bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Reply to Father Vernon
Authors: Pope Hugh
Published: July 2007

Vernon Johnson’s book, One Lord, One Faith really needed no reply. It was not a challenge, not controversial : it was itself a reply to innumerable inquirers who sought to know why he had thought it necessary to leave the Church of England and seek reconciliation with the Catholic Church. In explaining why he had so acted, he made a very simple, straight-forward and sincere statement of what had happened in his own soul. His explanation is written with a very rare courtesy and there is not a word which could be seriously interpreted as offensive to his Anglican friends. The Rev. E. Milner-White and the Rev. W. L. Knox are not satisfied with Father Vernon’s explanation. In effect they think hel has acted foolishly; but their object is not so much to convince him of his folly as to warn the many readers of his book from following too rashly in his footsteps. This ‘Reply’ is not studiously courteous nor is there the careful avoidance of giving offence which distinguished Father Vernon’s statement. In fact we have heard the book curtly described as ‘bad temper, bad history, bad theology, bad morals and bad taste’ —a severe indictment, but not entirely unmerited.

Is it good history, for instance, to say that the Churches of England and Rome ‘definitely claim unbroken descent from the Apostles through their similar ministries (a claim which history, that is to say, fact, allows to be equally strong in each case)’? And is this good theology?
The Liberator of South America: (1783–1830)
Authors: Montgomery Francis
Published: July 2007

The minds of students have sometimes been exercised as to who is the greatest Captain of history. Alexander subduing Asia in his short span of thirty-three years, Hannibal victoriously crossing the Alps and threatening Rome, Julius Caesar over-running the then known world, Charlemagne, Saladin, Ghengis-Khan, Tamerlane, Washington, Napoleon, all have their apologists.

‘…. certant; et adhuc sub judice lis est.’

The matter remains undetermined.

In military genius, in strategy, in constructive statesmanship Simon Bolivar was inferior to none of these. In patriotism, in disinterestedness, in Christian forbearance towards his enemies, in considerateness for all who depended on him he can have but few rivals.

From the moment that in Rome, on Mount Aventine, in 1804, he promised his former tutor and friend, Father Rodriguez, to devote himself whole-heartedly to the interests of his country, he never swerved from this determination. Despite his detractors there is no evidence of ambition or self-seeking in any of his acts; rather do they disprove it. A loyal and faithful son of Holy Church we find him ever pointing out and following the path of honour and of duty. He controlled for years the resources of the former Spanish colonies which hailed him as ‘el Liberador’ and as ‘Father of the country’; which voted him time and again large personal subsidies, always steadfastly declined; and he died without a shilling of public money in his possession. Nay, more, nine-tenths of his own splendid patrimony had been expended on public needs, though he was still comparatively young, forty-seven, and well aware of the sectaries plotting against him.
Did Savonarola Disobey the Pope?
Authors: Hogan Stanislaus M.
Published: July 2007

It is generally recognised that the conflict between Alexander VI and Savonarola was political rather than canonical; that political reasons more than zeal for the welfare of the Church and the salvation of souls dictated every move made by Alexander in his dealings with the Friar; and, furthermore, that the Pope’s mind had been poisoned by the false accusations and slanders of Savonarola’s implacable enemies. Both men were strong characters. They clashed, and the general opinion obtains that Savonarola flatly disobeyed the commands of the Supreme Pontiff. Savonarola has been pilloried by some writers as the unique example of grave disobedience to the Vicar of Christ, since no one except heresiarchs ever dared to flout Papal commands as he did yet die in communion with the Holy See. But others are convinced that the Friar did not disobey, and therefore he neither incurred nor deserved censure. We shall examine the question as briefly, yet as fully, as possible, and shall confine ourselves strictly to the query: Did Savonarola disobey the Pope?
What Happens at A Buchman House-Party?
Authors: Post J.Shrady
Published: July 2007

The deserter from a cause, good or otherwise, is viewed, and quite rightly, with suspicion. The assumption is that he must have some axe to grind, some grudge to settle. In this case neither is true. These comments are simply the saner reflection of one of those people ‘who cannot be fooled all the time.’ They apply only to the First Century Christian Fellowship, alias The. ‘Oxford’ Group Movement, alias ‘ Buchmanism,’ alias ‘The Groups,’ and do not in any way refer to those quiet, dignified meetings of individual churches, particularly Calvary Episcopal Church in New York City, whose staff, though holding a different viewpoint from mine, have placed me deeply in their debt by their unending kindness, affection and hospitality.

Before writing this article, the writer attended a Buchman meeting and publicly announced this intention.

