bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Return of the Just Price
Authors: Nevin Edward
Published: July 2007

A great deal has been heard of late of the problem of reconciling one aim of economic policy, that of stability, or full employment as it is usually expressed nowadays, with another aim, that of economic efficiency. But stability and efficiency do not exhaust the list of the rightful aims of economic policy. There is a third, since the economic system should be not only efficient and reasonably stable but should also be just. This third element, justice, has received relatively little attention in modern economic analysis, but this is in direct contrast with the discussions of economic matters found in the scholastic philosophers. In their treatises, the one thing about price which they emphasise is that it must be a just price. They devoted little space to any direct consideration of those aspects of human economic activities which bear upon the stability or efficiency of the system, but a great deal to those aspects which treat of justice as between man and man. Does this mean that the medieval writers were very poor economists? They have indeed been treated as such in the textbooks on the development of economic thought. But recent developments of economics are giving cause for some reassessment, here as elsewhere.
No Disturbing Renown
Authors: Eden Helen Parry
Published: July 2007

When Wilfrid and Alice Meynell visited Francis Thompson at Pantasaph, Alice wrote of her fellow-poet who was lodging in a cottage at the monastery gates, ‘There is no disturbing renown to be got among the cabins of the Flintshire hills’. She envied the Franciscan peace to which her friend came homeward at nightfall. Viola Meynell’s gracious and discerning account of Wilfrid Meynell and Francis Thompson shows a strong personality and a weak one fulfilling each other in the Christian charity that makes give and take possible, and united in serving three things recognised by their age as worth individual sacrifice—religion, domestic love and poetry. Journalist and poet, happy if hard-pressed father of seven children and waif of the London streets, their unique and self-effacing collaboration did more for the conversion of the England of their day than any publicist is likely to achieve for ours. As in some sort one of their converts, I should like to glance at this aspect of Viola Meynell’s book and endorse it from my own experience.
Religion in Primitive Society
Authors: Evans‐Pritchard E. E.
Published: July 2007

Early European travellers among savage peoples generally related that they had little or no religion. Anthropological writers often give the impression that they have little else. This contrast is, of course, to some extent accounted for by the great increase in knowledge about these peoples, but it is also due to a wider definition in modern times of what may be regarded as a religious fact. If the early traveller found among a people nothing corresponding to what he himself had been brought up to regard as religion he was prone to report that they had no religion, only some superstitions. As, however, the definition of religion was extended by anthropologists to cover ancestor cults, totemic observances, fetishism, and even magic and witchcraft, the part played by religious conceptions in the simpler societies received greater emphasis. The widening of the definition would seem to be due in part to changes in our own intellectual atmosphere. The early explorers were Christians. The early anthropologists were not. For the explorers had religion and the savage had not. But the positivism of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, associated in most people’s minds with the name of Comte, had had so strong an influence that the positions tended to become reversed in anthropological theories from the middle of last century till well into the present one. Since it was then held that religion is a way of thinking characteristic of the earliest phase of human development, savages had to be portrayed as totally lost in its darkness. Sir James Frazer, speaking of primitive religion, asserted that ‘the life of the savage is saturated with it’. Lévy-Bruhl declared that ‘the reality in which primitive peoples move is itself mystical’.
A New Bible Commentary
Authors: Crichton J. D.
Published: July 2007

Our age may have many defects but it also has its virtues. One of them is a resolute search for authenticity, for the real and the genuine. This has shown itself in various ways, among which we can number the ‘return to original sources’, urged so long ago by Leo XIII. The revival of biblical scholarship in the last sixty years and the increasing and widespread practice among the laity of reading the Bible are among the most reassuring signs of the Church’s vitality at the present day. But a growing familiarity with the word of God is accompanied by a realisation of the difficulties that lie in wait for the ordinary reader. Higher Criticism is no longer the menace it was, but most of us carry about, as the familiar furniture of our minds, vague reminiscences of what the critics have said, so that when we read the Pentateuch we are aware that it has been carved up into four, if not more, sources and that R (or even R 1, 2, 3), is said to be the author rather than Moses. When we read the lovely oracles of the second part of Isaiah we remember that obscure Germans have taught that they were written by a committee and that they are prophecies post eventum. Compared with these matters, the standing still of the sun for Joshua, or whether Jonah was or was not eaten by a whale or by another as yet zoologically unverified sea-monster, are comparatively easy questions.
The Finaly Case and the Church
Authors: Hill Roland
Published: July 2007

No event has so stirred up the dormant forces of anti-clericalism, anti-semitism and nationalism in post-war France as has the recent Affaire Finaly. The fate of two Jewish children, Robert and Gerard Finaly, who were baptised and taken to Spain by their Catholic protectors when the court had ordered that they should be given up to their Jewish relatives, have become a national scandal comparable to the Dreyfus affair. The Church and individual Catholics have been the targets of bitter attacks in the French press and radio, and the old cleavage between Catholic and anti-Catholic Frenchmen, barely healed in the last war and in the changed political atmosphere since 1945, seems to have opened up again.

