bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Christian Liberty and Obligations
Authors: Chenu M. D.
Published: July 2007

We have seen that the liberty of the Christian is, by definition, something super-human, absolute, inviolable. But if all this be so, how are we to set any limits to it? What room does it leave for rules and law? Are we not being so carried away with our idea of Christian freedom that we are being led to an anti-social anarchy, an anarchy all the more dangerous for being an anarchy of the Spirit? And in point of historic fact, do we not find throughout the history of the Church an abiding suspicion of such an exaltation of the liberty of the Spirit? How can we reconcile such claims with the demands of social law and order, with the well-being of the human community?

All liberty has both a personal and a social aspect, because liberty and the common good are bound up with one another. But does not this present a serious difficulty so soon as liberty be considered, not on the natural but on the theological plane? And is not this only to be expected when one passes from the order of the natural philosophy to that of faith? Is not the Christian, who measures his standards by God alone, free from the clutches—in his most intimate liberties at least—of every social obligation? Are we not to expect here a sort of supurnatural logic in direct opposition to the logic of nature?
Honoris Causa
Authors: Thomas Ivo
Published: July 2007

People, and peoples, will often act, and still more often claim to act, because, as they say, their honour demands it. If a war be engaged in, whatever be the immediate motive of economic interest, imperial ambition, or fears for national security, members of the nation are encouraged to believe that the national honour is at stake, and examples in plenty are not far to seek in our own and other countries of the strong appeal which this motive makes to the heart of man. History indeed is not wanting to show that the defence and preservation of honour can become, under the subtle habituation of artificial convention alone, a most powerful influence even in private life. Intermediate between that and the actions of the public person of the State, the military and in their own way other professional corps have, and have always had, what are known as their codes of honour, for which men who have been bred in them will risk their money, their social standing, their very lives. At times, undoubtedly, the keeping of his honour undimmed is the only motive present to a man’s consciousness, so trained can one become to act in that light without hesitation, and as it were by instinct. But if we want to see the full power of attraction which it can exercise, we must look at the book where human aims are writ large, in the political sphere, in which the motions of desire are more striking, the risks run more easily appreciable, the effects more widespread, than in the lives of individuals.
British Foreign Policy Since The War (I)
Authors: Beales A. C. F.
Published: July 2007

‘England is an international burglar turned householder, and now wanting a strong police-force to protect his house full of swag.’

(Mr. Aneurin Bevan.)

‘One of the most serious counts against British statesmanship in the post-war years is that it failed to accept whatever risk there might have been, and that it used the prospective neutrality of the United States as a cloak for British reluctance to bear the responsibility of leading the nations towards the effective outlawry of war.’

(Mr. Wickham Steed.)

A war to end war. So they said in 1918, and at Versailles was planned a new settlement and a new start. This, they said, would involve a peace based on forbearance and sacrifice all round. But the peoples, said the statesmen, were not ready for such an enlightened peace. And so the pips had to be made to squeak, and in England there was a khaki election.
Léon Bloy
Authors: Raybould A.N.
Published: July 2007

Marchenoir in Le Désespéré is generally taken as the prototype of the writer. In this character Léon Bloy draws the portrait of a man of intense and burning faith, but given to passion and governed not by reason, but by feeling; he gives the picture of an unrecognised and embittered artist, of one who with the vision of a saint could not practise even ordinary virtue, and who, driven to despair by the consequences of his acts, becomes almost insane through his capacity for suffering. This portrait, however, is neither exact nor complete; Léon Bloy himself was far more of a Christian and far less of a lunatic than Marchenoir.

Round this saint manqué, this vagabond accompli, this grotesque figure surrounded by poverty and degradation, the prey of passion, and yet dispenser of spiritual gifts, a peculiar interest centres to-day. To deny Léon Bloy’s spiritual influence would be not only injurious but unjust. He was responsible for some of the most remarkable conversions of the last fifty years, those of Jacques Maritain and de la Meer Walcheren among others.
Wars and Rumours of Wars
Authors: White Victor
Published: July 2007

It is only right and proper in a world which seems to be going rapidly more and more insane that good Christians should make every effort to sound the recall to Reason. It is only our bare duty to reaffirm the elements and applications of the natural law in a world which seems to be becoming more and more insensible to the natural law. For this reason, it is impossible to over-estimate the debt we owe to those Catholic thinkers who have made it their task in recent years to re-state the natural ethics of war and peace and to apply it to modern conditions of international relationships and methods of warfare. It is salutary that the philosophia perennis of ends and means should be reasserted and applied realistically to new sets of facts such as aerial bombardment and bacteriological warfare, to the impending realities of war waged by the sovereign State conditioned by the exigencies of imperialistic capitalist economy.