A few weeks ago three sandwich-men, wandering aimlessly up and down the Cornmarket in Oxford, announced to the world, in red letters a foot high, ‘The Truth about Buchmanism.’ The Buch-manite scowled, the public laughed, which is the proper attitude for the public to take, particularly that part of it which is not interested in reviving an already dying evangelism.
By Way of Oberammergau
Authors: Zulueta Alfonso de
Published: July 2007

Clear as a picture the play stood out. Its divine and human pathos cut the September air. The immense crowd was hushed. It was strange, this stillness and awe in so vast and modern a throng. The reason was not far to seek. For, from the first solemn moment when the Greek chorus was seen slowly taking possession of the stage, and the grave and gentle figure of Anton Lang stood forward as Coryphaeus to address the audience priestlike, there was one all-pervading impression. It might not mean the same to all, yet it was a play which concerned those present. Not merely a great human drama, fit as those of Shakespeare or Greek or German to evoke the Catharsis and lose the rapt soul in a sea of beauty and wonder. Such plays are valued for their power, not for their essence, nor for any fact they pre-suppose. Here, all knew that something was portrayed which claimed the undying gratitude and the deepest reverence of each man and woman.

Impressions, no doubt, were of the vaguest. We would not care to answer for the number of those in the audience whose beliefs exactly coincided with those of the actors. Yet, though the logical conclusion and the gift of Faith might be lacking, there were, at least, many Pilates—(Pilate as he is portrayed in this play, lovable before, pitiable after his great weakness)— many who felt that here they had to do with One who was more than other men, One for whom the vague word ‘divine’ had been waiting through the dawn of history, to alight in the fulness of time upon this Elect of men.
Father D’Arcy’s Thomas Aquinas
Authors: Gilby Thomas
Published: July 2007

The inclusion of a monograph on St. Thomas in the ‘Leaders of Philosophy’ series is significant of the growing strength of the Thomist revival. Even in England, later than in the rest of Europe, St. Thomas is now coming to be considered as taking rank among the philosophers who have mainly influenced western thought; with Leibniz, Spinoza, Berkeley, Kant. Father Knox’s Lady Denham, with her ‘Sir Thomas who?’ after the game of ghosts, is a type already growing uncommon.

Perhaps there is no one in this country better qualified than Father D’Arcy to give an acceptable statement of St. Thomas’s thought. A high and dry Thomist can cut an awkward figure in modern philosophical society. Father D’Arcy is never that; his manner is always tactful, indeed at times even deprecatory. He is inclined to present a Thomist certitude almost hat in hand, as when he says that the problem of the One and the Many receives ‘an attempted explanation in the metaphysics of St. Thomas. By an employment of his fundamental distinctions and what he calls analogy he tries to find a via media’ (p. 109). Still, a wedge cannot be driven in thick end first, and it is possible that Thomists in the past have not been sufficiently ingratiating. And there cart be little doubt that Father D’Arcy has also entered well into the spirit of his subject, and has written a book profitable even to the practised Thomist; something better than a list of theses strung together and described from outside; a synthesis showing a real insight into St. Thomas’s thought and the meaning of the principles of act and potency, of analogy, and of knowledge.
Equality of Consideration
Authors: Fox S. F. Darwin
Published: July 2007

Equality of function and equality of opportunity will make the world no happier or better. But where there is equality of consideration social peace reigns.

In a flower sepal, petal, stamen, anther, root, each has its contribution to make to the life and sweetness of the flower, and each is concerned in the health of the whole. So in the Christian State everybody is to be somebody, but not ‘ nobody to anybody.’ Each human being is ‘a separate thought of God.’

If a young man is taught to be as attentive to plain and poor girls as to attractive and smart ones, to the governess as much as to the heiress, if he is taught to treat inferior races, when among them, with respect and sympathy, he will be a better man than if he should thrill with the political theories of Harrington, Sidney, Condorcet, or Bright.

The modern child is encouraged by assiduous deference to its ideas and desires to be inconsiderate to others, especially its elders; the schoolboy has a snobbish way of refusing recognition to the claims of ‘outsiders’ or of social inferiors. Whereas it is by his behaviour and special courtesy to outsiders and inferiors that a gentleman is known. A lady also.

Queen Victoria wrote in one of her letters : ‘I was taught to beg my maid’s pardon for any naughtiness or rudeness towards her—a feeling I have ever retained.’
A Sailor Johnson Loved
Authors: Bracey Robert
Published: July 2007

The name Burney,’ Hazlitt once said, ‘is a X pass-port to the Temple of Fame. Those who bear it, wits, scholars, novelists, musicians, artists, are by birthright free of Parnassus.’ And the Burneys were full as loveable as they were cultured. ‘I love all that breed,’ cried Dr. Johnson, ‘and I love them because they love each other.’

Now of books about the Burneys there have been of recent years no end. Most of them, of course, are concerned with Madame D’Arblay, from Austin Dobson’s splendid edition of her Diary to the entertaining gossip; of Hill and Seeley. And her father, Dr. Burney, and her brother Charles, the great Greek scholar, and her sisters, have not passed unnoticed. Yet, until this present time, one hundred and ten years after his death, no one had thought of writing the Life of her sailor-brother James. He has had, indeed, to wait long for his Biography, but perhaps happily, for now that it has come at last it is an ideal one, graphic in style and based on much hitherto unpublished matter, altogether worthy of a man whose career was a romance and who is the connecting link between the great Johnsonian Circle and that other very different coterie of which Charles Lamb was the shining light.
An Unorthodox Defence of Orthodoxy
Authors: Vann Gerald
Published: July 2007

In the new religion of science God is supposed to have had the goodness to invite man to profiteer upon the universe.’ When Daedalus found he could fly he got too far above himself—and the vanquished world: his wings melted in the sun’s heat and, being dust, he unto dust returned.

