bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Bishop Gore, Dean Rashdall, and St. Thomas Aquinas
Authors: McNabb Vincent
Published: July 2007

The dogmatic duel between the two intellectual leaders of Anglo-Catholicism and Modernism within the Church of England is a struggle of giants made homely by irrepressible sallies of the ‘average man.’ Neither the Bishop nor the Dean can lay aside that human nature which feels and even repays a hurt.

We should have no joy in recording one of these sallies if strangely enough it did not bind into a single sheaf of words what it elsewhere scattered over the field of controversy. In the August number of The Modern Churchman Dean Rashdall has an article entitled ‘Bishop Gore and St. Thomas Aquinas,’ in which he writes :

’ Bishop Gore, in his criticisms of myself, has refused to accept my statements as to what I believe. He has claimed to look down into my thoughts and pronounce that, when I say that Christ is God and man, I really think of Him as man only. Such an attitude seems to me an unwarrantable presumption. I will not, therefore, be guilty of the same presumption towards him, and will refrain from saying that I suspect that, if I could look into his mind as he believes himself able to look into mine, I should find that he practically envisages the Holy Trinity to himself as three minds, Le. three Gods, not less distinct but only more unanimous and harmonious in their thoughts and plans than any three pagan deities.

I will not say this; I will content myself with observing that, though he escapes formal Tritheism by using the correct theological phrases, his thought is difficult to distinguish from Tritheism ‘(p. 208).

‘Bishop Gore (so far as I have been able to understand him) contends that no one can honestly accept the Creed of Nicea without regarding Father and Son as two separate personalities in the modern English sense of the word. At all events he uses the terms person and personality without a word to distinguish their theological meaning from that which they bear in common life or modem philosophy’ (p. 201).
Honour—and Honours
Authors: Burke Ulic
Published: July 2007

The exclusion of secular political questions from the subject matter of our Catholic Reviews, which obtained very largely before the war, was a weakness inherent in the mentality of the Catholic body at that time. It existed because Catholics, as a body, had never emerged from the atmosphere of sufferance; they felt their numerical weakness so strongly that it seemed a dangerous thing to discuss things on which they disagreed. It was a weakness because it hindered the development of political thought among Catholics, who, even if they have absorbed nothing more than the penny Catechism, are better equipped for it than those who have never had the advantage of that training in logic and philosophy. No Catholic should be capable of the mental confusion that so heavily overlays the political discussions of our secular press.

There is, and has been now for some time, every indication that this attitude of timid reserve has broken down. The Church in this country emerged from the war with a very much enhanced prestige, despite misrepresentation of the Papal neutrality. The historic Pastoral Letter of Cardinal Mercier made a deep and abiding impression on the non-Catholic mind. The returning troops brought back memories and impressions which scattered the mists of ignorant Victorian prejudice, and while the social teachings of Pope Leo XIII are slowly reaching the minds of the people, the striking Pastoral Letter of the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster on social questions, and the courageous intervention of some of the bishops in particular matters,
Catholic Effort in Present-Day France
Authors: Ryan Mary
Published: July 2007

Bossuet, in his sermon on the Unity of the Church, sees her history movingly prefigured by the march of the Israelites through the wilderness: ‘leaving Egypt and the darkness of idolatry she crosses, in search of the Promised Land, a measureless desert where she finds nothing but fearsome rocks and burning sand; no soil, no cultivation, none of earth’s fruits; a terrifying drought; no bread but such as must be sent down from heaven; no refreshing water but such as must be drawn by a miracle from the heart of a rock; all nature sterile in her regard and nothing good but by grace ... In the horror of this vast solitude, she appears surrounded by enemies, marching always in battle array, never resting but in tents, ever ready to move on and to fight; a stranger, whom nothing can fix. nothing satisfy; who casts a passing glance on all things but will neither stop nor stay, and yet is happy in this state, because of the consolations granted her on her journey, and the glorious and immutable rest which will be the end of her course.’

This comparison was never more pathetically applicable to the Church as a whole than in our day of ‘after-Christians’ ; nor to the Church in any country more than in modern France. For that reason, perhaps, French Catholics have gone very far towards a vivid realisation of the manifold aspects of Catholicism, of its universal appeal, of its touch on life at every point;
Further Steps Towards Reunion
Authors: McNabb Vincent
Published: July 2007

We have always felt and expressed the opinion that the de facto separation between the Church of England and the Church of Rome came about by process of law; not, indeed, primarily ecclesiastical, but civil. In this it did but follow the character of our people, over whom the majesty of law has always had such sway that for a time the country accepted with almost Oriental fanaticism the Divine Right of Kings.

This fixed opinion of ours on the legal and civil origin of the breach with Rome led us to expect that the formal, official and collective separation would be ended by the same process which had been its cause. It became part of our service of Jesus Christ, the Truth, to look for any signs, however slender and struggling, of an official will or wish to have speech, if not yet inter-communion, with the Holy See. Perhaps our hopes gave sight to our eyes when we discerned in the official acts of the ‘Conference of Bishops of the Anglican Communion,’ held at Lambeth in 1920, some beginning of that official action by the Church of England which three centuries had awaited in vain.

