of enlightenment that forsook Christianity and the supernatural order and adopted a purely natural type of contemplation and culture. If the British victory for which we hope and pray is, therefore, to prove itself worthy of its noble cause it would be necessary for the British citizen to return to a more integral Christian life which should include a contemplative culture that is basically supernatural.
The One‐Eyed Man
Authors: Foster Kenelm
Published: July 2007

‘Plainly I am an extreme revolutionary,’ says Mr. H. G. Wells in his recent booklet on the Rights of Man. An extreme revolutionary, I suppose, is a person who turns things, other people and himself right round; and there can be no doubt that things, other people and ourselves do sometimes need to Ire turned right round. Penance and Conversion: to change your mind and change your direction. But the context shows that Mr. Wells is talking politics: ‘I do not believe it possible to go on with the present way of living that prevails throughout the world, with the sovereign governments we have and the economic practices that prevail.’ Such governments and practices are in a sense ‘ways of living,’ and nobody should be childish enough to blame Mr. Wells for attending so busily to the organisation of the world, for being a revolutionary in this department of ethics alone. And in any case the department involves the whole. Mr. ‘Wells wants to change our minds at the root, and not merely our methods of government. This is implied by the sweeping completeness of his desire and vision of World-Reform; at least he thinks they are sweepingly complete, and that is the point here. Less egotistic than Hitler, Mr. A Veils is just as certain that his view is not only right but complete. But the completeness is negative, and that is the best that can be said for it. His horizontal view of the world cannot be accused of distorting the depths, for it simply disregards them. They cannot be distorted, for they are not even included.
Hilaire Belloc
Authors: Harrison F.
Published: July 2007

How shall we approach him, this unique figure in English literature, and what are we to name him—Englishman and Frenchman, poet and politician, reactionary and revolutionary, essayist, historian, satirist, soldier and seaman, thinker and man of action, sceptic and Christian? In mood merry and sad and bitter, in style exuberant and austere—what common factor, if any, is to be found in him?

The key to this many-sided man is at once complex and simple. He is concerned, in a word, with all the activities of man, political, social, artistic and religious, as seen in the light of the living Christian tradition of Catholic Europe; a tradition which has caught up into itself and made its own the civilisations of Greece and Rome and the long searching and finding of the Jews, and which claims to interpret for all time God to man and man to himself. It is, for better or worse, our tradition. It is in the atmosphere we breathe, it is the soil from which we spring, it is so familiar that at times we do not notice it, it is so complex that we all know little of it directly, so simple that we find it hard to accept, so exacting that we snatch at the excuse of fashion and distaste to abandon it, yet so penetrating that we are coloured by it against our will, and bear its marks even in revolt. It is a tradition that has again and again grown weak from within and been assailed from without, it has never been unchallenged and never utterly overthrown, and its fortunes were nevermore vital or more uncertain than at the present day.
God and Jane Austen
Authors: Watts Mary
Published: July 2007

It is a truth universally acknowledged that in private life Jane Austen was deeply religious. Henry Austen’s Notice stresses her charity, ‘Faultless herself, she always sought, in the faults of others, something to excuse, to forgive or forget. . . . She never uttered a hasty, a silly or a severe expression.’ Her devotion is the other prominent aspect. ‘She was thoroughly religious and devout; fearful of giving offence to God, and incapable of feeling it towards any fellow creature.’

But critics have generally held that her religion has not influenced her novels in any major way and have given it little attention. An exception was Angus Wilson in his series of broadcast talks on Evil in the English Novel, in which he maintained that religious belief and practice influenced Jane Austen’s art directly, though his suggestion that the material of her novels, ‘Three or Four Families in a Country Village’, reflects a belief that the salvation of one’s soul can best be achieved in retirement from ‘the world’ seems to me to be mistaken. The more one reads the novels the more one becomes aware that they are written from an essentially religious outlook on life but that this is so absorbed and taken for granted in her thinking that it is only occasionally made explicit. And, of course, it is an outlook profoundly influenced by the reading and preaching available to her in the early nineteenth century, characterized by a reticence in the expression of faith and a keen interest in the moral life—‘By their fruits ye shall know them’.
Does Moral Philosophy Pay?
Authors: Benson John
Published: July 2007

Thirteen years ago Professor G. E. M. Anscombe gave reasons for thinking that it is not at present profitable for us to do moral philosophy. The steady flow of books since then shows how little notice was taken. The three I shall be considering in this article present an opportunity to consider the case she made and its continuing relevance.