The science of the world, it would seem, is in fair way to conquering the world. Having measured the world, it cannot but think it has measured the master of the world. It re-edits its theology to suit the newer enlightenment, and ‘the God of Mr. Pupin, we are given to understand, is a God who serves.’

Mr. Ransom sketches the religious history of East and West in terms of an Eternal Triangle. There was the bearded, inscrutable God of Thunder : the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob. There was the Logos : Reason, the Patron of Science. There was the Pneuma, the Paraclete, the Ghost. There came a day, says Mr. Ransom, when the Logos, the Demigod, was substituted for ‘the Pneuma, the Holy Ghost, the Tetragram, the God of Israel.’ ‘And this was the very beginning of Occidentalism.’ We cast out the thunder : we could make our own. We wanted something sane yet soothingly sentimental. And so we chose the Logos. homely, serviceable scientist like ourselves. We fashioned the ‘soft modern version of Christ.’ We had been left with too remote a Reason : we said : ‘Not on bread alone doth man live’ (We neglected to add ‘Nor on butter’).
The Spanish Republic
Authors: Parker Alexander
Published: July 2007

It is idle yet to discuss the prospects of the second Spanish Republic; it is impossible to predict whether it will have as short a life as the first Republic of 1873. This lies not in the new form of government, but in the whole instability of Spanish politics. Before the April Revolution I was of the opinion that it was impossible to take Spanish politics seriously, an opinion which, to my mind, constituted no insult to the Spanish people. Though still persisting in that view, I will admit that recent events make the holding of it perhaps unfair. One thing now emerges as definite; there is no lack of political earnestness among a number of the people, but how large this number really is appears a matter of conjecture.

I was recently discussing the new Spanish situation with a friend who is an authority on everything Spanish. The conversation turned from Spain to the rest of Europe, and I remarked that Germany was a country I much admired. ‘Spain is a country one cannot admire,’ said my friend; ‘but it is a country one can love.’ To a certain extent this is true, in that one can love the country and its inhabitants, yet deplore its politics. When known, Spain is a country one can love with gratitude and joy; it is a country that can exercise an irresistible attraction; and its peculiar fascination, once felt, never fades, but grows ever stronger. Yet it is impossible, when looking back at its political history since the days of the great Hapsburgs, to admire what is only a lamentable history of deplorable government.
Seventeenth Century Scottish Catholics
Authors: Clayton Joseph
Published: July 2007

Our ignorance of the fortunes of Catholics in the Scotland of the Commonwealth period is for the most part utterly abysmal. Happily, Major Hay has been busy writh the manuscripts and other historical documents in Blairs College, with the result that now we may really know a good deal of what happened in the years that immediately followed the execution of Charles I. It is ‘a story of courageous struggle against cunningly-devised persecution’; of gallant adventure for Catholic clergy, regular and secular, with disappointments and hardships, hopes and fears, and the inevitable quarrels and mistakes. _

The Scottish Jesuits of this period ‘come to life again, with their virtues and defects, with theif likes and dislikes; they are real men of Scotland, not phantoms from a hagiological romance,’

Father John Seton, S.J., for instance, seeking to rally Catholics to the standard of Montrose (which work, no doubt, ‘was contrary to the rule of the society’), and keeping his mission secret, ‘not only from his enemies, but from his fellow-Jesuits in Paris.’ Howbeit the good fathers were not undisturbed by the mysterious comings and goings of this intrepid priest, whose fate it was to die of fever in the Scots College in Madrid.
Andante
Authors: Gray John
Published: July 2007

(St. Mary’s Loch from Megget Water Bridge, January.)

Lean evenly, white pool of light, before the spirit held intent, each power of sense impelled into one point of sight; no radiance on the glassy face or aught created eyes the vision holds, absorb, embrace; so all in silence lies.

The eyes behold a hundredfold a million ripples lap inaudibly upon a lap delicious curves enfold; around the water’s sinuous verges where the meek hills loll felicitously intermerges long lines’ rhythmic roll.

In a bright vault stand little clouds immobilized by frost, which yesterday were rolled and tossed and dragged in ragged shrouds. Hushed is the wild and rainy west before the tender north, to still the scene for one rough guest whom chance has driven forth;

round whom, attentive, motionless, each happily unseen in his impenetrable screen of leaves which once twigs dress; from odorous moor and windy height and opalescent haze like planets on a starry night all those spirits gaze.