It is to the credit of these prelates who, in 1920, foregathered at Lambeth from every continent of the world, that their words on re-union with Rome did not increase, but rather lessened, the difficulties of the situation. Combatants on both sides of the separation, too zealous to be wise, had added to the knots and intergrowth of an already complicated issue.
The Passion Play of 1922: I. Preliminary Encouragements
Authors: Burdett Osbert
Published: July 2007

Though many books and articles are written round every decennial performance of the Passion Play at Oberammergau, and the drama has so many points of deep interest that it requires altogether exceptional control in any writer who sees it not to record his impressions, I think that there is still something to be said. With the conviction that the play could not be performed in any other theatre or by any other actors, abides the assurance that its chief virtues, its atmosphere of uniqueness, can yet be shared by the majority necessarily unable to make the pilgrimage. If I can persuade the reader to this paradoxical conclusion, perhaps I shall have deserved my own good fortune. Let me, then, try to show him the simple means whereby he can make a spectator’s experience his own. It is doubtful if The Ring can be enjoyed adequately anywhere but at Munich or at Bayreuth. It is certain that, in England, Shakespeare is himself only at the Old Vic. Ibsen demands to be played in cycles. But the Passion Play, which could not be transplanted, can be experienced in the study by anyone who studies its traditions, its history, and (above all) its text, with the aid of the magnificent sets of photographs that are available. Of course, some supreme effects will be lost. The music, which has never been published, will be wanting. The peculiar virtue of an open-air theatre, to realise which the Greek model at Bradfield should be visited, remains to seek.
Religious Valves in German Literature of To-Day
Authors: Randall A. W. G.
Published: July 2007

To speak at all of religious values in literature may be regarded by some as rather questionable, on the ground that religion and the art of letters have little in common and that conscious attempts to make literature serve the cause of religion are generally failures or, at the best, half-successes, serving neither the one nor the other with completeness. But it is not quite from that point of view that the theme for this essay has been stated. Even the ‘art for art’s sake’ critics and artists—an ever-diminishing company, in the usual acceptation of the phrase—would agree that literature was expression, individual and social. Most people would further agree that religion was still a vital, if often unrecognised, element in the life of the human being or of the community. Given literature, then, as ‘expression,’ and religious aspiration as the same thing, it is justifiable to isolate them for a while and discuss, without any question of propaganda or of making ‘literature the handmaid of religion,’ the way in which the first is being linked to the second—the particular instance under notice being that of Germany to-day where, as will be seen shortly, the enquiry promises to be especially fruitful and thought-provoking.

Writers to whom the label ‘Catholic’ may be specifically applied are by no means a negligible quantity in Germany to-day, even regarded from the point of view of general literary criticism.
Catholic Organisation in Brittany
Authors: Gwynn Denis
Published: July 2007

More than any other part of France, Brittany has a distinct existence apart from the rest. Its old Celtic language is still spoken habitually among the working people over a great part of its western departments, while in St. Malo, and further east still to the very borders of Normandy, Breton is still the native language of a considerable proportion of the older people, who as often as not are quite illiterate, although in the best sense of the word they are highly cultivated, with their inheritance of traditions that have their roots centuries behind the present day. Brittany includes only five in all out of the ninety more or less equal departments into which (including Alsace Lorraine) modern France is divided. But this small north-western corner is thickly populated, and while it is barely larger than one-twentieth of the whole of France, it contains all but one-tenth of the population. What is more important, Brittany is one of the very few districts in the country in which the population is actually increasing at a normal rate, thereby helping to reduce the steady shrinkage of the whole French population. It is the most conspicuous example of the obvious fact in modern French economics—so obvious that it is now openly, if reluctantly, admitted by the most anti-clerical newspapers—that it is only where the Catholic tradition has remained vital that large families are still to be found as a general rule.

That is indeed why this primitive peasant population—made up of small farmers who grow potatoes and vegetables for the Paris and for the English markets and who brew their own cider from the endless orchards that make all the road-sides gay with red apples in the autumn,
Spade and Rood
Authors: Rope H. E. G.
Published: July 2007

Among the many shibboleths which satisfy the ‘practical men’ who utter them and exasperate the ‘visionaries’ who hanker after reality, not a few are connected with the land. ‘The stately homes of England,’ ‘the playing-fields of Eton,’ ‘our national sportsmanship,’ are examples. ‘England could never grow her own food’ is another. With those chiefly concerned it is axiomatic that fox-hunting and large estates have made England what she is! They have certainly contributed to do so, and the result is, of course, highly satisfactory to—the speaker. ‘We are at the present moment in Great Britain assisting at a third of these turning points in the history of generations, for we have just arrived at the time when only a few old people can still remember an England that was not urban, policed, and dependent upon mechanical and centralised communications. We have just entered upon the time when all living memory of the older agricultural England is passing away.’ If, remembering that ‘there’s livers out of Britain’ and that Britain herself has changed exceedingly, we ask what is the verdict of tradition and experience, the answer is less reassuring. From the very ranks of the English landowners themselves comes a clear, vigorous contradiction of the dominant shibboleths. This is what Mr. Christopher Turnor, a practical agriculturalist, a conservative by conviction, an acknowledged authority, has to say of large farming:

‘It is a fact capable of proof in every country of Europe that the subdivision of land or “the conversion” of large farms into small holdings has in every known case led to an increase in the human and animal population and greater productiveness.’
National Catholic Congresses—Some Criticisms and a Suggestion
Authors: Atteridge A. Hilliard
Published: July 2007

The first National Catholic Congress in England was held at Norwich in 1912. It was a development of the ‘Conferences’ which had been organised by the Catholic Truth Society for many successive years, and it was announced that the Congress was to be an annual event. There was a Congress at Plymouth in 1913, and another at Cardiff on the eve of the Great War in 1914. Then the series was interrupted for years. When the fourth Congress met at Liverpool in 1920, there was some talk of its being followed by a fifth in the following year. Current report even said that Leeds had been definitely selected as the place of meeting. But for some reason the idea was abandoned. It is now announced that in the coming year there will be a Catholic Congress at Birmingham, the first of a new series, meeting, not annually, but every third year.

I was present at and took some part in the proceedings of two out of the four Congresses that have been already held During and after these gatherings I heard from not a few of my friends—both clerics and laymen—the criticism that these meetings did not give results of sufficient value in comparison with the expenditure of time, money and effort required for their organisation. It was argued that they were to a great extent something like oratorical field-days, in which there was a good deal of mutual self-congratulation, and very little opportunity for helpful debate on practical matters.
Mrs. Meynell
Authors: Leslie Shane
Published: July 2007

I have never found the pen move with greater difficulty than in trying to record the impression which is left with me of Mrs. Meynell’s life and death. It is as hard as writing of her poetry and her prose —the prose with which she enamelled Life, the poetry which she laid up as Death’s garland. If the supremely important moment of a saint’s life is the last, to which every thought and deed has long paved the way, the extreme ecstacy of the poet no less is death. Then the last rhythm of life is rendered and the last measure of the soul is counted. If poesy is a divine gift, then God will call account for the poetic stewardship, not for the false rhymes and broken feet—for He forgives technicalities—but for fine arts wasted and supreme inspiration thrown to the dogs.

Great poets have deliberately given their powers to evil, and petty rhymesters toss their jingles to perdition. But the great poetry of the world is ever religious. Great prose need not be so. Poetry to be great requires the sublimer touch which only religion can give. Prose can be ironical, fantastical, wise, comic, solemn, almost sublime; but sublimity demands the rushing music, the piercing note, the ordered cadence, the organ’s diapason.

Alice Meynell’s prose, culled into a life’s sheaf of Essays, covered all those moods and forms. Out of them could be composed a little Breviary of country life and common-joy things.
Catholic Social Action in England: I. Father Plater and Some of his Critics
Authors: Reeves John Baptist
Published: July 2007

Ater looking forward, for what seemed a very long time, to Father Martindale’s Life of Father Plater/ we now find ourselves wondering how anything so thoroughly well done can have been prepared so quickly. The book is not the mere history of an eventful life; it is a skilful revelation of a remarkable personality. Many of us who before only knew Father Plater now feel that we understand him; and in human relations an understanding signifies more than it says.

It is not the usual lot of a man to be understood in his life-time by the majority of those who know him. Father Plater was more fortunate than most men in this respect, though even he had his critics. His good nature saved him from serious misunderstandings in the less pleasant sense of that word; but occasionally the differences of opinion between himself and others were serious enough. Most misunderstandings of this sort were solved during his life; but one, and that the most serious, has not only survived him, it still exists with regard to the work with which he was principally identified and which others are still carrying on in his name and spirit.
A Beautiful Church
Authors: Burdett Osbert
Published: July 2007

The little village of Fluelen that lies at the eastern end of the Lake of Lucerne is chiefly attractive to visitors from that city because it lies on the opposite and most distant arm of the star-shaped water. The white paddle-steamers with their scarlet pennons ply during the season several times a day between the two places. They lie about three hours apart, and those who do not make the circuit of the water nor take their luncheon on board, where it is expensive, alight at Fluelen. There, between two boats, three hours can pleasantly be spent on either side of dejeuner. The vin ordinaire of the village is a mellow wine, and half a litre, enough for two discriminating persons, could be had (last September) for one and fourpence. Sitting on a balcony of one of the cafés that are studded hospitably about the little place, one’s eyes expect to find nothing whereon to linger save the unfenced railway station, about a small gaunt chateau, the narrow quay, the winding street, and the view of the lake about the roots of the mountains. One does not wish for more, but there is such a thing as curiosity.