The facts of the case are briefly these: The Jewish doctor, Fritz Finaly, and his wife, who had found refuge in France after the Nazi occupation of Austria, were arrested in Grenoble by the Gestapo on February 14, 1944. They were sent to Buchenwald concentration camp where they were killed in the gas chamber. Shortly before their deportation they had entrusted their two children, then aged two and three years, to the Sisters of St Vincent de Paul. The mother superior of that convent was unable to keep them and approached the Sisters of Notre Dame de Sion who handed the children to Mlle Brun, the head of the municipal orphanage, who was already hiding ten other Jewish children.
Nuclear Physics and Philosophy
Authors: Reeves John Baptist
Published: July 2007

Many mathematicians know their details but are ignorant of the philosophical characterisation of their science.’ It was A. N. Whitehead who wrote this. He himself made an admirable effort to supply the defect. Assuming that no recognised philosopher knew enough of the details of mathematical science to give a reliable account of it, he read, besides Plato and Aristotle, a selection of seventeenth-century writers—particularly Descartes, Newton, Locke, Hume, Kant—who either knew enough about mathematics to be helpful, or little enough to show in what new way philosophy must be handled to meet the mathematicians’ need. He then wrote Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology, which he delivered as the Gifford Lectures for 1927-28 and published in book form in 1929. It is less exclusively addressed to mathematicians than the earlier work he had begun with Bertrand Russell and then abandoned; but its whole drive aims at setting the sciences that use mathematics in their full philosophical and spiritual context. By the time it was finished the revolution worked in physics by the theories of quanta and relativity was firmly established. The work took into account, with full approval, the new cosmological outlook the change implied.
Savonarola and the Renaissance
Authors: Weiss Roberto
Published: July 2007

The contrast between Savonarola and his times was not as vivid as had been imagined. Much of what he stood for was but the logical corollary to many of the aspirations of Renaissance men, a fact which explains in more than one way the success he enjoyed in the Florence of the Medici. Such a success in that town is even more remarkable when one realises that Savonarola was not a Florentine by birth. This must be pointed out, since the inhabitants of Florence looked down upon the other Italians as inferior beings, who behaved boorishly and spoke in absurdly ridiculous dialects. He came instead from Ferrara in north Italy. Now during the fifteenth century Ferrara was in more than one way the capital of the north Italian Renaissance. Yet Savonarola’s home atmosphere was by no means that of Cossa’s dazzling frescoes in the Schifanoia palace. What instead dominated it was the rigid puritanism of his grandfather, the court physician Michele Savonarola, a narrow scholar still intellectually in the middle ages. Michele saw to his grandson’s upbringing, and from him the young Savonarola acquired a remarkable taste for Holy Scripture. Still the attraction of Petrarch’s love lyric did not by-pass him altogether.
A Simple Meditation on Spanish Travel for the Ingenuous Tourist
Authors: Sarmiento Edward
Published: July 2007

Can the traveller abroad penetrate the ethos of a country? If there is such a thing, the traveller, properly so-called, may do so. But is the modern tourist properly to be called a traveller? Both elements in our preliminary question are so doubtful that it is difficult to see whether what we want to say is worth the attempt. But at least, when abroad, we are conscious of difference, whether it is superficial or deep we are less able to gauge. The danger is of supposing it, on the one hand, to be all a matter of climate and food-supply, and, on the other, of carrying it so deep as to forget our common humanity. As to the tourist, we can admit him as a traveller on this simple point of difference: if he seeks difference as a titillation, for the sake of a change, to forget for a fortnight the monotony of his office and the anxieties of his personal life, he is, what he is perfectly entitled to be, a man on his holiday; but if he is prepared to study his subject beforehand, to bring philosophic principles to bear on the differences, he observes in the new environment, to reflect on them afterwards, to beware of false generalisations and biassed conclusions, he is a serious traveller, if only for a fortnight, even though merely a tourist.
Moral Dilemmas
Authors: Congar Yves
Published: July 2007

The following article is concerned with discovering a basis for a more mature spiritual life, especially in the case of men. Three different viewpoints are successively adopted, from each of which man’s development is traced from childhood, through adolescence to complete maturity; at each stage far-reaching changes are seen to take place, and about the age of forty to forty-five a crisis normally occurs, which we shall have to discuss in some detail.

A child is utterly self-centred, though his charm and simplicity prevent this from shocking us as it would in a grown-up. In his actions he always aims at getting his own way, which to a large extent means satisfying his physical needs.