Yet we shall be mistaken if, having done all these things, we imagine that we have done anything specifically Christian. We are perhaps too ready to call a Christian doctrine of war what are in fact only dictates of the natural reason. Grace does not destroy Nature; Revelation is not contrary to Reason. But the fact remains that we cannot give a distinctively Christian witness to the events in the world around us in terms solely of natural reason and natural law. Nor can I answer the burning question, ‘What am I as a Christian to do in the event of war?’ solely in terms of a natural ethic, however rigorous.
The Jews
Authors: Vann Gerald
Published: July 2007

One of the most terrifying of contemporary phenomena is the emergence of virulent anti-semitism, not in Germany or in Italy, not under this or that political regime, but within the Church. It is terrifying; because it means that the devil is active in the Church in a way for which there is perhaps no previous parallel. Evil has always been active in the Church; but it has taken the form of lust, avarice, ambition, pride. This is something far worse. The essence of Christianity is love, and understanding based on love. The essence of ideological anti-semitism is hatred, and stupidity based on hatred. One was shown recently some leaflets written, according to their own testimony, by a Catholic, and urging Catholics to unite against the Jews and their threat of world domination. They made painful reading because of their extraordinary vulgarity. But they were terrifying because of the sheer violence of hatred they revealed. One felt that one was looking at the naked face of evil. Suppose that the author of these leaflets were right in his contention that world Jewry is plotting to dominate the world, to destroy Christendom; there could still be no excuse for tearing the Christian faith to shreds in a way that no outside force, Jewish or otherwise, could ever begin to do. To disseminate this poison in the name of Christ is a betrayal that is only possible to a Christian. But in face of such a betrayal, all calamities to the Church from without are negligible.
The Church and Culture
Authors: Tindal‐Atkinson Ælwin
Published: July 2007

‘Still unfulfilled is the dream of some little, old house with its garden and tennis-court in the quiet English country, which now recedes before me like the mirages (of the desert) among which I used to picture it for so many years. So much the more must I cling to that highest which need not and must not be resigned while strength is left to perceive it ... in that particular manifestation of immortal power by which each individual spirit is most deeply moved. I believe, and proclaim my faith, that this solace will proceed increasingly from the great classics of the world; both from their own splendour and from their contrast with the limitations of modern life.’

The rather long quotation with which this paper opens comes from the pen of a man whose life has been spent in the harassing work, of administration in the near East during the troubled years that followed the last war. The point I wish to fasten on is this: in the thorny and arid task of trying to reconcile Arab and Zionist claims in Palestine he turned again and again for solace to literature, music and architecture. For him, as for so many of us, Science, the achievement of man to-day, can bring some measure of bodily comfort, but no comfort of spirit; and I am afraid, in moments of depression, it may occasion a feeling of acute fear, for the part it seems destined to play in the destruction of our civilization.
‘Flowering Rifle’
Authors: Reviewer Your
Published: July 2007

To the Editor of Blackfriars.

Sir,—I must resolutely disregard the red herrings drawn across my path by the correspondents who give such a sinister reading of my notice of Roy Campbell’s Flowering Rifle. I criticised the book only on literary grounds, and mentioned that works like Auden’s Spain and Spender’s Vienna were also poor art because of their excessive political preoccupations; and because I reject inferior Leftist art along with Rightist work, I apparently suggest that the Rightist writer is Leftist. A re

markable piece of reasoning to come from a great theological college.

It is precisely on literary grounds that the critics neglect to base their criticism. The book is lyrical invective at best, and in trying to make an epic of it, the poet has executed a mechanical exercise, which oftenest sounds like a brass band at its brassiest repeating ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ ad nauseam. The language of the less prosy parts is worn-out ‘poetical’ currency like ‘golden,’ ‘scarlet,’ ‘silver,’ ‘storm-red,’ while often the faded literary metaphors of ‘rhyme,’ etc., are used to jolt the poem into life. The author himself says the poem is not meant to emulate people like Claudel, and we can easily agree when we read such bathos as :

‘Toledo, here, against the morning sky Like some great battle-cruiser from the fight Returned with Victory (terrific sight I)’

—the capitals being used to galvanise the cliche into some shadow of life. But above all, the epic lacks the structure of an epic, and is largely a broken record of literary quarrels.
How Faith Safeguards Reason
Authors: McNabb Vincent
Published: July 2007

1. If anyone shall deny one true God, Creator and Lord of things visible and invisible; let him be anathema.

2. If anyone shall not be ashamed to affirm that, except matter, nothing exists; let him be anathema.

3. If anyone shall say that the substance and essence of God and of all things is one and the same; let him be anathema. (Vatican Council—on Catholic Faith, Can. I—III).

1. If anyone shall say that the one true God our Creator and Lord cannot be known by the natural light of Reason, through created things; let him be anathema.

2. If anyone shall say that it is impossible or inexpedient that men should be taught by divine revelation concerning God and the worship to be paid to Him; let him be anathema.

3. If anyone shall say that man cannot be raised by divine power to a higher than natural knowledge and perfection, but can and ought by a continuous progress to arrive at length of himself at the possession of all that is true and good; let him be anathema.