Therefore, especially if one has gone ashore earlier, at Tellplatz, an hour’s pleasant walk on the hither side of Fluelen, along the famous Axenstrasse road that tunnels the mountain-side with natural windows such as are seen in old cloisters, one’s eyes are persistently drawn from the mountain to the village at its foot, where they focus themselves upon a little white church, much stained by weather, whose incredibly thin and tapering red spire stands expectantly like the horn of a bright snail, just protruded.
A Pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the Fifteenth Century
Authors: Watkin Edward Ingram
Published: July 2007

The child can grasp only the individual and the concrete; this particular object in this particular place at this particular time. Only with growth towards maturity do we become able to grasp generalities, universal values, abstract ideas. And even the maturest adult remains in large measure a child. His mind intimately bound up with a body always stands in need of concrete physical forms, places, events, persons. Therefore the Christian revelation, addressed not to disembodied spirits nor even to thinking machines, whose bodily life has been reduced to a minimum, like Mr. Wells’s Martians, has revealed the infinite and purely spiritual God in the very concrete and bodily form of Jesus Christ with the definite events and places of His earthly life. And that revelation is preserved and applied in a particular visible body of men with a visible head whose worship is filled with sensible symbols and whose supreme gifts of grace are bestowed through definite physical acts and objects. And if our mediaeval ancestors, children all their lives through, when compared with ourselves, whose outlook is even excessively, because selfconsciously and priggishly adult, exaggerated this necessary character of human religion, and sought a particular physical object to commemorate and enshrine every person and event of scripture, careless whether that person or event belonged to history or to sacred poetry, their exaggeration, if often amusing, is always sympathetic. For it is an outlook by which God is easier found, than by the scepticism which refuses to seek the Divine, outside the sphere of strict logical demonstration, where the deepest truth is never found.
Where All Roads Lead: The History of a Half-Truth (II)
Authors: Chesterton G. K.
Published: July 2007

By this time it must be obvious that every single thing in the Catholic Church which was condemned by the modern world has now been re-introduced by the modern world, and always in a lower form. The Puritans rejected art and symbolism, and the Decadents brought them back again, with all the old appeal to sense and an additional appeal to sensuality. The rationalists rejected supernatural healing, and it was brought back by Yankee charlatans who not only proclaimed supernatural healing, but forbade natural healing. Protestant moralists abolished the confessional and the Psycho-Analysts have re-established the confessional, with every one of its alleged dangers and not one of its admitted safeguards. The Protestant patriots resented the intervention of an international faith, and went on to evolve an empire entangled in international finance. Having complained that the family was insulted by monasticism, they have lived to see the family broken in pieces by bureaucracy; having objected to fasts being appointed for anybody during any exceptional interval, they have survived to see teetotalers and vegetarians trying to impose a fast on everybody for ever.

All this, as I say, has become obvious, but there is a further development of the truth with which I am more especially dealing here; which concerns not so much the case of these general movements which may almost be called vulgar errors, but rather the case of certain individual ideas that are the private inspiration of individuals. As I said in the last issue, a young man may, without any very offensive vanity, come to the conclusion that he has something to say.
A Don Quixote of the Pulpit
Authors: Bracey Robert
Published: July 2007

When Cervantes created ‘Don Quixote,’ the greatest and most delightful of satires, the perfect picture of Spanish national life and manners, that exquisite ‘Book of Humanity’ as Sainte Beuve calls it, he had it in mind to laugh away and burlesque out of existence those foolish romances of chivalry so prevalent in his day, which he held to be in deplorable taste and fraught with harm for the morals of his country. How well he succeeded, all the world knows.

Two centuries later, Spain brought forth a second Cervantes, a satirist of hardly less eminence, but scarcely known to Englishmen of the present day. He too produced a ‘Book of Humanity,’ a lively study of national character; he too had it in mind to laugh away and ridicule into nothingness something which he held to be dangerous to Spain and a slur on her good name. And he too, on a more modest stage, achieved his object. His book in its only English translation, that of 1772, lies before us in faded calf volumes, as we write: ‘The History of the famous Preacher, Friar Gerund de Campazas.’

The author, still well remembered in Spain, which held a literary festival in his honour as recently as 1903, on the occasion of the second centenary of his birth, was a Jesuit, one Jose Francesco de Isla, whose life covered the years 1703—1781. He was a professor at Salamanca and a popular preacher and director, with pronounced literary tastes and almost unexampled gifts of satire and humour.
The Parson of Salisbury and the Three Painted Coffers
Authors: Eden Helen Parry
Published: July 2007

At the end of the reign of King Edward the First, there lived in the city of Salisbury a poor, honest Parson, who had in his charge a small church abutting on the market-place and the souls of a few hundred people thereabouts. Of both church and people he was the careful and loving custodian, but chiefly of the latter ; for he held it as a truth indubitable, that though Our Blessed Lord deigns to dwell on the altar, it is merely as a stepping-stone to the souls of the faithful.