As he grows into a youth he enters into fuller possession of his mental and physical powers. He is haunted by the spirit of adventure and by vague ambitions (ambition itself, less generous, comes only later), for there seems no limit to what he is able to do. But for all his openness of heart he remains somewhat self-centred; it is the things that will allow him to live his own life, with his own personality, that he is striving after.
Moral Dilemmas
Authors: Vann Gerald
Published: July 2007

One of the pastoral problems which loom very large in these days is that of the Catholics who, having entered upon a marriage which the Church cannot recognise as such, then find themselves tortured in mind by their consequent separation from the sacramental life of the Church, and long to return to it but see no way of doing so. What is to be done for them? How are they to be advised?

It is as useless as it is heartless to say simply that they have only themselves to blame: that they sinned in contracting a marriage which is no marriage at all, and that the Church will receive them back when, and only when, they renounce it. In practice this is harmful, since it may well drive them completely and finally away from the Church. In theory it is bad theology, because it simplifies what is in reality complex, and refuses to face all the facts of a human situation. Ethics is not an exact science, precisely because its business is with the complexities and untidiness of human action in the concrete; and indeed the ultimate ethical judgment, as to what A is to do here and now, is not a question of science merely but of art, the art of prudence. We might well recall here some wise words of M. Maritain: ‘Some people imagine that morality measures our actions, not in the light of the just human ends which they ought to be aiming at in the given circumstances, but by a forest of abstract formulae which life must copy like a book. ... In reality the principles of morals are not theorems or idols: they are the supreme rules governing a concrete activity the aim of which is something to be done in certain definite circumstances, and governing it through more proximate rules and above all through the rules, which are never set down in advance, of the virtue of prudence. . . . They do not seek to devour human life; they are there to build it up.
Frederick Ozanam, Christian and Democrat
Authors: Langdale James
Published: July 2007

The centenary of the death of Frederick Ozanam has passed practically unnoticed. A few articles in the Catholic Press, a couple of small and unpretentious works from Ireland, a meeting of the Brothers of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul in Paris 5 this seems a meagre tribute to pay to one of the greatest Catholic laymen of our time. The reason is, I think, that Ozanam presents a difficult problem for many of his most fervent admirers. They are attracted by his spirituality, his deep sense of Christian charity, his love of God and of the poor. But there is a whole side of Ozanam which is out of keeping with what English Catholic publicists are pleased to call the ‘Catholic tradition’. He was a man of bold and original views, a republican, a radical and a democrat at a time when most French Catholics were devoted to the principles of absolute monarchy; he had an intense dislike for aggressive apologetics, and showed to Protestants and unbelievers a spirit of tolerance which many considered to be treason to the Faith. The failure of the revolution of 1848, the dictatorship of Louis Napoleon and the rejection of democracy by Pius IX, dealt a crushing blow to all the social and political ideals of Christian democracy for which Ozanam had fought, and his hagio- graphers have therefore had a tendency to suppress or tone down the more awkward facts, presenting us with edifying little biographies, full of touching and pious incidents, which fail absolutely to give us an idea of his striking originality.
Second Thoughts on the Priest‐Workers
Authors: Fitzsimons John
Published: July 2007

In recent times no Catholic subject has attracted such widespread attention as the affair of the priest-workers in France. The various phases of the negotiations between the French Hierarchy and the Vatican were widely reported in the English press; in one week the matter was discussed in a leader in the Manchester Guardian, in an article in the New Statesman and in a talk on the Third Programme. Some commentators seemed to see in it an attempt by the Church in France to revolt against the dominance of the Vatican, on the principle that if you scratch a French bishop you find a Gallican; others seemed to feel that the episode revealed the Church (in France as elsewhere) in its true colours as anti-worker; others yet again insinuated that a halt had to be called to the desertions that were taking place from the ranks of the priest-workers to the Communists. Yet to appreciate the recent decisions of the French bishops, the priest-workers must be seen in the context of the whole problem of the Church and the workers in France, and of the worker apostolate which existed long before the experiment of the priest-workers was begun. In other words, the directives issued by the Assembly of Cardinals and Archbishops to the leaders of worker Catholic Action in October are as significant as the new instructions regarding the position of priest-workers.

The picture is falsified unless the priest-worker is seen as part of the whole worker apostolate and that against the background of the growth of social Catholicism in France.
Latin American
Authors: Evans Illtud
Published: July 2007

Latin America accounts for more than a third of the world’s Catholic population but for less than nine per cent of the world’s priests. The disproportion between these figures is the cardinal factor in the religious situation of a vast area almost wholly Catholic in nominal allegiance but which today presents one of the most urgent of the Church’s missionary problems.