4. If anyone shall not receive as sacred and canonical the books of Holy Scripture entire with all their parts, as the Holy Synod of Trent has enumerated them, or shall deny that they have been divinely inspired; let him be anathema.
The Church and Culture (II)
Authors: Tindal‐Atkinson Ælwin
Published: July 2007

What we call the Christian Middle Ages emerge from a time of confusion that separates them from the ordered civilization of the Roman Empire. During that time of confusion there was a progressive disintegration of the old Roman order. The Empire itself broke up, and Europe was subjected to successive waves of barbarian invaders, who, if they brought nothing else, did at least invigorate the West with fresh blood. The barbarian brought with him an energy both physical and moral that provided sufficient human enthusiasm to embrace Christianity, and under Christian inspiration produce something as near a purely Christian culture as mankind has yet reached.

The connecting link between the ancient and medieval world is the Catholic Church, carrying with her down the centuries the cultural heritage which she had already adopted and baptised: this was largely preserved in the living tradition of her worship, which gathered and conveyed in an unbroken stream a thin residuum of human achievement. Much disappeared in the wanton destruction of the great libraries of the ancient world, or through the neglect that comes of despair, when the past glows with a melancholy radiance and the future is veiled by darkness and fear. At such times there comes a point when nothing seems worth saving but the bare fact of existence. In a world of shifting sands the Church remained the one rock of civilization.
Extracts and Comments
Authors: Penguin
Published: July 2007

‘une belle equipe’ is the title of a stimulating account in the Canadian Revue Dominicaine of the work of the ‘Cerf’ publishing house in Paris:

They are only seven Friars Preachers, but they control one of the most triumphant of the Catholic movements of France, that of ‘Les Editions du Cerf.’ True, they have the wholehearted support of many of their colleagues in the Dominican Order and of a splendid group of the laity. But they alone form the permanent central organisation.

From his earliest days as a Dominican each of them had dreamed of a gigantic apostolate which would utilise modem technical resources of propaganda to the utmost. The great theses of St. Thomas, which had enabled them to penetrate into the heart of the Christian mysteries, seemed to them to be too substantial a nourishment to be served as they stood to the men and women of to-day. So they made up their minds to give a modern presentation to the eternal message of Christ, which their scholastic studies had enabled them more clearly to understand—a presentation adapted to the comprehension of modem men.

It is now many years ago that they began to put their ideal into execution . . . When so many false shepherds were leading the masses astray, when so many demagogues were making themselves the apostles of inhuman causes and leading the people into the slavery of the State, the Machine, the Majority, they proclaimed aloud the claims of God and the dignity of the human person . . . They must address living thought to living men in living language.
Lumen Ecclesiae
Authors: Potter Roland D.
Published: July 2007

Many who would know St. Dominic better, who would enter more deeply into the inward spirit of the Dominican ideal, will turn almost instinctively to historical sources and strive patiently to piece together necessarily fragmentary evidence, to form a portrait of the saint and fashion in the mind a vision of the ideal. Such an approach is normal and fruitful when handled by those competent in the delicate intricacies of history. Still, happily, there are other methods, other approaches to an understanding of St. Dominic; and assuredly in this domain the evidences of history were never meant to be an exclusive norm for our judgements. Why not, for instance, learn from the liturgy, which has much to say on St. Dominic and his purpose? Thus (one point only, among many) the Dominicans’ day of liturgical prayer closes with an antiphon which vividly calls to mind him who, in his time, was a ‘burning and a shining light,’ calls to mind, too, his brethren who have shone in every age because they worked for the Church, preaching not themselves but the Light of the World. ‘Lumen Ecclesiæ, Doctor Veritatis, Predicator Gratia’—‘Light of the Church, Doctor of Truth, Herald of Grace . . .’ There is more than an ordinary ring in such incisive titles, battering mind and will of those who will to listen.

‘Light,’ ‘lightsomeness’ and kindred terms are perhaps worn thin in common parlance. A little thought, a return to Scriptural and Patristic texts soon refurbishes this age-old currency. The Scriptures from Genesis to the Apocalypse, abound in examples of the use of light, even in its mere physical sense, for the vivid intensity of southern and oriental skies play upon the minds and imagery of those who have experienced them, the inspired writers included. Stark contrasts prevail over gentle nuances.
St. Dominic and the Rosary
Authors: Hogan Stanislaus M.
Published: July 2007

The familiar representations of our blessed Lady giving a rosary to St. Dominic are symbolical of a tradition, so tenaciously upheld by the Church, that she not only insists upon such representations being placed on, or near, the Rosary Altar in every church where the Confraternity of the Rosary is established, but forbids all representations of Our Lady giving a rosary to any other Saint.