John Gray.
Sentimental
Authors: Clegg Aileen Mary
Published: July 2007

Mrs. Seemsby-Gore liked, one to have a title, so when she went to the Pyrenees she made up her mind to look up Miss Fairleigh—the Honourable Miss Fairleigh, she would remind you, Lord Fielden’s daughter. If you said ‘Ah!’ vaguely, because you didn’t know Miss Fairleigh and had never set eyes on Fielden, she was tempted to write you down an outsider.

Miss Fairleigh—‘Dubbin’ to her intimates, though Mrs. Seemsby-Gore didn’t know that—was staying in Lourdes while she put in a month of service at the Piscines. Consequently she wasn’t at home when Mrs. Seemsby-Gore called. However, she returned the call the following evening just before dinner, explained the situation and said she would be free to go for an expedition into the mountains two days later. There would be no big pilgrimage in, she said, so she wouldn’t be missed at the Piscines.

Miss Fairleigh’s talk of Piscines and Pilgrimages bewildered the other lady, who wasn’t a Catholic and thought that Catholics, with rare exceptions such as Miss Fairleigh, weren’t good form.

‘Do I “see” Lourdes?’ she asked doubtfully. One saw a Duomo or a Gallery if there was one. She wasn’t sure about Lourdes.

Miss Fairleigh’s eyes twinkled a little.

‘I think one should,’ she said. ‘I’ll lend you a book. I could drop it in as I pass in the morning. You could glance through it while you breakfast and then wander about by yourself. No one’ll say anything to you. Anybody can go anywhere.’

Mrs. Seemsby-Gore faintly liked the idea.
The Psychology of Shakespeare
Authors: O'Connor John
Published: July 2007

This book may be classed at once as on the sane side in Shakespeare research. It is also on the side of the humaner letters, beautifully written and excellently produced, and striking a golden mean between Textual Criticism and Higher Criticism, begetter of so much futility and freak. Monsignor Kolbe prefaces his analyses of the plays with some simple and profound general remarks on the analogy between great pictures and great dramas. Both alike, he says, display the subconsciousness of the artist, appealing to the subconsciousness of the onlooker. Modern thought is much handicapped by a wilful ignorance of what ancient thought took for granted, and is perpetually bewrayed with startling discoveries of what everyone knew when the world was comparatively young, or at least unstaled. They, the ancients, knew that each man keeps a treasure-house of his experiences organic or mental, and that some have a larger and better store, some a choice and ordered store, and others a parti-coloured rag-bag. And this they called Memoria. Samuel Butler alone and early, rediscovered this mysterious mother of the Muses to be the mother of specific differences in organic matter, and the author of instinct; in one pregnant phrase undoing, or at least gainsaying, the disastrous error of Darwin, who stressed environment as one of the parents of specific differentiation.
St. Thomas in The Court of Appeal
Authors: McNabb Vincent
Published: July 2007

It is now some thirty years since the Summa Theologica began to circulate in an English translation. Little or no notice was taken of it even by those whom it was calculated to serve in their service of scientific truth. But the lack of welcome which befell it had no dismays for those responsible for an enterprise which seemed on the verge of folly. They were not moved when they were told that no good and little profit could come of an attempt to put the clock of modern progress back seven centuries to the age of Aquinas. Such friendly dissuasion as they were offered they met by silence and a more dogged resolve to forgive even their enemies by offering them not a cup of water but a wine-cup of the best!

Experience and instinct had taught them that after the bewilderment of modern materialistic expansion had settled, the human mind would begin to ask questions, that is, to seek ultimate causes. Some sort of unity would be demanded by the finer minds who could not brook a mere welter of multiplicity. Men would seek to discuss with their fellow men the What and Whence and Why. They would desire both a Synthesis and the power to discuss that synthesis with minds of like desire. All this meant that they would demand such a Synthesis if it existed and accept some standarised vocabulary in order that discussion might become a possibility.
An Uncommon Book of Prayer
Authors: Pope Hugh
Published: July 2007

Among the many treasures of St. Edmund’s College, Ware, are a number of old Catholic Prayer-Books. Their preservation is mainly due to the zeal and insight of Father Raymund Stanfield. Amongst them is a copy of the famous old Manual: A Manual of Prayers and Litanies: Distributed according to the Days of the Week. With other Excellent Devotions fitted for all Persons and Occasions. Last Edition much corrected. Permissu Superiorum, 1688. It is a 12mo. volume, singularly compact though actually containing no less than 564 beautifully printed pages. From the foreword ‘To the Pious Reader’ we learn that the present edition is ‘purg’d from many, both gross Errata’s in the Print, and improprieties in the Translations’; the Hymns are ‘rendered according to the Corrected Latin of P. Urban VIII (now generally used in the Church), and those too in far more Musical Numbers.’

But the main and justest glory of this last Edition is a large and exquisite body of Litanies, so strong, and yet so sweet; so affectuous, and yet so instructive; so rigorously ordered and expressed, yet so soft and naturally flowing; in fine, so intirely comprehensive and yet so moderately proportion’d that it is impossible they can be attended to without rendring their Readers wisely devout; nor practis’d without engaging attention; nor once read, without inveigling into a continual practise.