The evidence of statistics is never the whole of any story, but the facts are so grave and their significance so little appreciated that this weakening of the Church’s essential function in South America must be further illustrated. It is usually assumed that a proportion of one priest to a thousand faithful is the barest minimum for assuring the Church’s basic ministrations. (In countries predominantly Protestant the ratio is much higher. Thus England and Wales have a proportion of one priest to about 450, the United States one to 622.) For the whole of Latin America the proportion is one to 7,000, with considerable variations in the different republics. (In Chile it is one to 3,000; in Argentina one to 4,750; in Brazil one to 8,000; in Honduras one to 10,350; in Guatemala one to 28,000.) The effective ministry of the priests there are (and in most countries many are in any case old) is hindered above all by the brute facts of geography. Thus in Venezuela a population of 4,500,000 is served by 800 priests, of whom 160 are at work in the diocese of Caracas alone. The remaining 640 are dispersed through a territory six times the size of France.
Rhyme and Reason
Authors: Davie Ian
Published: July 2007

A Poem provides an enclosed domain for investigation, challenging the critic to discover how it is constructed, how its formal structure is related to the complex effect it gives, how metrical means are related to poetic ends. Although kinship of form provides the critic with a positive basis for comparison in the treatment of different poems, the emphasis seems now to have shifted from the study of a poem’s shared and inherited qualities to the study of what is distinctive or typical of the age in which it is written; as a result, little attention is paid to the diversity of poetic forms—distinct, vital and active in themselves—working in the minds of many different poets independently, towards the same kind of poetic result.

Yet the fixed poetic forms and prescribed measures have a sort of philosophic beauty of their own. The poet must commit his feelings to their determination within some chosen form. The nature of his material sets a problem to be solved, and the solution is the poetic ordering of that material: he will, therefore, imagine each effect in relation to the technical means necessary for its accomplishment, by so distributing his rhymes, for example, that the emphasis derived from rhyme in one part is exactly neutralized by a similar concentration upon another.

The subject-matter of a poem exercises a remote control over the poet’s choice of words, and its form an immediate control, the metrical scheme tightening the interpretation of the grammar. Words have certain degrees of elevation in the scale of language.
Lost Opportunities
Authors: Langdale James
Published: July 2007

In a previous article, I pointed out that Frederic Ozanam, the great and saintly founder of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, had in the course of his lectures on Commercial Law at the University of Lyons in 1839 outlined a remarkable system of Christian social reforms. He had denounced the exploitation of the working classes, which he described as slavery, he called for a just wage, profit-sharing and even pensions—over fifty years before Leo XIII published the encyclical Rerum Novarum. And Ozanam was not the only French Catholic to be moved by the spectacle of working-class misery which grew in intensity with the development of the Industrial Revolution. Conservatives like Villeneuve-Bargemont and Charles de Coux had denounced the evil effects of industrialism, and Royahsts claimed that the plight of the workers was due to the Revolution which had made their exploitation possible by destroying the Guilds of the ancien regime. Other Catholics were influenced by the doctrines of the early Socialist thinkers, such as Saint-Simon and Fourrier. The most notable of these were the group of working men who, under the leadership of Buchez, founded a paper called l’Atelier, some of the pages of which make stimulating and startling reading even today. The vigorous and progressive spirit of this elite of French Catholic social thinkers is best rendered by the Abbe (afterwards Mgr) Maret, the friend and collaborator of Ozanam and Lacordaire, who (before Marx and Proudhon had given to the word ‘socialism’ its materialistic and atheistic connotation) wrote: ‘It is no use refuting the pseudo-socialists, let us become socialists ourselves’.
Bilingualism and the Schools of Wales
Authors: Foster Idris
Published: July 2007

It is laid down in Section 4(i) of the Education Act 1944 that ‘there shall be two Central Advisory Councils for Education, one for England and the other for Wales and Monmouthshire, and it shall be the duty of those Councils to advise the Minister upon such matters connected with educational theory and practice as they think fit and upon any questions referred to them by him’.

The Central Advisory Council for Wales has already published three substantial reports: they deal with the future of secondary education in Wales, with county colleges and with The place of Welsh and English in the schools of Wales. This last report, which is the result of two years of hard work, is an impressive volume and its contents merit an extended notice. By nature of its terms of reference, which include ‘the problem of bilingualism in Wales generally’, it is a document of the greatest importance not only for those who are bound to be concerned with education in Wales but also for all who feel any concern for the future of the Welsh nation.

The historical setting of the problem is presented in the first two sections of the Report. The first gives a comprehensive and valuable account of the place of Welsh and English in the schools between 1650 and 1925: the former date marks the foundation of nearly sixty free schools in Wales under the ‘Act for the Better Propagation of the Gospel’, and the latter was the year which saw the appointment of the Departmental Committee whose inspiring but as yet, after a quarter of a century, not fully implemented report on Welsh in Education and Life was published in 1927.
Nature and Natural Theology
Authors: Bright Laurence
Published: July 2007

Those who consider theology worth talking about, form perhaps a very small minority in the country; but at least, apart from Marxists, or humanists at our older Universities, very few of them would still maintain that it has finally been disposed of by science. Against the background threat of total destruction, modem efforts are preferably directed to integrating what has been inherited; so it is the relation rather than the conflict of science and religion which now provides the usual theme in public lectures on those subjects. Two recent publications may exemplify this contrast of styles between old and new.