This tradition has been questioned, being alleged to date only from the time of Alan de la Roche, who was born in 1428. This zealous preacher of the devotion of the Rosary, so it is insinuated, foisted upon a credulous public the legend that St. Dominic had been commanded by the Mother of God to preach the Rosary, and the legend has persisted ever since his day. Alan appealed to ‘tradition and documents’ in support of his assertion, but there are no documents, we are told, and there is no tradition anterior to Alan himself. If this were indeed the truth, it is amazing that Alan could have succeeded in causing his claim to be accepted. Even if criticism in those days was not so acute or perfect as it is in our own, it is difficult to think that there were no critics able and ready to show that Alan was romancing. We do no know if Alan was brought to book for his statement, nor have we found that he was accused of having invented or imagined it. But the later critics do not fail to emphasize the silence of St. Dominic’s early biographers with regard to the Rosary, pointing out that there is no mention, direct or indirect, by these writers, their contemporaries, or immediate successors, of the supposed fact that the Founder of the Order of Preachers was also the Founder of the Rosary.

Disregarding the various theories that have been put forward in place of accepted tradition, we offer for consideration the following facts which will be found both illuminating and authoritative.
The Letters of T. E. Lawrence
Authors: Urban Foster Paul
Published: July 2007

‘Stranger,’ says Arete in Lawrence’s translation of the Odyssey, ‘this have to ask of you from myself; first, What man are you, and where from? Who gave you those clothes? . . . .’ Resourceful Odysseus answered: ‘It is grievous for me, O Queen, to give a connected history of my pains: the celestial gods have given me too many. Yet this I will say to meet your questioning.’ ‘Who gave you those clothes?’ is the question many have asked at the spectacle of Lawrence in the uniform of an Aircraftsman. Here is the answer to the question and the connected history of this Odysseus’ ‘many pains.’

The six hundred letters given in this volume form an enormous book of some eight hundred pages. They are written to bankers, statesmen, artists, children, private soldiers, Marshals of the R.A.F., M.P.s, Under-Secretaries of State; to Mr. Bernard Shaw, Lady Astor, C. M. Doughty, Mr. Noel Coward, Mrs. Thomas Hardy, and a dozen others as eminent. A single afternoon at Karachi produces four long letters, to the American typographer Bruce Rogers, H. S. Ede of the Tate Gallery, Mrs. Thomas Hardy, and E. M. Forster. Without learning the sensational and the unnecessary we have given us, probably finally, the substantial man in all his complexity. Some indeed of the letters, revealing the depths of suffering to which he subjected himself in the Army, make such painful reading that one might wonder why his friends have given them to the world. It is true that no English figure since, perhaps, Lord Byron had attained so great a ‘news-value’; but this was clearly not the motive of those who loved him and have revealed his confessions to the world.
International War
Authors: Nibb John
Published: July 2007

International War

Sir,—In your recent issues the articles and correspondence on war show a marked tendency to discuss secondary problems rather than the central one; emphasis seems to be upon the lawfulness or unlawfulness of the means employed. But, if a man is unjustifiably attacked by an aggressor—both parties being conscious of where the unjust aggression lies—he is presumably morally entitled, though not morally compelled, to defend himself, and in so doing need not be restricted to hitting above the belt; he may ‘hit hard, hit quick, hit anywhere.’ If a nation is a political, social, mental and moral unity, such as the theory of nationalism implies, it is difficult to see why the nonsoldiering element should be morally entitled to preferential treatment and be regarded as immune from attack. I submit, however, that the theory in question is properly indefensible, and would ask Fr. Victor White before concluding his war articles to give some attention to it and to the logical conclusions that follow its denial.—Yours, etc.,

John Nibb.

C.T.S. IN CHINA

Sir,—I take the liberty of asking for some space in your valuable paper in order to convey an earnest appeal to all your readers who are interested in missionary work.

All those who have followed the development of the war in China may be surprised to hear that, although hundreds of churches have been destroyed and flourishing Christian units have been dispersed, still the war has given an opportunity to the Church to show its charity, and this has brought about a very considerable movement of mass conversions.
War and the Early Church
Authors: White Victor
Published: July 2007

We have seen that the idea of war as the instrument of God’s judgment permeates the Bible from Genesis to the Apocalypse. It is the ruling idea which gives unity and consistency to the most ‘militarist’ as well as to the most ‘pacifist’ passages of Scripture, diverse historical situations and epochs calling forth diverse applications of that dominant conception. It now remains to suggest that this same idea has dominated the authentic Christian idea of war and attitude towards war throughout the changing circumstances of the situation of the Christian Church in the world. For just as this conception dominates the Scriptures from Genesis to the Apocalypse, so it has ever been uppermost in the authentic mind of the Church from the Apocalypse—which foresees wars as the outcome of the outpouring of the ‘vials full of the wrath of God’—to Benedict XV—who, in September, 1914, cried, ‘We beg and implore ... all the sons of the Church ... to beg that God, mindful of His mercy, may lay aside this scourge of anger with which He inflicts on the people the penalty of their sins.’