Under this simple conviction, the Parson—Sir Nicholas by name—toiled his hardest from morning till night to help every man, woman and child in his flock build and beautify, in his or her own heart, a shrine for the Most High. He aided proud, indolent and clumsy sinners to hew new stones for the repairing of their dilapidated or ruined souls; the heaviest stones he carried himself, lent a hand to fit them into their allotted places, and stepped back gaily with the poor wretch, their owner, to admire the progress of his puny fabric and congratulate him as though he were the founder of Rome itself—alter Romulus, says my pious original. For souls more advanced, he was an equal authority on spires and pinnacles, crockets and weather-vanes. All the dizziest flights of heavenly architecture he knew by heart—something from books, something from experience, and some-thing from the inspiration on which he faithfully counted.
Where All Roads Lead
Authors: Chesterton G. K.
Published: July 2007

A Note on Comparative Religion (II)

Since writing in the last issue I have seen something in a popular publication which constitutes a sort of commentary on what I wrote; something that is in form a contradiction and in fact a confirmation. I remarked that Mr. Wells, who had previously maintained that things could not really be assimilated to each other at all, had afterwards assimilated the historic religions to each other a great deal too much. I pointed out that what we call the world’s religions differ not only in the sense in which they are true, but in the sense in which they are religious. They differ not only in what they succeed in doing, but in what they profess to do. One of the most interesting of them, Buddhism, is in some sense the subject of a passage in the current publication called The Outline of Literature, and there Mr. Wells himself is quoted as an authority on the Gospel of Buddha. He begins by saying, ‘The fundamental teaching of Gautama, as it is now being made plain to us by the study of original sources, is clear and simple, and in the closest harmony with modern ideas.’ This may be very consoling; but a man who has turned over a reasonable amount of modern journalism and controversy may still feel impelled to ask : Which modern ideas? Even in the work of Mr. Wells alone, there is so large and rich a variety of modern ideas as to make it a little difficult to be in the closest harmony with all of them. We all have a vague popular impression about Buddhism, that it advises abnegation, the extinction of the ego, and so on; but these phrases might mean several different things.
Lionel Johnson—Poet and Scholar
Authors: Price M. S.
Published: July 2007

There are some poetical personalities who disdain the heroic equipment to such an extent that to all but a few intimates who care to penetrate below the mask, they must remain imcomprehensible, and therefore, in an age that has no use or time for reticence, uninteresting. A Hugo or a Wilde catch the eye of the crowd, a Lionel Johnson never.

He was an Epicurean in the finer meaning of the word, and if it were not common knowledge now that Pater drew his hero from R. C. Jackson one might be tempted to imagine that he took for model his most distinguished pupil. Not an Epicurean in the popular sense of ‘Cueillez dès aujourd’hui les roses de la vie/ but one to whom ‘les roses’ meant all that survives of what was finest in Mediaeval art and life in our age. In the cool-shadowed cloisters of Winchester and Oxford he found his natural environment, and brought to such an environment a white passion for the literature of Greece and Rome, and that ‘native instinct for devotion’ which finally found a resting place in the Catholic Church.

He spent six years at Winchester and then passed on to New College, Oxford, and for both these places he felt the deep personal adoration that is usually given to friend or mistress. He loved the peace and the traditions of Winchester, and young though he was, his vibrating appreciation was keenly awake to the architectural and spiritual beauty of that ancient school.
Taillefer
Authors: Dayrell Vivienne
Published: July 2007

Before the waiting long-bows bent and sprang, Before a thousand arrows broke the sky That misty dawra on Senlac . . . was a clang Of arms, and Taillefer rode by Tossing his sword on high.

To us who battle but who cannot live,

Happy was he, this Taillefer, who might In one superb and joyous gesture give The careless courage and the young delight, The splendour of the fight.

We too, we are not cravens, but our eyes Shine with no wonder, lighten with no mirth, Where is the god-like glory of surprise,

The chivalry, whose star shone on our birth Upon this earth?

The crash of spears is round us and we know The lances glitter for us, but we dare A harder thing than courage : for the foe Dear, lordly Laugher, that assails is Care.

. . . . O ride before us too, and teach us so To laugh like thee, Taillefer.,

Vivienne Dayrell_
Is it Modernism?
Authors: McNabb Vincent
Published: July 2007

The late Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford has published what we must call a scholarly and painful book. Only a scholar brought up in the atmosphere of a modern University could have written as Bishop Headlam has written on ‘Jesus the Christ.’ Even the ‘Map,’ which is duly heralded on the title-page, has that note of scholarship which the older Universities, with their dogged craftsmanship, keep amidst a machine-mad world.

It goes without saying that there is a long, well-documented account of ‘Modern Criticism,’ which the Bishop chivalrously calls ‘learned criticism.’ As his Lordship does not altogether agree with the findings of the learned criticism, he therefore saves us from the charge of paradox in our having suggested that a work can be at once scholarly and painful;

i.e. the fruit of research, yet wide of the truth, or, in other words, learned but wrong.