There is little to show that the greater part of Professor Price’s Eddington memorial lecture was not written thirty or more years ago. Its argument begins with the claim that ‘the materialistic conception of human personality ... is accepted nowadays, almost as a matter of course, by the majority of Western educated people’. Though there is a disagreement as to the exact form materiahsm takes (Epiphenomenalism, Behaviourism, Marxism are suggested ways), it is at least certain, according to science, that ‘mental processes are inseparable from bodily ones’. Since theism, our natural knowledge of God exclusive of particular revelation (though Professor Price’s scope is wider, the essential point lies here), depends on some direct awareness of him, unmediated by the senses, it is thoroughly discredited in a scientific age. But a ray of hope shone through the general gloom on the day ‘when the Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882 by a brilliant group of Cambridge men’.
Where the Television Critic Comes In
Authors: Lockhart Freda Bruce
Published: July 2007

Excuses that television is still only in the experimental stage are platitudinous but inevitable. Television criticism too is still forcedly exploratory, critics being of their nature parasites unable to advance beyond the medium which provides their material.

Television criticism hitherto stems from two sources: radio criticism and film criticism. To both the radio critic and the film critic television is, at present anyway, a more cumbersome, unwieldy, more realistic medium, more concerned with what it presents than how it presents it. Enjoying neither the incorporeal detachment of radio, nor the manoeuvrability of celluloid, it lacks the fluidity and flexibility of both radio and cinema. Until now, too, it falls far short of the purely visual achievements of the cinema, so that programmes of any visual appeal at all stand out in lonely splendour in the viewer’s memory: the Coronation of course (among its many other and more important achievements) was one, the St Denis High Mass another; but an otherwise often tedious and heavily criticized programme, Lime Grove’s Elizabethan evening, was also a pleasure to the eye as few TV programmes are.

Television in fact overlaps at many points with radio (not always to the disadvantage of ‘steam’ radio); at others it complements the cinema (by now it should be clear that each is going to need the other). More important for the critic is to determine where television differs from the other mechanised media of communication; what its own properties are..
The Appeal to Sound Learning—I
Authors: St John Henry
Published: July 2007

The apologetic defence of the central Anglican position, if the extremes of Anglo-Catholic papalism and Protestant fundamentalism are excepted, finch its final justification in an appeal to sound learning. The formula is Bishop Creighton’s. It was the application of this principle, he maintained, that brought about the changes made in the English Church in the sixteenth century. Not that the Church of England claims a monopoly of learning, but that it owes its present existence to the fact that the theology and devotional life of Western Christendom, of which up to the Reformation it was an integral part, had become overweighted and distorted in its development, and was maintaining an ecclesiastical system that obscured rather than illustrated the vital principles on which the Christian life is founded.

Efforts at reform from within were defeated because the logical fabric of scholastic theology on which it rested was so strong that it was difficult to deal with it in detail; it was hard to see where reform was to begin or where it was to end. Reforming efforts resulted in a sense of hopeless weariness, and at length it became apparent that reform was only possible by returning to the principles of sound learning. It was these principles that were applied during the formative years of the Reformation, not by any one great leader whose personality impressed itself upon the changes that were made, but by the long process of the aspirations which have sprung from these principles, producing by gradual evolution the formularies, and in particular the Prayer Book, from which the Anglican oudook and ethos derive.
Religion as the Writer's Theme A Blackfriars Conference
Authors: Evans Illtud
Published: July 2007

In an age of conferences the hope of an agreed conclusion most often overshadows the discussion, and the reassurance of public opinion can be a more powerful motive than the painful search for the truth. In July, the third of a series of Conferences being held this year at Spode House, Hawkesyard, on ‘Religion and the Arts’ was devoted to the Christian writer, and if its theme seemed vague it was at least happily free from the larger generalizations. The intention was not to produce a manifesto or to try to resolve the difficulties of a Catholic writer confronted with a world which at so many points rejects the religious and moral premisses that must be his. It was, rather, an opportunity for considering some of the factors in a debate that has suffered from lack of definition, and this was done in a setting of common faith and common life (if only for a few days), for want of which the writer or critic who is a Catholic can feel a special isolation.