But just as, as we have previously said, we must avoid expecting to find in the Scriptures ready-made solutions to our present problems, so, if we would scan the pages of Christian history for light in our present perplexities, we must beware of expecting to find in them exact precedents for our present attitudes and conduct.
Worship and Family Life
Authors: Pepler Conrad
Published: July 2007

To write on worship and family life is nearly as great an undertaking as to outline the world-wide process from its coming out from God in creation to its return to Him in praise and love. For God created the world that He might be worshipped and praised in an unending hymn of love by His creatures, of whom the highest in this world is man. Man is not only the figurehead of creation; he is, with the divine assistance, the continual promoter of this same creation; and it is in the family, above all, that he exercises this noble right to co-operate in the work of God. The family is in a sense the hub of creation, and the very raison d’etre of creation is worship. Even the natural family has an intimate touch of the divine in it, for does not God co-operate by an immediate act of creation in the production of every human soul? The first unmeaning cry of the newly-born child is in reality a cry of praise for the Omnipotent Creator.

We are concerned here especially with Christian marriage and Christian family life in which all the natural aspects of divine worship, voiced consciously or unconsciously by these co-operators in God’s creative act, are raised to a higher order and united by grace to the worship offered by the only-begotten Son of God, made Man that He might harmonize the discordant notes and restore to God a perfect Hosanna and Alleluia.
Poor Whites
Authors: Tindal‐Atkinson Ælwin
Published: July 2007

‘Poor Whites’ is a convenient label, used indiscriminately to describe the white population of North America living in two quite distinct areas south of the Mason-Dixon line; the coastal area with its coloured people and cotton and tobacco plantations, and the mountain area of the Southern Appalachians. The material poverty that marks both groups has led the industrialized Northern States to lump them together under a common condemnation. Poverty is scarcely a virtue to men whose Calvinistic background once made material prosperity a manifest sign of divine favour. Hence the average New Englander, for example, bred in a highly acquisitive tradition had little re-gaid for those whites of the South, who had been left far behind in the race for worldly possessions and still lived in circumstances not far removed from those of primitive pioneering days.

In the case of the Poor Whites proper, who live in the Tobacco and Cotton States, economic and climatic factors have been responsible for their depressed condition. Before and since Emancipation the coloured people have provided the labour in the plantations; they are better suited to heavy toil in a warm climate and cost less than white labour. Consequently the poorer whites have gained a reputation for shiftlessness and lack of enterprise. The coloured population generally refers to them as ‘Poor White Trash,’ and the name has spread all over the continent.
Salvation Through the Church
Authors: Pearson Jordan
Published: July 2007

‘The Church,’ said an ancient writer, ‘was created first o£ all, and for Her sake was the world made.’ Nowadays we seem to have lost much of that lofty sense, that divine view, of the Church in the purposes of God. We tend to consider Her empirically only, as one sect among many, as one section only of the human race. It is one of the functions of the revival of ecclesiology—of that branch of theology which treats of the nature and purpose of the Church —to restore that ancient sense of the Catholicity of the Church, the all-embracing society of redeemed humanity, the Kingdom of God on earth.

Amongst recent literature on the Church, Catholicisme; les Aspects Sociaux du Dogme, by Henry de Lubac, S.J., is of first importance. Based entirely upon the living theology of the Fathers, this excellent book gives a comprehensive account of the social implications of Catholicism. In an important chapter, Le Salut par I’Eglise, Father de Lubac recalls to mind the fact that mankind is naturally and instinctively a social organism, living a single, simple life; disunion and discord, the cancerous growths of sin, have rent asunder this unity, which was a spiritual harmony rooted in the love of God, and its restoration is only possible now, in the existing state of things, through Christ and His Church. ‘Seul I’Idéal que le Christ a transmis a son Eglise est assez pur et assez puissant. . . pour inspirer aux hommes de travailler a leur unité spirituelle, comme seul le Sacrifice de son Sang peut donner l’efficace leur travail.’
In Tempore Belli
Authors: Vann Gerald
Published: July 2007

Our first duty, now that war is upon us—and it will be increasingly our duty until the conflict is ended—must be to remind ourselves of what our attitude towards it should be as Christians. Morality is not Christian unless it is subsumed under religion; right action is determined primarily by our whole attitude to God; and in the context of war there is a Christian attitude of mind towards it in general as well as a detailed system of ethical principles. That attitude of mind should be our first concern now. In the litany of the saints we pray: From pestilence, famine and war, O Lord deliver us. War is set beside the other two scouiges with which God chastises the sins of the world. In the recognition of that fact, that war for the Christian is chastisement, lies the root of our attitude. For needless to say, the sin of which we shall think is not the sin of somebody else. It is easy, all too easy, to project the moral guilt on to our neighbour—in this case, those with whom we are at war. It is so easy that it is the first thing to guard against. It is not a question here of assigning the political responsibility. The drama of war is played on two planes, the temporal and the spiritual; on the one level we may as a nation be guilty or we may not; on the other, it would be the negation of all that Christianity teaches to regard ourselves as innocent. It is a platitude to say that the perhaps unspectacular sins of the Christian are more grievous than the spectacular sins of the pagan because they are a deeper injury to God’s love; but it is a platitude of Which we do well to remind ourselves. The first thing, then, is penitence: to desire, and work for, and pray for, a change of heart within ourselves.
The Idealism of The Y.C.W.
Authors: Lancaster George
Published: July 2007