The Calendar which follows is peculiarly interesting. In January alone twenty British Saints are commemorated or their feasts kept; in February twenty-two; in March twenty-seven; in April twenty-six, and so on.
The True Socialist
Authors: Clayton Joseph
Published: July 2007

Catholic not being a true socialist, ought not to call himself a socialist. The Pope has said so.

The true socialist, the genuine Marxist, was never a Catholic and never could be one. For the economic theory that capitalism was fated by inexorable law to pass away, superseded by a class-conscious proletariat that would order all industry on a basis of social equality and thereby produce a co-operative commonwealth, was the dogma and the hope of the true socialist. We say was because when Lenin and his supporters resolved to enforce in their own way the Marxian doctrine in Russia, the old-fashioned Marxian socialist, particularly in England and Germany, was profoundly shocked. Hyndman, the ‘father of English socialism,’ with Kautsky and the ‘old guard’ of the German Social-Democratic Party, protested that Lenin and the Russian communists were not behaving according to plan, since no classconscious proletariat had yetbeen organised in Russia. What happened at Moscow queered the pitch altogether for socialism. The Bolshevik tyranny, in fact, did not, and has not, inaugurated social equality, neither has it produced the co-operative commonwealth of the socialist vision.
Traces of Catholicism in Welsh Folklore and Custom
Authors: Edwards T. Charles
Published: July 2007

Wales is the lost Brittany of Catholicism in this island. The Reformation was ill-received by the people, and for some considerable time the loyalty of the Welsh to the old religion was a force on which the leaders of Catholicism could rely. For a generation or more after the accession of Elizabeth the religious opinions and prejudices of the greater number of Welshmen are best represented by the forceful lines of the schoolmaster-poet, Richard Gwyn of Llanidloes :

Adam, the first man hadBut one Paradise;And there is but one Church, upon a hill.Where there is right communion.She is conspicuous as the sun,. . . . .And she is dowered beyond price,Though smoke mounts from Satan’s pit,Between the blind man and the sky.

In the end Catholicism in Wales perished, for the most part rather from inanition than from any very positive process of conversion to Protestantism.

Strype, speaking of the middle of the sixteenth century, says:

In Wales the people ordinarily carried their beads about with them to church and used them in prayer. And even at Carmarthen, while the Bishop was at the communion table bareheaded, doing his devotions, the people kneeled there and knocked their breasts at the sight of the communion, using the same superstitious ceremonies as they had used in times past before the mass. They brought their corpses to be buried with songs and candles lighted up about them. And one Doctor Hughes ministering the Communion in the Cathedral Church of S. David’s, did after the popish manner break the host into three pieces, putting one of the parts into the cup, and giving a whole cake to the communicant without breaking the same.
The Beauty of Honesty
Authors: Delany Bernard
Published: July 2007

Exactly a hundred years ago, in 1831, Thomas Carlyle published his Sartor Resartus which, in his amusing manner of mock bombast, he claimed to be the first contribution of a fundamental character addressed to the British reader on the Philosophy of Clothes. It is probably quite an accident that Mr. Eric Gill’s book, Clothes’ appears in this year of grace 1931 : there is no evidence that he is falling in with the modern craze for celebrating obscure centenaries, or that he has any wish to revive interest in that solemn, sombre man who used to be called (how strange it sounds now !) the Sage of Chelsea. In fact, the two books bear little relation to one another, and they are separated by more important and significant things than by the big gap of a century. They agree in these particulars; each is very much the product of its age, dated 1831 and 1931 respectively; each is written by a man of genius who has an interest in stonecutting, though many will agree that Mr. Gill’s gift is pre-eminently for designing and sculpture and the cutting of letters, and less conspicuously for letters pure and simple; and each is in the nature of a satire which must have given its author great joy to write—Carlyle’s inclining to be sardonic and somewhat turgid, Gill’s more of a brilliant school-boy lark, scurrilous and Rabelaisian.
The Holy Shroud of Turin
Authors: Barnes A. S.
Published: July 2007

The recent Exposition of the Holy Shroud at Turin, after an interval of a third of a century, has attracted a great deal of attention and discussion. Something like two millions of pilgrims passed before the Relic in the course of the twenty days during which it was exposed for veneration. Before the interest thus aroused once more dies away it may be well to try to put on record what it is that we have learnt.

The Holy Shroud differs from all other Relics, with the exception perhaps of the Title of the Cross, in being the principal witness to its own authenticity. It consists of a long sheet of linen, some fourteen feet long by three and a half in width, on which can be seen two imprints, back and front, of a human figure, placed head to head with a space of about six inches between.

Now there are only two ways, as a moment’s thought will show us, in which such a double imprint can be formed on a single sheet. It may be the result of human artistic work, each image being separately painted by a human hand. On the other hand it may have been produced by a human body which has been laid upon the sheet and covered over with the other half, the imprinted image being thus produced by the body itself. There is no third way conceivable in which a double image can have been formed, or at any rate no third way has ever yet been suggested by anyone.
Casement and Ireland
Authors: O’Sullivan Richard
Published: July 2007

Such is the unity of all history that anyone who endeavours to tell a piece of it must feel that his first sentence tears a seamless web.’