Everywhere is seen the scholarly hand of the Biblical archeologist. We have most fascinating accounts of the road-system, which indeed has a place of honour in the Appendix. In a book of some 340 pages, more than a half are given over to that geographical, political and ecclesiastical learning which naturally springs up in an atmosphere of modern books. The student, therefore, who is seeking an almost cinematically vivid picture of the times of Jesus Christ will be grateful to the Bishop of Gloucester for his book. We have said much in saying that there are pages in it as thrilling as a work of fiction.
France and Birth Control
Authors: Gwynn Denis
Published: July 2007

In his new study of The Problem of Population, Mr. Harold Cox presents the popular case for birth-control with his customary lucidity and with that command of statistics that can compel conviction for any argument. But one rubs one’s eyes with amazement to find so stalwart a champion of individual liberty carried, by his enthusiasm for what he regards as the moral duty of birth-control, into advocating the most intolerable of all forms of State interference with personal rights. Can it indeed be Mr. Harold Cox who declares emphatically (p. 153) for the compulsory sterilisation by State-appointed practitioners, of large classes of mankind? ‘To sum up,’ he concludes roundly, ‘those persons who, as the result of physical or mental defects, are unfitted to produce children should be sterilised, with their consent or with the consent of their guardians, at the expense of the State.’ One wonders whether Mr. Cox himself, or any one of his friends whom he might name at random, would be able to satisfy a Government medical board that they possess that ‘freedom from any heritable taint’ which he postulates as being the essential condition of the right to have children. If words have any meaning at all, Mr. Cox expressly asserts that anyone in whose family there is hereditary disease— be it blindness or consumption or mental instability— must be ruthlessly forced to undergo a sterilising operation.

Mr. Cox bases his case upon the sordid conditions that over-population has produced in all countries ancient and modern—in the west of Ireland before the famine of the forties, or in the teeming villages of China, as much as in the slums of Glasgow or Liverpool.
The Life of Mark Sykes.
Authors: Chesterton G. K.
Published: July 2007

The book before me opens with the following words: ‘In the year of the Incarnation of our Lord 1879, and of the Hegira of the Prophet 1296, and on the Eve of the Feast of St. Patrick, an only child was born to Sir Tatton Sykes, Baronet, of Sled-mere, in the county of York, and to Jessica Christina his lawful wife. Mark Sykes was this only son, and he always remained the original child of original parents.’ It may be added that he ended by securing an original biographer. When a biography begins with a sentence like that, we know, long before such guesses are commonly possible in more conventional cases, that the author is not a hack or a humdrum eulogist, but a man with a sense of history as a background to biography. We know that the author is as interesting as the subject. And we could distinguish this quality of distinction, even if we had not seen on the title page the name of Shane Leslie. The first sentence, recording nothing but a fact such as is found in a directory or a genealogical tree, yet gathers round it a crystallisation of creeds and influences, like the conjunction of stars in some horoscope of a happier and more Christian astrology. We have foreshadowed, as in a dissolving view of historic visions, the influences inspiring the subject and his biographer; beginning with the greatest of all influences, the mystery and majesty of their common creed. The date is stated not only as a date, but as a dogma.
Professor Contardo Ferrini
Authors: Christitch A.
Published: July 2007

Twenty years ago there passed away in Italy one of the greatest exponents of Roman Law, whose researches won him a foremost place in the world of science, wresting for his native land the laurels which had hitherto been held by Germany, in the domain of Jurisprudence. The name of Contardo Ferrini, well-known as it is to present day jurists, bids fair to become familiar before long to every Catholic, inasmuch as the beatification process of its erudite bearer has already been introduced at Rome. The present Holy Father, intimately acquainted with the life and merits of Ferrini, was a warm supporter of his cause in 1905. It is therefore confidently hoped that good progress will be made during his pontificate. Pius X had already intimated the consolation it would give him to raise a university professor to the Altar.

The life of the modest, retiring scientist is a fresh proof that there is no contradiction between F aith and Science. The man for whom his teachers, the historian Mommsen, and the Byzantinist, Karl Zacharia von Lingenthal, prophesied a brilliant part in the restoration of a branch of learning then neglected in Italy, was a daily communicant, and spent every spare moment in converse with his Divine Master. ‘I pray God/ wrote Ferrini to an intimate friend,’ that prayer may never expire on my lips as long as I live, for that would be the end of my supernatural existence.’ Contardo Ferrini was born at Milan in 1859.
The Church in Sweden
Authors: Langton Edmund
Published: July 2007