In discussing the idealism of the Y.C.W. I am taking a great deal for granted. I am taking it as a proven fact that the conditions in which many of our young people to-day are forced to earn their daily bread are very often, if not usually, diametrically opposed to the ideals of the Christian Gospel. I am also taking it as an assumption that every real Christian will admit the necessity of some form of organized apostolate within the Church to cater for the Young Christian Worker in these anti-spiritual, anti-Christian conditions. Now the Y.C.W. movement claims to cater for this need and can claim a large measure of success in Belgium, France and elsewhere. I put forward here some brief outline of the ideals which have guided the founder of the Movement, Canon Cardijn, ideals which he has expressed many times, ideals which are their own recommendation.

We commence with two principles: the first, that all Young Christian Workers must be missionaries of their milieu, missionaries, that is, in their ordinary surroundings, in the ordinary atmosphere of the workshop, but, above all, missionaries who give a religious soul to every act of their life: and the second, that there is no external means of caring for the Young Worker at the present day. With regard to the first principle, note that I insist on the interior formation of the apostle, for the interior life is a source of activity of itself and in itself to which no other can be compared. Wc recall the words of the incomparable Bossuet: ‘Hands raised aloft in prayer smash more battalions than hands which strike.’ Yes, the inner life of the young apostle must be the branch filled with strong sap, of which his external works are but the flowers.
The Heresy of the New Man
Authors: Prince J. F. T.
Published: July 2007

The writing of History is commonly advertised as a twofold labour: it is necessary not only to ascertain the facts but to interpret their meaning. The vocation of Karl Marx was scarcely less arduous; for, having established the principle of social evolution, there remained the labour of investing it with a positive content. This precisely was done by postulating an economic interpretation of History.

Sociologists and biologists to whom the whole of nature was the result of development from the simple to the complex (and all reality derived from the homogeneous distribution of matter) could scarcely pass the ball from one to another with more ease than that with which the cloak of Victorian morphology fell to the Sociologist.

Analysing those economic forces whose inter-play was according to him the cause of social behaviour, Karl Marx claimed to have found the key of history. Robert Owen and the Utopians, awaiting a swift transformation of Society without violence, fell by the way even as Utopians have fallen since. Owen’s New Moral World would not dawn. How could it? Evolution, said Marx, was a strictly Gontinouous process and since the operating forces were no longer occult there could be no surprise in store for society. This is all the best part of a century ago; but at no time, surely, has historico-political thought re-acted so obediently to the mood of evolutionists as to-day.

There are still those of us old enough to treasure recollection of history classes in which our media axiomata of all time (and for all time) was the triumph of Christianity over the paganism of the ancient world. Today in an ever increasing number of instances the cosmos-changing mission of Jesus Christ is presented to young students as merely an emphatic point in the cycle, classical, subclassical and Christian.
A Catholic Bishop of Medieval India: Friar Jordanus, O.P., 1330
Authors: Marsh‐Edwards J. C.
Published: July 2007

Throughout the fourteenth century the great Mongol Tartar Empire dominated Asia. Under its benevolent religious policy Christian missionaries were enabled to penetrate to districts never before reached by preachers of the Gospel. With the exception of some Augustinian Friars, working in Persia and Armenia in the latter years of the century, these missionaries were all members of the Preaching or Minor Friars. Hand in hand the two Orders faced hardship and martyrdom amid the snow-swept peaks of Armenia and the Caucasus, on the barren wastes of Turkestan and in the burning heat of India, in the union and brotherhood of their Saintly Founders.

The word of the Great Khan in Khanbaliq (Peking) was law from the shores of the Yellow Sea to the banks of the Vistula, and from the Himalayas to Siberia. South of the Himalayas, where the Mongol horsemen had not penetrated, lay the Moslem Sultanate of Delhi, whose rulers were of Turki race. They claimed dominion over the whole peninsula, but even after Alaud-din’s conquest of the Deccan in 1330, their effective sovereignty did not extend far beyond the modern Bombay. In the south, among the native rulers of the Malabar Coast, its acknowledgement was confined to the occasional appearance of some Moslem pirate levying toll for himself in the name of his Delhi master. Away beyond the foothills, in the interior of the country, even this ephemeral authority was wanting.
Physical Science and the Catholic Student
Authors: Caldin E. F.
Published: July 2007