These memorable words of Maitland naturally recur to the mind as one reads the direct and lucid story of the life and death of Roger Casement that Denis Gwynn has given to the world. In the course of his life—so abruptly ended—Roger Casement seemed to be the meeting-place of many strange forces; of the living and of the dead. Some of these forces reflect themselves or are reflected in the titles Mr. Gwynn has chosen for his contents page. The Congo; Putamayo; Ireland; Germany (The Great War); the Traitor’s Gate. The mere repetition of the names gives more than a hint of the strange cycle through which the life of Casement moved. In the beginning of his public career he was a figure of international power and reputation. Later, he declined (or ought I to say, developed?) into a person of some importance in Irish national politics. He ended as a lonely man upon the scaffold. He was so lonely at the end as to be out of touch and in a large measure out of sympathy with the counsel who defended him and with the arguments they used in his defence. And yet, just at the end, in the Divine Mercy, Roger Casement was reconciled to the Church of his Baptism, of which he had forgotten (if indeed he had ever realised) he was once a member. In truth he had received Catholic baptism as a small child at Rhyl while on holiday with his mother, who had been born a Catholic but who had ceased after marriage to practise her religion.
Too Much Ink
Authors: Richings Ronald
Published: July 2007

Into an England where Faith was indigenous, Charity a common virtue, and Hope a sane, constructive effort, Caxton was admitted as a man with a wonderful new toy. He was, in fact, the pioneer of materialism, and the legacy we have inherited from him after more than four centuries, is the chaos of the modern world.

We live now, at best, in a maze of false optimism. Most men realise that something is wrong with the world; they know that Faith is a limited psychological phenomenon with a certain commercial value, that Charity is either a convincing gesture (also with a commercial value) or a weakness that encourages the lower classes, and that Hope is a pious wish that, in spite of Socialism, Mammon may come into his own; but ‘hard-headed business men’ and their satellites are the last people to face realities; self-preservation is the antithesis of soul-preservation, and the one is pleasing and lucrative, the other painful and exacting, so the issue is cloaked in the obscurity of ink which itself is the maggot that has bred our present corruption. Ink, according to the Oxford Dictionary, is a black liquid ejected by a cuttle-fish to assist its escape from a foe.
Justice or Expediency?
Authors: G.C.H.
Published: July 2007

One of the gravest dangers of the present political system in this country is the acceptance of expediency as the guiding principle of legislation. Moral principles have no longer any practical influence in government. The disadvantages of employing ecclesiastics in high offices in the Government, always greatly exaggerated, had the important counter-balancing advantage of the recognition of moral principles in legislation.

Political ecclesiastics might be corrupt, though there is no historical evidence to show that they were more corrupt than the modern lawyer-politician, business-politician, or demagogue-politician. It would be difficult to show that Holy Orders, per se, are more demoralising than the verbal subtleties of the Statute Book, stock and share broking (or pushing), or even a righteous indignation at the sweating of the working classes.

A statesman or politician in Holy Orders (to-day this suggests the Devil in Holy Water) must, at the worst, make some show of informing with moral principles his public acts and those for which he is officially responsible. He has some acquaintance with moral principles drawn from the Christian code, which is the code permeating our culture and civilisation and therefore not foreign to the minds and consciences of the people. The lawyer, business man or demagogue may be quite ignorant of Christian moral principles, except in so far as he has to adapt himself to the effect of them on his fellows. He may deliberately discard such principles and only permit them to influence his actions as necessary but regrettable expedients.
St. Thomas and Humanism
Authors: Vann Gerald
Published: July 2007

If St. Thomas had not been born a Catholic, his philosophy would have brought him to Catholicism. If he had not been—or if he were not—by temperament a humanist, Thomism and the Faith were sufficient to make him one. These three, which meet and fuse in the human soul, are so intimately linked together that it ris impossible perfectly to possess any one of them without possessing the others. All three find common expression in the enfranchisement of the personality. Humanism in the full and real.sense is more than the incomplete humanism of the ancients; more than the atrophied humanism of the Renaissance. For in humanism there are two elements. There is the worship, the love, of beauty, wherever beauty is to be found. There is the realization of the personality in whatever sphere that realization is possible. And both Greece and the Renaissance failed in fullness in these things. If there be any realm of reality, any part of the university of being, whose beauty finds no echo in the heart of a man; if there be anything of life and its fullness to which his personality will not respond, that man is, in that degree, no humanist. In the same degree he will be, logically, no follower of the philosophy of St. Thomas or of the religion of Christ.