With the possible exception of Norway and Finland there is no country in the civilized world so profoundly non-Catholic as Sweden. One talks vaguely of Holland and Sweden as both Protestant countries, but at least every third Dutchman is a Catholic, while there is not one among a thousand Swedes. Sweden has, in fact, a population of nearly six million souls, of whom not three thousand are Catholics. There are two little churches in Stockholm, one at Gottenburg, one at Malmo, and there are lowly chapels in one or two of the smaller towns scattered at huge intervals about this enormous, sparsely populated country. In all there are not more than eight or nine Catholic places of worship in Sweden, and there actually exist only two priests of Swedish birth. At Stockholm resides the Vicar Apostolic, who is a German, as are the majority of the priests in Sweden. Those at Gottenburg and Malmo are, however, Dutch. One of the two Swedish priests, a zealous and energetic man and an excellent linguist, edits the one Swedish Catholic newspaper, a monthly periodical, Credo, which has excited the interest and obtained the blessing of Cardinal Bourne, a gracious message from whom was printed in its pages last Christmas.

The Bishop’s church in Stockholm is situated in the Southern and smaller part of the town (Sodermalm) which is as far removed from the Northern part as Birkenhead is from Liverpool. It is a tiny red brick building and from outside bears a striking resemblance to a Primitive Methodist chapel. The Catholic Encyclopedia describes its interior decorations as being ‘tasteful.’ That is, perhaps, a matter of opinion, but at any rate the three altars are always adorned with beautiful flowers, and there is good music at High Mass on Sundays.
Pope and King
Authors: Britten James
Published: July 2007

Under the heading, ‘A Wonderful Demonstration,’ the English Churchman for April 19 gives an account of a meeting held at the Albert Hall nine days previously, announced as a ‘Great Protestant Appeal against the proposed Royal Visit to the Pope and to demand the withdrawal of the Envoy to the Vatican.’ The gathering ‘was a magnificent one.’

‘It was an inspiration to look upon that great sea of faces and to hear the stirring cries of ten thousand voices as they manifested their eager desire for the unequivocal preservation of the principles of freedom secured to this Protestant realm. . . People were only waiting and longing for a suitable opportunity of demonstrating the thoughts that were burning within them’ :

and according to another authority, the Protestant Woman, the announcement of the royal visit ‘has stirred them to their depths.’

Judging from the speech of Mr. Kensit, the Secretary of the United Protestant Council who organised the demonstration, the stirring was highly successful. All the Orange Lodges of Great Britain and Ireland sent messages of support; and although the old Orange threat to kick the King’s crown into the Boyne was not repeated, the Grand Orange Lodge of Scotland

‘pointed out respectfully that the King should remember that he holds his crown by virtue of being a Protestant’

and that

‘thousands of loyal Orangemen and Orangewomen will be forced, if this ongoing is continued, to reconsider their position, in’ that respect.’

One would have thought that a matter which had stirred Protestants to their depths and elicited ‘the prayers and longings of millions of loyal hearts’ would
Saint Thomas Aquinas, 1323–1923
Authors: Delany Bernard
Published: July 2007

One of the few advantages of living in the twentieth century is that we can keep centenaries. And judging by the yearly crop of these celebrations, it is an advantage we seem to make the most of. St. Dominic, St. Francis, St. Ignatius, St. Jerome, Dante, Napoleon, Shakespeare, Columbus, Cervantes, Shelley and Pascal have all of late been in the thoughts of those who glory in greatness and set store by antiquity. When we are wearied by our present woeful strifes or anxious about the ill-foreboding future, we can look back and take comfort in the past. It is natural that we, who are made for an eternal destiny, should find the thought of never-ending time entrancing; and length of days seems to us a symbol and a suggestion of eternity—a hint of immortality. A man who lives a hundred years is an object of praise and wonder, but the centenarian who preserved all the grace and sprightliness of youth would be an object of envy too. It is precisely this combination that attracts us in a centenary. We are not simply revering immemorial age : we are honouring someone who has been proof against time’s decay, who is ever ancient yet ever new, as old as the hills yet as fresh as the dawn.

This month we keep the six hundredth anniversary of the canonization of St. Thomas Aquinas. The occasion seems appropriate to indulge a few reflections upon the enthusiastic interest his name still evokes, and to remind ourselves that the influence of his genius is as strong upon the minds of men of all schools of thought to-day as it was when the Church set her seal upon his greatness six hundred years ago.
Dante in Purgatory
Authors: Makepeace John Foster
Published: July 2007

Of the three Canticas of the Commedia the hardest for a non-Catholic to understand is the Purga-torio; because the entire conception of purgatory is foreign to his mind. Hence we find even devout men like H. F. Cary, who has general sympathy with Dante’s teaching, misunderstand him here. For example, upon the well-known lines (x. 106-in, which shall be quoted from his own translation):

‘Reader! I would not that amazed thou miss Of thy good purpose, hearing how just God Decrees our debts be cancel’d. Pander not The form of suffering. Think on what succeeds :

Think that, at worst, beyond the mighty doom It cannot pass.’

Cary’s comment is : ‘This is, in truth, an unanswerable objection to the doctrine of Purgatory. It is difficult to conceive how the best can meet death without horror, if they believe it must be followed by immediate and intense suffering.’ And Leigh Hunt, in his Italian Poets, refers to this comment with approval, after his own manner, that is to say, in less refined language.