Forty people came to the Conference and they represented no one but themselves. For the most part they were either contributors to this journal or critical readers of it; professionally they included university dons, working journalists, students, booksellers, creative writers of (as they would admit) varying degrees of achievement, and priests whose work requires them to be specially concerned with the written word. ‘Religion as the Writer’s Theme’ was the general subject of the lectures and discussions.
Dante as a Religious Poet
Authors: Foster Kenelm
Published: July 2007

The commonplace that Dante is a religious poet prompts one to ask what this compound term means; but for my purpose it suffices to define religion as an interior state of submissive attention to God, and poetry as an interior state of creative attention to things—that is, an attention which tends essentially to express experience as completely as possible in words. Religion, in this sense, is not necessarily Christianity, though Christianity presupposes it; still less is it the doctrine or the external observances of any given religion. Similarly poetry, in this sense, is not any particular poem or poems, though these all presuppose it. Both terms refer to interior states which may be found in any human soul. And as defined, these two states are clearly distinct. And the distinction is supported a posteriori by the fact that most religious people are not, except in remote potency, poets and that many poets are not, except in remote potency, religious. The two states, however, though distinct, are not incompatible and have in fact often been found together; but when this happens there is a certain overlapping of interests, causing tensions and problems varying with the circumstances and characters of the religious poets concerned. In Gerard Hopkins, for instance, the tension was between poetry and his priestly vocation; and there is no more tragic case known to us, because in no one else have the two gifts and capacities appeared at a greater intensity simultaneously. Dante’s case is very different: if he felt this tension at all, he must have felt it less intensely; because for him there was no question of sacrificing poetry to religion, but (if anything) of sacrificing one sort of poetry (of secular inspiration) to another sort (of religious inspiration).
Faith and Words
Authors: Attwater Donald
Published: July 2007

‘We have on the one side auoided the scrupulositie of the Puritanes . . .; as also on the other side we haue shunned the obscuritie of the Papists, in their Azimes, Tutiike, Rational, Holocausts, Praepuce, Pasche, and a number of such like.’

. . . [Catholic] correspondence of a singular freshness, authentic eighteenth-century, and authentic English, mere English, indeed, and utterly free from the stereotyped halfforeign jargon that later generations were to experience.’

‘The fruits of the bloody sacrifice are superabundantly applied by the unbloody sacrifice.’

‘I saw Pfuff’s “Interrelated Harmony” described in the catalogue as a neo-amorphist experiment in intra-abstractionism. It is also an embodiment of universal mode-concepts, and the absence of stress emphasizes the integral tranquillity. Whirlpools of space would be a more accurate description of these non-emotional facets of dynamic passivity.’

The first of these quotations is from the address to the reader of the translators of the Authorized Version of the Bible; the second is from a review in The Times Literary Supplement; the third is a contemporary theologian quoting from cap. 2 of session xxii of the Council of Trent; the fourth is from a satirical jape of ‘Beachcomber’. They are part of the harvest of a little desultory reading, and serve well enough as an indication of what I want to talk— or rather, muse—about: words.

Everything, however small, that can be a hindrance to faith is of importance; and as an experienced missioner has said, ‘language can in fact be a pretty effective hindrance’.
Vaughan Williams and the English Tradition
Authors: Taylor Eric
Published: July 2007

It is curious how the leadership of the musical world has passed from one country to another. This is not always merely the result of fashion or of social causes: it really does appear that the muses are migratory. The commanding influence exerted by any country at one time has tended to swamp or, to change the metaphor, at least obscure the native art of others. One has only to think of the tremendous impact of Italian, and later of German, music in this country to realize this. So complete and far-reaching has the predominance been on occasion that an appearance of a truly international musical style has been given. This was never more clearly true than in the eighteenth century, when the process was aided by a social and aristocratic internationalism. Nevertheless, every nation has a characteristic musical tradition of its own, even though the tradition may sometimes only be traced with difficulty, being continued by a host of minor, forgotten composers. Thus, even in eighteenth-century England, which is popularly regarded as a locus classicus of a trough in a musical tradition, there were composers such as Boyce who spoke in unmistakably English accents.

What it is that causes and perpetuates national characteristics is a matter for conjecture. Rousseau attributed it to the influence, via song, of language; but, though there may be some truth in this, it is certainly an inadequate explanation. It is more important to give some account of what is meant by a national tradition, lest the cynic should suspect mere jingoism or an attempt to excuse second-rate music.
Father Vincent McNabb in the Field
Authors: Delany Bernard
Published: July 2007