It need hardly be said that such a conception is in no conflict with the Christian idea of what is called detachment or of mortification.
St. Thomas and Humanism
Authors: Vann Gerald
Published: July 2007

St. Thomas’s originality lies in the fact that he made his philosophy a welded, organic whole including and co-ordinating in the sweep of its horizon the entire panorama of being. To understand the humanism which is one facet of his philosophy. We must understand his W eltanschauung : his vision of the world, of reality, as a whole. It is the aim of this essay simply to set forth St. Thomas’s teaching, hoping thereby to shew that his philosophy is humanist in what has been submitted in the preceding pages to be the true meaning of humanism.

Man is not to be studied as an isolated phenomenon : he is part of a design infinitely vaster than himself. It is of importance to realise that St. Thomas’s metaphysic, like Aristotle’s, is teleological. In exitu creaturarum a primo principio, he says in the Sentences, attenditur quaedam circulatio vel regiratio, eo quod omnia, revertuntur sicut in finem in id a quo sicut a principio prodierunt. He sees the birth of worlds, the march of centuries, as an emanation from the infinite, which in a vast sweep runs its course back to the abyss of energy from which it sprang. The Aristotelean idea of potentiality applies to the universe as a whole : each entity aspiring towards its proper actualization, the cosmos itself is viewed as ‘yearning,’ in the Aristotelean phrase, for its fulfilment. The desire of the soul for assimilation with the godhead is the supreme human example of this general trend.
Broadcasting Catholicism
Authors: Swinstead A.E.H.
Published: July 2007

There has been a good deal of discussion lately about religious broadcasting. Some people will not have wireless at any price, think it is undermining our lives like the rest of the mechanical inventions, and would not have Catholics touch the accursed thing. Unless wireless is in itself wrong—and the example of Vatican City seems to settle that—there is a good deal to be said against the withdrawal of Catholic broadcasts, but it is not the purpose of this article to try to say it. Other people object to the way it has to be, or at any rate is, done. They criticise the matter of broadcast sermons, and resent what they regard as interference with Catholic worship. Father Martindale has several times explained, and again recently in The Southwark Record, that Catholics are free to present the whole faith, but the impression seems to remain that they do, in fact, water it down for wireless audiences.

Like most discussions, this is best—if not most warmly—argued by people with knowledge, and the knowledge required is not perhaps possessed by the ordinary layman. He knows what his own acquaintances think of Catholic broadcasts and what he himself feels about them, but no more. Priests like Père Lhande, of Radio-Paris, and Father Martindale really have some chance of judging of the effects of their talks, and the clergy are the best judges of the material considered suitable for wireless audiences. But there is a line of approach to the whole subject that is within the competence of anyone who has done a good deal of listening-in and is prepared to think a little, and I am not sure that the most has been made of it.
Marx and the Man
Authors: Vann Gerald
Published: July 2007

‘To run slap into infinity is a momentarily annihilating experience.’ When a man has embraced an emotional faith in a supernatural, while, by force of puritanical environment, denying the natural, it is unlikely that the faith will live for long. What is not anchored to humanity is no safe and abiding refuge for a man. If he ‘lives in a large modern city where existence is insecure, and change is rapid, and further change imperative; where chaos is a standing threat, and yet in the refluent ballet of becoming every optimistic idea seems on tip-toe to be realised; where, at the very lowest one must put one’s best foot forward to keep up with the march of invention and innovation : the How challenges at every turn, and (he) is irresistibly driven into its arms.’ The Why of things no longer concerns him; he joins in the quest for that Utopia which Marxism seeks. It is at least a refuge from the denial of human values which puritanism implies.
Metaphysics Revived
Authors: Gilby Thomas
Published: July 2007

Pure philosophy is no longer unfashionable. In the last few years, scientists of repute have impressed the general reader with its capital importance. The brilliant expositions of contemporary science by Sir A. S. Eddington and Sir James Jeans mount to a philosophical enquiry. They make it quite clear that physical science as such cannot arrive at the nature of things.

The Cambridge University Press has now given us an account, in a small volume the size of The Mysterious Universe, of a voyage into metaphysics launched in the true spirit of Plato, St. Thomas, Spinoza and the pure philosophers of the past. It does not set out to discover and provide a popular map of reality. But when philosophy has been too often confused with so much that is inferior, it is agreeable to read of ‘a resolute direction of thought to the problem of Being’; of an effort to attain truth through Ideas and not images; of a search for causes that are at the same time reasons.
Disarmament
Authors: Jarrett Bede
Published: July 2007

We take our stand on the phrase of Pope Benedict XV in his letter to the belligerent powers on August 1st, 1917, that what is needed is ‘a simultaneous and reciprocal diminution of armaments’ and it is needed precisely in order to help the nations to an era of peace. No one doubts but that these enormous armaments are themselves a cause of unrest in Europe, of themselves they suggest menace and a doom.

But again it is undoubted that armaments are themselves not so much a cause of evil as a result of evil; they testify to an evil beneath the surface of which they are the outward and visible sign. That deeper evil is the one which is in most need of cure. It would be as unwise to attempt to cure our troubles by mere disarmament as it would be to cure a fever by putting ointment on the resulting rash, for everyone knows that armaments are a symptom and are not the disease.