‘The purpose of this article is to show how Dante himself, on the contrary, represents the attitude of the Holy Souls towards their own sufferings in Purgatory.

There are thirty-three cantos in the Purgatorio. The first nine of these are occupied with the Ante-purgatory, the middle cantos with Purgatory itself, and the last six with the ‘Earthly Paradise.’ It is very important to bear this fact in mind because the main interest of the drama of the ‘Second Kingdom’ lies in the Ante-purgatory, and the key to its interpretation may be found there.

Every reader of Dante will remember its lovely opening verse : ‘I will sing of that second Kingdom where the human spirit is purified and becomes worthy to ascend to heaven.’
History
Authors: Rope H. E. G.
Published: July 2007

’ The pageant of the ages I behold,

The high ennobling struggle of mankind, Heart-stirring as a trumpet is unroll’d Before my eyes, to quicken will and mind.’

‘Record of crimes and follies, age by age,

The shame of fallen man repeated still,

His vain presumption; here and there a page Of glory in a library of ill.’

Thus youth and eld have bandied to and fro Age after age their still unspent debate.

But wisdom God-inspir’d said long ago :

While knowledge groweth sorrows aggravate.

Youth’s ardour, sadness of experience,

Man fallen, and God’s judgments manifold, Life’s landscape, human history now dense And murk, now sunlight-gladden’d, I behold.

Interpret well the lesson, see it whole;

Lose not thyself amid the forest maze,

Roam not at random; see and mark, my soul, And thou shalt firmlier tread the appointed ways.

H. E. G. Rope.
About the Foreign Missions
Authors: Atteridge A. Hilliard
Published: July 2007

One of the most satisfactory features in the programme of the Birmingham Catholic Congress is the announcement of the great missionary exhibition at Bingley Hall. We had a missionary exhibition on a smaller scale at Westminster last year. As a first effort of the kind it was very creditable to its promoters, though it had the defects of a first attempt. Its scope was necessarily limited. It was rather a group of small exhibitions bearing on the work of some of our mission organisations, than a well-organised demonstration of Catholic missionary enterprise as a whole. We may hope that the Bingley Hall Exhibition will show a considerable advance in this respect; and further, that it will be the first of a series of Congress Exhibitions, representing more and more efficiently at each of these Catholic gatherings the development of the foreign missions.

Speaking of the missions at the Liverpool National Catholic Congress, Cardinal Bourne said :

‘There is, in truth, solid evidence that the work of the Foreign Missions is winning for itself a much more important place in the hearts of the Catholics of England and Wales, and every effort must be made to maintain and increase this interest. It is more than likely that before long the Apostolic See will call upon the whole Catholic world for a more widespread, more completely developed, more effective, and fully international organization of the missionary activities of the Church. If, and when that moment comes, the Catholics of England and Wales must not be wanting in zeal, devotion and generosity.’

This forecast has been amply verified. The Holy See has made its appeal to the zeal and generosity of the Catholic world, and shown its appreciation of the work of the Propagation of the Faith by transferring the central direction of the Association to Rome itself.
The Visitation
Authors: Moore E. Hamilton
Published: July 2007

Distaff and spindle idle laid,

Forth with this tiding, unafraid,

On Jewry’s hills her gracious feet Move like the hind at morning fleet: Quarn felix ea!

Good Zachary, whose lips are dumb, With praiseful heart beholds her come. To greet her runs Elizabeth— Magnificat then Our Lady saith, Anima mea!

E. Hamilton Moore.
Catholic and Protestant Economics
Authors: Gwynn Denis
Published: July 2007

The title of Dr. O’Brien’s new volume is somewhat misleading. The immense research which he has here condensed into less than two hundred pages is concerned, not with a description of the practical effects of the Reformation in breaking down the social and economic life of the Middle Ages, but ‘exclusively with the effects of the Reformation on economic thought and theory.’ He disclaims all intention of writing history, on the ground that it would involve a complete study of Europe since the middle of the sixteenth century. He confines himself to the discussion of a thesis which challenges unending controversies, setting himself ‘to prove that both capitalism and socialism alike can be shown to have had their origin in the Protestant Reformation.’

At first sight, such a discussion would appear to be purely academic. But Dr. O’Brien raises questions which go to the root of all modern social reform. Whereas the standard teaching of the economists generally explains the intolerable tyranny which we understand by modern capitalism as the natural outcome of the industrial revolution, Dr. O’Brien maintains with great ability—and he supports his argument with a fiiass of evidence from recognised authorities M Half-a-dozen countries—that it was not the industrial revolution which produced capitalism, but capitalism (as he interprets it) which produced the industrial revolution. In other words, capitalism cannot Kl regarded as the result of natural economic development; Dr. O’Brien maintains that it is the outcome of a fsflse philosophy of human life.