The Catholic engaged in the study of natural science is in some ways less well placed than any other student for growing into a full-blooded Christian. His subject is not one which provides obvious stimulation for his Catholic conscience. Its content and presentations are unaltered whether its exponents are Christians or not, and the student lacks the stimulus of that constant need of criticism and re-interpretation, which is provided, for instance, by the study of history. And it is undeniable that natural science when studied intensively easily produces a person hypertrophied in some respects and gravely lacking in Catholic fundamentals. Laboratory work occupies long hours which others would spend on general Catholic reading, and it is too easy to become caught up into a routine which contains little but science. Prayer and spiritual reading do not thrive when they have to be fitted precariously into short intervals saved from the rush. Work is not readily sacrificed to them, for there is severe overcrowding and economic pressure in the lower ranks of scientific workers. (This competition, incidentally, does not favour humility nor a true love of learning.) The manual work of the laboratory gives a certain balance to the scientist’s life, and this again tends to obscure the deficiencies of the latter on the spiritual level. Further, there are certain intellectual obstacles. If a Catholic scientist is intelligent enough to begin thinking about the nature of his scientific knowledge and comparing it with Thomist philosophy, he is liable to be oppressed by certain superficial divergences between the principles of Thomism and of physical science.
Kierkegaard's Journals
Authors: White Victor
Published: July 2007

Even in the abridged form of the English translation the Journals of Kierkegaard are not to be read at a sitting, or even in a series of consecutive sittings. Their thought is at once too concentrated and their range too vast. Covering his jottings and reflections de omni re scibili et quibusdam aliis over twenty of his most creative years, the Journals could perhaps be assimilated in scarcely less a span. Not, therefore, a book to borrow. But emphatically a book to possess, to browse in and to browse upon, to open and to close at well-spaced intervals which allow ample time for digestion, for assimilation and rejection. A book to feed upon, for it contains in epigrams and tabloid essays the marrow of his thought. But for that very reason a book which, consumed gluttonously, must infallibly produce biliousness and dyspepsia accompanied by dizziness and nausea.

There will be some who find Kierkegaard indigestible and nauseating anyway. And that not only for the reasons which he himself anticipated; the reasons which would reflect upon his readers rather than upon himself. Not only, that is to say, because ‘every man is afraid of the truth,’ and ‘between man and truth lies mortification,’ or because he sought ‘to tear the veil from human twaddle and from the conceited self-complacency with which men try to convince themselves and others that man really wants to know the truth’ (1153). Not only because of the ‘scandal of the Cross’ which he proclaimed, fully understanding that if you ‘act just once so that your action expresses the fact that you fear God alone and do not fear men: you at once “scandalise” people,’ and that ‘whatever avoids “scandalising” is only what, out of fear of men and human respect, conforms entirely with worldliness’ (1116).
L'Aube in the Evening
Authors: Gilby Thomas
Published: July 2007

It is true, replied the Dutchman, we are a small people without a great future. But when early in the morning we hear a loud knocking at the door, we know it is only the milk.

The Times every morning and the New Statesman every week, those cover serious periodical reading for many of us. From them we should assume that the political weight of Catholicism has been thrown heavily to the right for the last hundred years. The association of Catholics with the forces of tradition is, of course, evident; this, at its worst, has meant subservience of vested interests, and, at its best, rallying with the stable and chivalrous elements of society. It is true that altar and throne, farm and nationality were the causes Catholics fought for most conspicuously in the nineteenth century, and that Liberalismus was, to put it mildly, not favourably regarded in the second period of Pio Nono’s pontificate. What is not so generally appreciated is the strength and official standing of the Labourite movement in the Church.

Père Lacordaire died, he said, an impenitent liberal, the Bishop Baron von Ketteler dug deeper to the roots of reform than did our own Victorian Radicals, and cardinals like Manning, Mermillod and Gibbons were scarcely daffodils that came before the sturzos dared. They were the leaders of a Catholic democratic movement that had reached such proportions by the time of the Europe of Locarno that the action of Catholic groups on the whole—I speak quantitatively—lay with Trade Unionism and Parliamentary Democracy.
The Spirituality of William Langland
Authors: Pepler Conrad
Published: July 2007

An exclusive study of the English fourteenth century mystics might lead one to suppose that the Mass and Divine Office played little part in the genuine spiritual life of the country. It might seem that the individualistic religion of the post-Reformation period was already the vital influence in those, such as Rolle, Hilton and Dame Julian, who sought the Kingdom of God with earnestness. But then we must not forget the great quantity of devotional verse designed for the ordinary Englishmen of the day: ascetical works, mass-books and instructions on the sacraments, on the virtues and vices. The mystical writers presupposed in their readers a thorough acquaintance with the broader and more ‘ecclesiastical’ type of religion inculcated by these works. It is clear from Walter Hilton that a realization of the union of the faithful in the ‘ghostly’ Body of Christ and of the meaning of the Mass and Divine Office were considered as the groundwork of a true spiritual life. It is therefore in that other less mystical literature that we may expect to find a mirror of the common spirituality of our forefathers. One of the most fruitful sources for such a picture lies in that vigorous poem of ecclesiastical reform, ‘The Vision of Piers Plowman,’ which endeavours to recall the sinning English folk to the springs of the spiritual life in the unity of the Church. In this poem we find a truly English and liturgical type of spirituality that must have been characteristic of the devout members of the Church, both ecclesiastical and lay.
Mrs. Fitzherbert
Authors: Bracey Robert
Published: July 2007