Miss Anscombe’s essay, ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, is included in The Definition of Morality, together with twelve others which are meant to hang from the same peg: the question, ‘What is the meaning of “morality”?’ The most interesting of them get up and walk away with the peg, opening up issues beyond the matters of usage which the editors tidily catalogue in their introduction. This is certainly true of Miss Anscombe’s. Her quarrel with modern moral philosophers is not that they are wrong in the way they use or define ‘moral’ and ‘morality’, but that in the way they use them these terms mean nothing at all. She argues that the concept of obligation, with its related moral sense of‘ought’, which has been given pride of place by moral philosophers since the eighteenth century, is intelligible only within a law-conception of morality. To speak of a moral ‘law’, of being ‘bound’, ‘obliged’ and so on, makes no sense unless one believes that there is someone who issues the law. The decay of divine law as a basis for morality has left these terms bereft of content, but not, unfortunately, of their ‘mesmeric force’. The smell remains for some time even when the gas-works has been dismantled. When ‘ought’ lacks the content provided by some actual law, telling a man that he ought not to commit adultery gives him no reason at all for not doing so.
Monnica: My Mother
Authors: Bickford H. D. C.
Published: July 2007

It seems strange, at the time the Oedipus complex was being unravelled, that the case history of Augustine of Hippo (A.D. 350-434) and his mother Monnica should not have been more generally used as basic illustrative material. Perhaps it was too firmly embedded, in the lay mind, in the bracket of salvation-history to be eligible for general use. Fortunately, however, the portrait of this provincial Roman-African mother has been preserved simply because it was safely insulated within the pages of a ‘devotional’ book—the Confessions of Augustine, a writing that itself has barely begun to disgorge its total psychological treasures. To excise and examine the history of Monnica will tell us a lot about Augustine, which in its turn could tell us a lot about Augustine-style Western Christianity—a grass-roots examination that is becoming a popular lay pastime.

The biography of Monnica presents a complex study. At times Augustine almost persuades us into believing that she is actually the theme of the Confessions:

‘Do Thou inspire, O Lord my God, do Thou inspire Thy servants, my brethren, Thy sons, my masters, whom I serve with heart and voice and pen, that whoso reads these pages may remember before Thy altar, Monnica, Thy handmaid ... so shall her dying request be granted to her in richer abundance by the prayers of many, through my Confessions, than through my prayers.’

But even when he presents her ‘straight’ he depicts a complicated love-hate relationship, however much he attempts to polish up the love aspect. Added to which is the immense difficulty presented by Augustine’s own dichotomous style of writing and thinking whereby he presents Monnica to us through a series of quite contradictory lenses.
Glaucon's Question
Authors: Meynell Hugo
Published: July 2007

‘What is the use of being a good man—I do not mean what is the use to others, but to oneself? Would not the ideal state, from one’s own point of view, be to have the power to injure others for one’s own benefit to any extent at all, without being injured in turn oneself? Suppose, like the man in the fairy story, I were able to make myself invisible at will. If I had this power, and abstained, out of conscientious scruples, from all the indulgence in robbery and seduction for which my talent gave me the opportunity, would I not be mad? All our moral education seems to be based on the principle that the consequences to an agent of his being morally bad are unfortunate to himself; but few seem to assure us that to be bad is in itself to be unfortunate—and when they do so, their assurances carry little conviction. And if it is only a matter of consequences, the ideal aim in life, for a man of enlightened self-interest, would seem to be to find some means of enjoying the immediate fruits of being wicked while avoiding the unfortunate consequences. It may be objected that this would be difficult; but then most worthwhile achievements are difficult. Is there any indication that the good man is somehow, just by virtue of being good, more fortunate than the bad? We would dearly like to believe this, but cannot find any adequate reason for doing so. It is no use saying that men and gods will ensure that the good man is rewarded and the bad man punished; since men can always be put off by flattery and bribery, if not by deception; and the gods by sacrifices. Let us take a stark and extreme case: the contrast between a bad man, with all possible worldly goods, honoured among men as though he were good; and a good man, regarded as bad and, in consequence, poor and persecuted, hated, mocked, and finally enduring an agonizing death by being impaled. Who is going to say that the good man in this case is more fortunate than the bad?’
The Burden of the White Man's God
Authors: van der Hart Rob
Published: July 2007

In the land of our fathers there are many strangers. They have drifted away from their homes, across the sea, into the New World which they held to be ‘undiscovered’. Why did they seek a new land, and why did they leave their own? Why did they leave behind the soil from which they were born; why did they break away from the womb to which they belong?