In a noble tribute to the late Hilaire Belloc at the Requiem Mass in Westminster Cathedral last year Monsignor Knox spoke in passing of Father Vincent McNabb—the champion-in-arms and inspiration of Belloc and Chesterton and the brilliant group of Catholics among whom they moved; ‘Father Vincent’, he said, ‘who has left us so little record of his splendid gifts’. Some of us could not help wondering what exactly the preacher meant by that little aside. Was it an appraisement of Father Vincent’s thirty-eight published books and the many pamphlets and articles which he buried in the back numbers of innumerable journals and reviews? Perhaps it only meant that Father Vincent has left us no great massive work of primary importance, accepted as a permanent contribution to knowledge. His acute mind, extraordinary capacity for original thought, and the vital intellectual energy he poured into everything he did would seem to have made such a magnum opus possible. His two earliest books on Faith and Prayer (recently republished in one volume) showed promise that his theological writing might have developed on the highest classical level. Those who knew him may be inclined to say that he was too much the poet and artist to be tied down to technical theology and that anyhow his romantic temperament gave another bent to his genius. But whatever the explanation, although there is so much that is profound, original and stimulating in his published writings, he has left us no full-length, sustained study comparable to one or other of the major works of Cardinal Newman. He has given us no Apologia or Summa.
The Menace of Mescalin
Authors: Zaehner R. C.
Published: July 2007

Mr Aldous Huxley has recently published yet another book. It is not a very good book; nor is it a very attractive book; but it is, alas, in its way an important book. Its importance consists in this: that anyone who may feel an inclination to enjoy, here and now, what Christians call the Beatific Vision or the experience which the Zen Buddhists call satori, has merely to buy himself three-pennyworth of mescalin at the nearest chemist’s, and behold, the ineffable vision is his. Whether or not the drug is available in this country in commercial quantities, I am afraid I have been too idle to find out. However, there it is for any who may care to make the experiment—heaven in a capsule.

It may be surprising to learn that Mr Huxley, who has for so long written in a tone of such great authority on mysticism and the mystical experience, confesses that before he achieved ‘liberation’ though mescalin, he had not actually had a mystical experience of any kind himself. ‘For’, says he, ‘until this morning I had known contemplation only in its humble, its more ordinary forms—as discursive thinking; as a rapt absorption in poetry or painting or music; as a patient waiting upon those inspirations, without which even the prosiest writer cannot hope to accomplish anything; as occasional glimpses in nature, of Wordsworth’s “something far more deeply interfused”; as systematic silence, leading, sometimes, to hints of an obscure knowledge.’
‘True Religion Now Established’
Authors: St John Henry
Published: July 2007

With the completion of the third volume of his massive history, Father Philip Hughes brings the story of the Reformation in England to an end, though it is an end only in the sense that the Elizabethan settlement had reached, at the death of the queen, a certain stability in its development. The first duty of a reviewer must surely be to congratulate Father Hughes on a great achievement. He has covered the whole general ground in closely-studied detail, exploring all the printed sources with patient and accurate industry. Yet, immense as is the mass of fact he makes use of to elucidate events and the factors controlling them, we are never allowed to feel that the vital issues are obscured rather than illuminated; they stand out in his narrative with invariable clarity. The disciplined learning of his treatment of the complex evidence will make his book, for a long time to come, a classical exposition of the Catholic point of view in Reformation history. The writing is distinguished by a deep and sometimes passionate conviction, yet it is conspicuously fair; this is acknowledged by scholars who do not share Father Hughes’ presuppositions. ‘An historian’s book for historians’, it has been called by one such scholar, ‘a work of real value to all who wish to study the English Reformation at an advanced level.’

The truth of the saying omnia abeunt in theologiam is specially observable in Reformation history. The greatest of the non-Catholic historians of the period, as Father Hughes sometimes shows, can be at a disadvantage in appreciating to the full the influence of theological presuppositions upon thought and action on both sides.
A Catechism for Adults: I.—“I believe”
Authors: Hislop Ian
Published: July 2007

At first sight there is something arid about a creed. But a Christian ignores the creed at his peril. It is fatally easy to drift along in a tide of emotional devotion, and precisely because our devotion is not disciplined by the rule of faith, to become stranded on the sands of sentiment. No individual has sufficient balance or insight to receive the full content of revelation, and each individual tends to inject some personal bias into his formulation of the faith; the tendency is to interpret in terms of our own psychological structure and interests. This is seen even in the great Saints and Doctors of the Chinch, but they, since they are holy, accept the correction of their bias from the Church, and receive, within the Church, a life that complements their insufficiency. This is even more markedly the case when the individual is living on his religious emotions, on unregulated devotional responses, which, since they lack the defining and purifying influence of the creeds, very easily degenerate into mere superstition. No doubt faith can co-exist with superstition; but the thorns grow very fast, and can soon choke the good seed. It is a good rule which says that the more strongly the emotions are stirred, the more urgently credal definition is required. This is not to say that emotion, feeling and devotion do not play their part in religion. Of course they do, for Christ claims the whole person, and human feeling is used by the Holy Spirit as a way in to the furthest places of the soul.
Temptation Bulldozer
Authors: Zacharias H. C. E.
Published: July 2007

Some time ago, when in San Francisco, I visited the Flood Mansion—a perfect replica of a magnificent Italian palazzo, correct down to the least detail, set on a commanding height of the city, with a glorious view across the laguna to the mainland. The interior more than kept the promise of the exterior—from the grandiose entrance hall and its sweep of a balustraded staircase well to the lovely furniture and interior decoration of the numberless rooms, salons, corridors and landings. Yet for all this artistic splendour, the dominating feeling it evoked in me was one of profound sadness. For the palazzo was dead, as was its former owner, and the heirs, refusing to live there, were making a gift of it to a Religious Congregation, which had moved in—so far quite inconspicuously.