With the publication of Mr. Shane Leslie’s Life of Mrs. Fitzherbert, which appears a little over a century after her death, the clouds which so long hung over the name and fame of that sorely maligned woman have surely lifted at last and for ever. None will more rejoice at a final vindication than will the spiritual descendants of the English Catholic body, to which she belonged, and which (even when appearances seemed most adverse) always clung loyally to her. Her fellow Catholics were sometimes puzzled at and bewildered by her actions, but remained convinced that ultimately she would be found never to have strayed from the right path. Dr. Kirk, writing in her life-time his Biographies of English Catholics, well expressed their feeling: ‘Mrs. Fitzherbert’s long and mysterious connection with George IV when Prince of Wales rendered her the topic of general conversation, more than perhaps any other woman of her time; but by her friends and relations, and by all who ever enjoyed her acquaintance, she has always been regarded with the most unqualified sentiments of approbation and esteem.’

To all students of her period, Mrs. Fitzherbert’s name and personality are well known. This ‘wife who for reasons of state had to pretend to be a mistress’ figures constantly in the histories, memoirs, pamphlets, lampoons, newspapers, paintings and caricatures of the entire epoch, by some sneered at as a light o’ love, by others placed on a level with the Valiant Woman of the Scriptures. Mrs. Fitzherbert’s father was one of the Smythes, Baronets of Eshe and Acton Burnell, her mother an Errington of an ancient Catholic family in the North.
The Critics' Shelley
Authors: Sayer George
Published: July 2007

Nowadays there are few professional critics who praise or condemn books for moral reasons. That custom, one of the virtues of the old Edinburgh, can be seen dying in the early Victorian reviews. For years critics have smiled good-humouredly at Dryden and Dr. Johnson for their preoccupation with moral values, and writers have laughed at Milton and Sir Philip Sidney for their desire to instruct and improve. But the decline is less noticeable among those who do not have to write for money, who receive their books, not with the publishers’ compliments, but through buying or borrowing, and are as a result more inclined to read them right through. Really most of us are ignorant of æsthetic principles: we are little interested in the Will o’ the Wisp incantations of La Poésie Pure, nor do we care to try the slippery path across the Crocean bog. To the disgust of those critics who wish us to judge by their own mysterious esoteric standards, most of us insist on having a little index of our own. There are many books, said to be masterpieces, which we object to for moral reasons, and will not, whatever their artistic merits, admit to our shelves. Against this attitude, which is at least as old as Aristotle, the professional critics have often fought in vain. Most of us still insist on liking books for other than purely aesthetic reasons, and, to make more popular a writer of whom he thinks highly, the critic has to stoop to our level.

The cause of the early neglect of Shelley’s poetry was certainly moral. He lived at a time when it was more than usually easy for a rather wild young man to make himself disliked. Most people were sick to death of the ‘new’ ideas which had fired the French Revolution and sustained the Napoleonic Wars.
We Take Our Stance
Authors: Beaumont Mary
Published: July 2007

Since we are to try to lay a foundation for future discussion, the first essential seems to be that we shall know our own mind. And as catholics that means in the words of St. Paul: ‘to let this mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus’ (Phil, ii, 5). When we begin to appreciate what that means we can take our stance.

The world for us is explained in terms of reason and of faith-—two ways of knowing the truth, different in mode and complementary in what they give the mind. In common with every human being we can use our mind on the world as we discover it, and we do. Asking the how and why of things, sorting out the wealth of experience and facts and activity, trying tc discover some purpose in it all, to get a view of things as a whole and in their causes, and this is to philosophise. Sapientis est ordinare. Men have done this from the beginning with more or less sincerity, more or less success. Sometimes philosophers have succumbed to the temptation to pursue one aspect at the cost of the whole, sometimes philosophy has been prostituted by being made the handmaid of propaganda. So that at first glance the history of philosophy seems to present an overwhelming confusion of theories that contradict, an embarras de richesses. But a closer inspection does yield a developing body of thought, as indeed we can rightly expect, since the raw material of philosophy is God’s revelation of Himself in nature. This body of thought, the philosophia perennis, synthetised by Aristotle among the pagans, and Aquinas among the Christians— that is not to exclude others, but to name the morning stars—and enriched, sometimes unwittingly, by their successors, will provide us with principles when we begin to sort out the richness of knowledge and achievement, the bewilderment of chaos and confusion we find ourselves in to-day.