With their minds disconnected—and freed—from the earth, they could master the forces of nature. And so they took possession of the land that seemed so empty, so much there for the taking, because no one claimed it. They did not know that man does not naturally possess the land to which he belongs; he does not say: T own this soil’. For how can we own the soil from which we are born and to which we will return? Is not man’s life encompassed by the earth and her dark forces, as in a wider dimension from which things and deeds receive their meaning?
Koch on Apocalyptic
Authors: Robinson Bernard
Published: July 2007

‘(Jesus’ audience) thought that the Kingdom would be a place like the old kingdom of David, with armies and a king’s throne. Jesus knew that it was not a place, but the action of God ruling over our hearts.’ So John Hargreaves, though it is perhaps unfair to pick on him, for similar pronouncements can be found in hundreds of popular, and indeed scholarly, theological writings. It is the way most of us were brought up to think. Perhaps it is the right way of thinking, but there are, I think, increasingly good reasons for feeling unsure about that. When the Jews talked about ‘the kingdom’ (without further qualification) they certainly were not thinking of some invisible operation: they meant the Roman Empire. The ‘Kingdom of God’ on the lips of Jesus may well have referred to something equally tangible—to a world order, not a concept. He may well have been speaking not of the invisible activity of ‘grace’ in the ‘soul’, but of a kingdom, however spiritual, with visible, material attributes. A recent writer on the Fourth Gospel, for instance, has interpreted the scene before Pilate in these terms:

Jesus’ kingship is not ‘unworldly’. Instead one of the characteristics of the Johannine treatment of the trial and of the events that lead up to it is that the political implications are emphasized. In 11, 48 a specifically political motivation is injected into the plotting of the Jewish authorities. John alone mentions the presence of the Roman soldiers the spaira kai ho chiliarchos) at the arrest of Jesus. In the trial itself, the political-realistic element is introduced by the Jews at 19, 12: ‘If you release this man you are not Caesar’s friend; anyone who makes himself a king opposes Caesar’.
Cultural Continuity and a Scottish Tradition
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

Can the university—even a radically reformed university—really carry the burden of providing our society with ‘memory and mature purpose’, as Dr Leavis keeps hoping? Remembering some of his more recent essays while staying in fairly remote parts of Scotland this summer, I began once again to reflect on how much the schools fail to do and yet could so easily undertake (as a handful of rare teachers have always done)—if only we could unlearn the attitude to language that has prevailed from the beginning of public education a century or so ago. Gaelic steadily declines in the Hebrides, the vital remnant of the Scottish Gaidhealtachd, and the Buchan dialect in the north-east of Scotland is losing its vigour. In both cases the schools are where the native speech dies. If this is a matter of conscious political decision at all, it is only because we submit to the priorities of the commercial system and allow our conception of language and life to be dictated to us by that. Seeing a language die out doesn’t bother the man who regards language as simply a means for exchanging ideas: for him another language can easily be substituted. But if language is, as Dr Leavis says, what creates ‘the human world of values and significances and spiritual graces’, then it is surely clear that ‘exchanging ideas’ is much less than an adequate description of the place of language in human life.
The Anthropomorphic Illusion—A Note on Jacques Monod
Authors: Roberts Noel
Published: July 2007

A recent book by a Nobel prize-winner in biology, Jacques Monod, is proving a best-seller in France and Germany and is causing much discussion in Britain. Written as it is by an expert in the field of molecular biology with a flair for philosophical thought, it poses a serious challenge to Christian belief in the uniqueness of man and his need of redemption. Monod’s undisguised aim is to demolish what he calls the ‘anthropomorphic illusion’. Galileo in removing the earth from the centre of the cosmos failed to achieve it, advances in biology at the molecular level, he claims, give every promise of succeeding—in fact have succeeded. ‘We would like’, he says, ‘to think ourselves necessary, inevitable, ordained from all eternity. All religions, nearly all philosophers, and even part of science testify to the unwearying heroic effort of mankind desperately denying its own contingency.’ Armed with the latest advances in molecular biology he sets out with overweening confidence and in places superb skill to lay bare the evolutionary process from the level of simple molecules to the greatest mystery of all, human consciousness. Not content with that achievement he then offers a panacea for the modern spiritual malaise—a formidable undertaking.
An Anglican on the ‘Two Witnesses’
Authors: McNabb Vincent
Published: July 2007

In August and October, 1926, the Anglican Quarterly, Theology, published two remarkable articles written by the Ireland Professor of Exegesis at Oxford (C. H. Turner) and entitled ‘St. Peter in the New Testament.’ Their writer was a scholar of such competence in Biblical and Patristic studies that his advocacy of the Petrine claims made his articles the most important work on Anglo-Roman controversy since Newman’s Development.