That disease is selfishness, unrestrained desire to possess. It runs through national as well as international politics, it is to be found not merely in nations but in persons; not just at Geneva or Shanghai but in each of us. A gathering of Christians to protest against excessive armaments is in the nature of a confession. There would be no need to-day to have this meeting if we ministers of Christ had properly done our work. We meet here therefore not first to protest against others but to confess our own failure.
Owen Glendower
Authors: Charles-Edwards. T.
Published: July 2007

Owen Glyn DWR has been neglected to a remarkable extent by English historians. The reason is perhaps not far to seek. He belonged to the great army of unsuccessful men; and history has never been kind to failures. He survived in the memory of Englishmen as a character in a Shakesperian play. In so far as he entered at all into serious history, they were content to put him down as an irascible but unpractical Celt, a picturesque bandit, the main object of whose existence was to kill Saxons.

His fate at the hands of his countrymen was little better. Paradoxically enough the battle of Bosworth, which enabled a Welsh king to ride into London at the head of a largely Welsh army, did Wales little but harm. The gentry came to court and became Anglicised : the Reformation which destroyed the monasteries—the cultural centres of the country—completed the process. The patriots were usually papists, and either fled abroad or perished on the gallows. The Act of 1535 avowedly aimed at the extirpation of the Welsh language : and the unpleasant figure of the anglicised Welshman began to appear. In 1567 Dr. Griffith Roberts, the Chaplain of St. Charles Borromeo, and a prominent exile, satirized the type in the preface to his Grammar : ‘their Welsh is Englishfied, and their English, God knows, is too Welshy.’ Morus Kyffin, a fervent defender of the Reformation, wrote in 1595 of a ‘clerical person’ who ‘said that it was not right to allow any Welsh books to be printed.
Military Service or Military Slavery
Authors: de la Bedoyere Michael
Published: July 2007

As much as any other single factor, conscription or enforced military service lies near the root of the military mentality and the atmosphere of war which weigh down on a world the vast majority of whose inhabitants hate the very idea of war. Yet the abolition of conscription has hardly figured at all in the various disarmament proposals, and no serious effort has been made to relegate it to the category of social abuses to which it belongs, serfdom, feudal service, and certain kinds of industrial wage-slaveries.

Before discussing the question of whether and when conscription is ethically justifiable, it will be worth our while to examine the reason for the mischievous part it must play in the modern world. One of the oddest characteristics of the post-war world which still claims to be democratic in spirit if not always in political organisation is the divorce between what political philosophers have called the general will of the people of a State and the actual will of the State as manifested in the policies and activities of its rulers. We may imagine, for example, the average Englishman or the average Frenchman or the average Italian opening his morning paper. He will read of this financial crisis or that, of this political squabble or the other, of the reports of the various countries’ unsympathetic reception of some disarmament proposal. What link, what nexus is there between his mind and these items of news? Practically none, unless we call fear a nexus. He may be afraid for his money, his property, still more afraid of being personally dragged into some disastrous consequence of the mismanagement of the powers that be.
The Fallacy of Primitive Communism
Authors: Piddington Ralph
Published: July 2007

It has been suggested by writers of note that the next few decades will see an advance in the social sciences comparable to the advance which has already been made in our knowledge of the material sciences. In spite of the more pessimistic view, that prejudice and class interests must necessarily render a sane solution of our social problems impossible, there is a general tendency towards a co-ordination of the work of social scientists, and from the chaos of extravagant theories certain general principles are slowly but surely gaining acceptance by the majority of students in the fields of psychology, sociology, and economics.

Nowhere is this tendency more apparent than in social anthropology, the science which studies the social structure of primitive societies with a view to understanding the motives which actuate human beings reared in an environment totally different from our own. These studies are proving of great value in the solution of social problems, and the savage, instead of being dragged in as an afterthought to justify preconceived theories, is being studied for his own sake, and the results applied to more advanced societies.
Hitler—Entwicklungsmoeglichkeiteni
Authors: Pottmann Karl
Published: July 2007

The late German revolution gives opportunity to enlarge on the present situation of Central Europe. The fall of the Republic, the rise of Hitlerism and their influence on national as well as international politics, leave much room for speculation. The reports about Jew-baiting, the contradictory pronouncements of Nazi leaders, the compulsory silence of critical public opinion, all these present some aspects of recent happenings, but they certainly fail to convey understanding. It is said that Germany has lost many friends in England; expressions like barbarism, dangerous nationalism, etc., occur in every discussion on the subject. Indeed, the most unfavourable image of Imperial Germany shows its face through the ‘National Revolution at least to the average Englishman.

It is a difficult task to give an impartial view about a national upheaval when confronted with suspicious public opinion and still more when the writer, for different reasons, has much in common with that opinion. Hitlerism, until now, has little to show that would claim sympathy from the foreign observer. Yet, however much the Nazi movement may be disliked, it would seem that it is incomprehensible in its essential force. This difficulty of understanding, which sometimes expresses itself in astonishment, more often in disappointment over Germany, gives the basis and encouragement to this article.