What makes a mansion in Europe, of which this was such a faithful copy, to be what it is, is the fact that it is the family mansion—the place where gallant ancestors had lived and where the present head of the house was carrying on a family tradition which was being handed on to another generation, now growing up within its walls. A family—which included not only the actual kin, but tenants, servants, clients and all kinds of henchmen and hangers-on, all together forming a true social unit. The Flood Mansion by contrast was just a museum piece, the costly whim of a mulish individual with no pride of ancestry nor hope of progeny.
What is Europe?
Authors: Hill Roland
Published: July 2007

The origin of this work goes back to the winter of 1942 when a Conference of Allied Ministers of Education met in London to consider the possibility of producing a European history ‘of an objective character’ which might be available for general use after the war. The results of their deliberations are three volumes on the history of European civilization which, the editors hope, may be translated into other languages in order to communicate ‘to the youth of Europe, as dispassionately and as justly as possible, some sense of the inheritance of Europe and the influence of that inheritance’.

In the dark days of the last war England was the hope of an oppressed Continent, and it would have been invaluable if the liberation of Europe, having had its point of departure in this country, could have been followed by an intellectual assessment of the spiritual values of the European past to meet the hopes of a despairing world. If the First World War can be regarded as the real end of the nineteenth century, there are grounds for seeing in the Second World War the end of a whole phase of European history which we would describe as the triumph and fall of human reason. Europe was confronted by a barbarian revolt of unreason. What was this Europe? What could, and indeed can, be salvaged from the past? Or should the question really be: what is the new view of man which the European inheritance compels us to accept?
Catechism for Adults—II: God
Authors: Hislop Ian
Published: July 2007

The Apostles’ Creed, like all creeds, is a formal summary of salient points in the tradition—in the paradosis, what is handed over in the spirit from the Apostles to the end of time. Though it was not drawn up by the Apostles it does represent a systematic elaboration of the trinitarian formulae and clauses found in the Epistles of St Paul. The evidence suggests that in the primitive Church the creeds take shape first in association with the interrogations which are part of the baptismal rite, and secondly in the catechetical instructions. Be that as it may, there is no evidence for fixed official creeds till the turn of the second century when the Roman Creed was formulated as a declaratory creed for catechumens—this is the creed which, with some modifications, we know as the Apostles’ Creed. This creed follows a basic trinitarian pattern—the first article treating of God the Father, the second to the seventh with God the Son, and the eighth to the twelfth with God the Holy Spirit.

Simple though the creed is in language and structure as compared with the creeds for bishops characteristic of the fourth century, each article states a mystery of faith—it is, says St Thomas, the task of an article of a creed to give guidance to the mind of the faithful on points where there are distinguishable reasons for asserting that faith here carries us beyond reason. Hence it is clear that creed-saying is an activity of faith and that the creeds are concerned to direct the faithful mind to supernatural truth.
Fiction and the Age of Faith
Authors: Smith Naomi Royde
Published: July 2007

At Intervals during the past hundred years the historical novel has turned away from the court and the camp to occupy itself with religion, often with enormous popular success. Between Hypatia and II Santo two of the best sellers of their day were Quo Vadis? and John Inglesant. They are still to be found on bookshelves from which those other historical novels, Barabbas and The Sorrows of Satan, have been cast out. Religion in itself; the religious adventure; the problems of conduct and belief; the opposition of the Church—all have long occupied, and continue to occupy modem writers; but it is only in the present decade, with Miss H. F. M. Prescott’s Man on a Donkey, that historical fiction has returned to the Age of Faith.

The immediate gain is immense. We escape from investigations of tortured conscience and the conflicts of post-Reformation theology and practice and are once more involved in the crowded freedom of action based on an accepted creed, an obeyed authority. Haugenier de Linnières, the newly knighted hero of Madame Oldenbourg’s novel, The Corner Stone, goes none too willingly with the pseudo-crusade against the Albigenses. He had heard it said ‘that Raymond of Toulouse had never worshipped the devil; that war against him was not really a holy war. He thought these were quibbling considerations. You go to God’s defence or you do not.’ You also play at I’amour courtois—liberal shepherds give it a grosser name—with another man’s wife who plays at virtue in exquisite raiment and in exquisite vernal settings.