One point especially was almost a startling innovation which might have identified an anonymous writer not with England but with Rome. Let the writer make the point in his own words :

‘It cannot be reasonably questioned that the thought of Rome, the imperial city, the stronghold of the anti-Christian power, is very close to the mind of the seer (i.e. St. John in writing the Apocalypse) in certain points of his vision.

‘The Beast is the emperor and the head slain to death and his death-wound was healed (Apoc. xiii, 3) can be no other than Nero, the expectation of whose return from the East was so vivid till the end of the first century.
Work and the First Beatitude
Authors: Rigby Stephen
Published: July 2007

There is a haunting quality about the gentle irony of Arnold Lunn’s remark, ‘My father held the quaint belief that Christ meant what he said on the subject of riches.’ There is a trenchant quality about Gilbert Chesterton’s remark : ‘If there is one thing which Christ and his saints have said with a sort of savage monotony, it is that the rich are in peculiar danger of moral ruin.’ The ironic quality of the one remark and the trenchant quality of the other are both just, for there are those who seize like vultures on a carcase upon the words, ‘in spirit,’ in the First Beatitude, and have tried to eviscerate Christ’s teaching : as if forsooth the cumulative effect of so many parables, warnings and threats were not to show that it is intensely difficult to be poor in spirit, if one is rich in body. The ordinarily good rich are they who, in St. John Chrysostom’s words, bank their money in God’s bank, the bosom of the poor, getting heavenly usury thereby, and not looking upon themselves as benefactors of the poor, but as debtors to the poor. The very good rich are they who keep the trappings of riches, but discard the reality : a St. Louis of France will wear a royal robe, but next the skin will be a hair shirt; he will keep a rich table for his guests, but he will only toy with his own food.
The Paths of Israel
Authors: Lampert E.
Published: July 2007

The Jewish problem has become one of the most ominous and terrible issues of contemporary consciousness, which is tested by new waves of terrifying anti-Semitism. It must, however, be said that this ppves the way to a deeper realisation of the problem itself. It is raised to a new level, receives new definition and new illumination. Beneath the surface of the elemental outburst something far more essential, significant and decisive than all this sounding storm around the ‘Jewish question ‘is taking place. Above all, it becomes clear that it is not enough to oppose moral or legal standards to antiSemitism ; that the answer to the whole tragedy of Israel must be sought in its mysterious bond with the destinies of world-history.

There are several ways of approaching the Jewish problem. For sociologists, economists, for historians of culture and for moralists, Jewry will always be a social, economic or cultural unit, or an object of moral valuation. Racial nationalism turns the whole issue into biology. At the present time anti-Semitism is primarily concerned with racial arguments; yet often these only Conceal feelings of hatred and resentment. I will not speak of the approach to the problem which has become the chief source of the delirious ideas about the ‘Jewish conspiracy,’ the ‘Wise men of Sion,’ etc.—legendary tales, or rather blood-stained slanders, which still confuse some minds, not so much in this country as on the Continent.
The Sacrament of Marriage
Authors: Vann Gerald
Published: July 2007

God is love. God is creator, God’s creation is the expression of his love.

Man is created in the image and likeness of God. Man too is lover and creator. But for him, to love and to create is hard.

It is hard to love, because so often when he sees a beautiful thing man wants to clutch at it, possess it, dominate, domineer, use it for himself, destroy it.

It is hard to create, because creation comes only from love.

There is no love and no creation without worship and humility and fear; and in order that we may have these things God takes us by the hand, and leads us to the trackless and waterless, places, and gives us the gift of pain.

Man’s destiny is to create, in the image and likeness of God. We are not men and women unless we are makers, whether what we make be ships or sealing wax or cabbages or kingdoms. But for most men and women the primary creation is procreation; the primary work of art is married life. God gives us in each case the ecstasy of creation : the joy that follows the agony of making, the joy that follows the anguish of child-bearing. If we had only these gifts of joy and ecstasy we might forget the giver, and rest in the gifts and regard them as our own possession; we might cease to love and worship, and become beasts of prey. Love is worship. ‘With my body I thee worship ‘; the body conveys the message, but it is the whole I that worships, the whole of the body and its deepest roots, the whole of the spirit and its deepest roots, in one act of recognition and acceptance of oneness, of adoration and offering.
The Decline of Discipline
Authors: Albemarle Diana
Published: July 2007

Whether we deplore it, or welcome it as a deliverance, it is a fact beyond controversy that parental authority has decreased in the last fifty years, and. that this has been accompanied by a decline in family discipline. The battle is joined, but the issue is still in doubt, between those who see in this a breakdown of the family group pattern, and those who believe that the development of the psychologists’ ‘free’ child is the forerunner of a new age of enlightenment, a new family relationship of pure love—although, apparently, the obligations in this new relationship are entirely material ones and entirely onesided. It may not be inappropriate in a number of Blackfriars devoted to the Family to glance briefly at some of the implications of this phenomenon.

When seen against its historical background the first thing to strike the observer is that this decline is not an isolated fact, but that it appears to be bound up with a general decline of the concept of authority, and a growing tendency to pragmatic thought. Sovereignty is no longer looked upon as delegated by God, but as residing in the group, whether this group is defined as an individual group, or an ideal group ol humanity to which all subordinate groups owe allegiance, and with reference to which their separate authorities are limited. The parent has progressively, during the last half-century, come to doubt his ‘right’ to exercise discipline, has forgotten the real source of his authority, and has accepted more and more State interference. The rapid contemporary advance in Social Services, excellent in so many ways, has often undermined ‘the parents’ sense of responsibility, and narrowed the field of their authority, still further. Moreover, once the origin of that authority nad become obscure, the mother, and to a lesser degree the father, became an easy prey to the popular versions of current psychology.
Where Do We Go From Here?
Authors: Mackinnon D. M.
Published: July 2007

Of course others have faced this problem, and found their answer. It would be wanton, spiritual arrogance for the author in his academic seclusion to suggest otherwise. Yet sometimes, as he lays aside one or other of the various handbooks of Christian reconstruction with which the market is flooded in these days, a horrid doubt crosses his mind which passes into a nightmarish sense of unreality. We draught our charters, we hold our luncheons, we address our public meetings. We go to the world outside the conference-hall door with a smile, with a handbook, nearly always with a sense of assurance Again, we search the Scriptures not that we may have life, but that we may find a slogan for a Christian mass-movement, in which the demands ot the platform will blunt the sharpness of our truly Christian perception. Our attitude seems sometimes a curiously sorry compact of assurance and desperation. We are assured because we think we have a solution for the frightful torments of the present; we are afraid because we see the dreadful possibility that men will not listen to us, may in fact opt finally for other gods.

Is this altogether unfair? The picture is not intentionally spiteful. But there are moments when it seems hard to escape the conviction that some contemporary forms of Christian social activity are little less than highly subtle forms of escapism. They are ‘idealist’ in the sense assigned to that term by Marxist writers, for they rest on unconscious desire to escape the pressing demand to wrestle with social actualities in the here and now by passing into a world that analysis points out to be one of ideas only.
‘Anywhere, Anywhen’
Authors: Lunn Arnold
Published: July 2007

The stout little man, lurching-along the narrow pavement of a street in Lima, had been celebrating Peru’s rupture of relations with the Axis, and he was looking for Germans to insult. His technique for identifying German citizens was to thrust two fingers, extended in the symbolic shape of a ‘V’ into the face of passers-by and to study their reactions. Mine failed to satisfy him, but when he finally realised that was English he melted into a flood/of tender remorse. ‘Mi amigo. All English my friends.’ ‘Muchas gratias,’ I replied, ‘A Dios.’ But he would not let me go. ‘You are my friend. Anywhere, anywhen.’ His heart was in the right place, but his feet were not; and by the time I had rescued him from a passing car, his affection was dynamic in its energy. Seizing me by the arm, he propelled me through the front door of his own shop. I disengaged myself as the champion of the democracies collapsed on to the sofa. ‘You are my friend. Anywhere, anywhen.’ I looked up and my eyes came to rest on an advertisement for the Leica, an enlargement of a Leica snapshot of the Wetterhorn from Grindelwald. And, for one vivid moment, I had a sense of bilocation as if part of me was in Grindelwald and part in Peru. ‘My friend. Anywhere. Anywhen.’ Fifty years have passed since I first saw Grindelwald, and few indeed are the human friends whose company I would prefer to the Wetterhorn.
Trends of Catholic Thought in Modern Germany
Authors: Marinoff Irene
Published: July 2007

It is of profound significance that since the end of the last war Catholic thinkers in Germany should have devoted themselves almost exclusively to the preparation for the struggle for the Faith which is now raging. It is as though they had sensed the impending danger and were concentrating all their energies on the twofold task of arriving at a true appreciation of the present spiritual situation, and of providing the means to solve its problems in the spirit of Christ. This struggle for the Faith, for the very reason that it is fought on the spiritual plane, is by no means identical with the present war, which only becomes relevant as it serves to clarify the situation, and affects the spirits of men. The decisive events will take place in the depths of the human heart; it is here that the future of mankind will be decided. The crucial question is the same, which has at all times determined the fate of the individual as well as of nations : ‘What think ye of Christ?’

This question was asked in the days of the Roman Empire, when to acknowledge the Kingship of Christ meant torture and death. It was asked in ages when belief was easy, when the individual was not yet torn out of community with his fellows, and lived in a world which bore in every detail the stamp of God. It is characteristic of the present situation that the very conditions which enabled such a question to be heard and answered in the past, seem no longer to exist.
England and the Countryman
Authors: Shewring Walter
Published: July 2007

It is now some time since Mr. Massingham began to educate and delight us with his studies of the English rural tradition, but the present book may be considered his most mature achievement. In it he takes the types which he regards as most representative of the English countryman and examines in turn the origins, status, character and history of each. The history indeed is of rather a melancholy kind, since in each case rise and development is followed by a decline and fall, the fortunes of the countryside being bound up with those of England and its culture at large, and the movement towards modern times being a retreat rather than an advance. The replacement of sacred by secular, of spiritual by material, of the functional and the reasonable by the functionless and irrational, of many-sided wisdom by the smartness of business men and the research of undisciplined scientists—these are the characteristic note's of modernity, and it is natural that they should appear with particular vividness in the history of so central and primary a thing as agriculture. Nevertheless, the diagnosis is not a hopeless one, and its partial acceptance now, with the chance of wider acceptance soon, offers some possibility of a return to the norm we have forsaken.
An Eagle Whiter Than A Dove
Authors: Fressanges G. A.
Published: July 2007

During four generations Poland has been specially dear to the hearts of English Catholics. One reason assuredly for this attachment arises from the strong Irish element in our make up, with its memory of suppression of the faith and violent persecution. Yet the native Catholics too share an affinity with the Polish people that is strong and peculiarly English. The English have always shown a keen sense of injustice. The enemies of our race would say it was a sense only outraged by injustice of a continental brand. It is, however, a commonplace that England has afforded an exile’s home for every kind of Ishmael : The Seers of the Enlightenment followed by Bourbons and Eugenie: Dom Manoel and Don Sturzo; Garibaldi and the French émigré clergy, whose names are honoured in the history of many London parishes; Marx and Chateaubriand; Einstein and Chopin. But more than this, for English Catholics Poland typifies splendidly the spirit of resurgent Catholicism. The English remnant can take heart from the example of Poland.

The first lesson I ever learned in the study of the European scene was that there were two bastions in Europe, Ireland and Poland; both were rooted in tradition, both were vital in a dying world, because established on the four-square gospel of a sane social creed : a Faith, the land, family and patriotism—i.e. the love of the hearth I was taught later in the insularity of English University life with its fear of metaphysics and again in the cosmopolitan fever of the Sorbonne that Poland and Ireland were despicable blockhouses of superstition and reaction. It was taken for granted that Weygand had saved Warsaw : so miraculous in achievement was that strategy that it seemed incredible otherwise.
Cardinal Hinsley: His Last Words on Unity
Authors: Marchant James
Published: July 2007

I had just finished reading in his firm flowing handwriting, but with here and there a marked break, what must have been, alas ! one of his last personal letters, when the sad news came through of the heart attack from which he did not recover. He confessed that he had been having a rather bad time lately and was incapable of real work.

Then his thoughts reverted to the subject of unity, one of the clear notes of his episcopacy, rarely absent from his serious mind, and to our grievous disunities. ‘In the mission field, I found,’ he writes, that the awful confusion due to disunion was the obstacle to the spread-of the Kingdom of God. In Europe our enemies—the enemies of Christianity, he calls them—make capital out of our divisions. But the mere mixing together, so to speak, of varying creeds and of different ways of worship would be a mechanical union, not the one body of Christ.’ He develops the I heme again and says that our prayers for the indwelling of the Holy Spirit sent to lead us into all truth must be ceaseless. It was the theme of one of his letters from the Collegio Inglese after his elevation, whilst he waited to take up his great task—’ At my age what can I do? ‘But as a soldier he obeys. ‘

The troubled years and the awful movement of evil events have revealed that the Holy Father was divinely guided in his choice of a messenger. As the Public Orator of Oxford declaimed, ‘Cardinal Hinsley has become a true leader, not only in his own Church but in the nation at large.’ His broadcast after war broke upon us showed that he spoke with the voice of the nation—sad, stern, courageous, unfaltering.
The Christian Leaven
Authors: Murray Rosalind
Published: July 2007

I have been asked to speak on the Christian leaven in the University. It is an important subject and one on which I myself feel strongly. The view which I am going to put forward will not I know be generally accepted ; it does not claim to be the only view which can be taken of the situation, but it is one which, in my opinion, is at the present time too little stressed ; I may therefore be forgiven if in this short space I state my case rather strongly, and I should like to apologise beforehand to all those whom I am now about to provoke. I do not mean to be offensive, but it is difficult to put what I want to say shortly and clearly without seeming to be so.

I propose in this paper to exclude all other considerations, and to state as forcibly as I can just one, perhaps rather narrow, view, essentially a convert’s view, of what the Christian Leaven is, and what it might be. I speak moreover not merely as a convert from Protestantism to Catholicism, but from Paganism to Christianity, and this is a far more revolutionary conversion, different not only in degree but almost in kind. ... St. Augustine as compared with Cardinal Newman. It is necessarily of more significance for the modern world in as much as the modern world itself is overwhelmingly pagan and not protestant and for this reason it is important to try and realise what is in fact involved in such conversion; it is not merely a question of Apostolic Succession or the validity of Anglican Orders which is at issue, but our entire conception of existence, the question of God’s existence and the nature of man.
Christian Life in the Home
Authors: Williams Thomas L.
Published: July 2007

This meeting is, I understand, not a religious service in the sense that there is no collection, but I should like to begin my talk with one thing that is usually associated with the beginning of sermons, a text, only I have not taken my text from the Gospels; I am happy to have been able to take it from Her Majesty the Queen’s wonderful broadcast on Passion Sunday :—

‘It is on the strength of our spiritual life that the right rebuilding of our national life depends. In these last tragic years many have found in religion the source and mainspring of the courage and selflessness that they needed. On the other hand we cannot close our eyes to the fact that our precious Christian heritage is threatened by adverse influences. It does indeed seem to me that if the years to come are to see some real spiritual recovery, the women of our nation must be deeply concerned with religion and our homes the very place where it should start. It is the creative and dynamic power of Christianity which can help us to carry the moral responsibilities which history is placing on our shoulders. If our homes can be truly Christian, then the influence of that spirit will assuredly spread like leaven through all the aspects of our common life, social, industrial and political.’

These are the finest words I have ever heard on the radio, and coming from our Queen, they must have and continue to have a great effect on the nation and the Empire.
God's Happy Warrior
Authors: Delany Bernard
Published: July 2007

You are the light of the world. A city seated on a mountain cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle and put it under a bushel, but upon a candlestick, that it may shine to all that are in the house. So let your light shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your father who is in heaven (Matt, v, 14-16).

‘You are the light of the world,’ says our Lord to his disciples; and again, ‘I am the Light of the world ‘(John viii, 12). If the world then is to be truly enlightened, these two lights, Master and disciple, must be one; they must glow with a single light and burn with a single flame. The apostle who bears the gospel-message must strive by life and teaching to identify himself with the Lord who sends him.

‘Let your light shine before men that they may glorify your Father who is in heaven.’ These words provide a clue to the life-secret of him whose going leaves a heavy burden of sorrow on our hearts—a sorrow not for him, who has gone to his well-earned rest and rich reward, but for ourselves who have lost him for a time and will surely never in this world see his like again. You knew him and what he was; but there must be many who were puzzled and even astonished at this strange figure walking our streets and appearing to be a visitor from another century who had strayed into our modem world.