bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Catholicism and Civilization
Authors: De Munnynck Mark
Published: July 2007

It is thought in certain circles that these two words are the exact antithesis of each other. The persecution of Catholics is called ‘kulturkampf’; and people do not hesitate to say that the prosperity of certain countries dates from the time when they repudiated the Catholic Faith. We are too used to such opinions to be roused by them. Ignorance of Catholic doctrine, usually involuntary, thus once more gives rise to an error, which becomes an injustice. We may surprise certain people when we say :—

(i) That Catholicism insists on civilization and progress as a duty;

(2) That the Catholic Church is the most effectual instrument, and most sure guarantee for progressive civilization.

What is Civilization?

Philosophers and sociologists are on the horns of a dilemma when they consider the nature of civilization. They have complicated the problem by indictments on the subject of ‘Kultur’ and civilization. They say that civilization is nothing else but the help that social man is always giving to nature so that man can live better and better. The expansion of life—by man’s government of nature, by the enriching of his intellectual life, by his artistic, economic and industrial works, by the close connection of the finite with the Infinite—these are the ends and the limits of civilization.

Civilization is a religious duty.

It is enough to have defined civilization, to see that continual effort towards a higher civilization is not only a tendency of human nature; it is equally a religious duty.

God created us. He created us for Himself. We exist for God. He is the only end and explanation of our life. All our efforts should be towards God.
Scottish Baronial
Authors: Blaikie Murdoch W. G.
Published: July 2007

A Noble Style in Architecture

The art which endures is that which is greatly distinctive, besides being beautiful. Waiving the first endeavours of primitive man, for these doings are far too remote to be seen clearly, it may be asserted with complete assurance, that never yet did a school of artists ply their craft, who did not begin by relying on a senior school. A very long page would be needful, whereon to show forth the debts which France owed, on the one hand to Italy, on the other to the Low Countries. And if the Greek achievement was fully as individual as the French, in its early stages Hellenic art tells clearly of discipleship of Egypt and Assyria. The architecture called Scottish Baronial is notably among those things, which combine distinctiveness with beauty. But in approaching a tribute to this work, it behoves to remember that it could not have from the start its markedly idiosyncratic temper. Who were the preceptors of the initial artists in the formula?

There is widespread the idea that the Franco-Scottish alliance originated with the marriage of Mary, Queen of Scots, to the Dauphin. But the league was ancient on that event, and it would seem to have been David I, crowned King of Scots in 1124, who first brought about intimate relations between his compatriots and the French. Caring before all else for things ecclesiastical, he was founder of most of the Scottish abbeys; and one of his actions was to bring to his dominions a group of French monks who were skilled in building. Thus it was normal that soon there should stand revealed, alike in churches and castles in Scotland, an affinity with French architecture.
Eternal Rest Give Unto Us
Authors: McNabb Vincent
Published: July 2007

Odarkness-Frighted one Let faith thy fears outrun.

Within thy Father’s arms Peace be to death’s alarms.

And on God’s mothering breast Take, child, untroubled rest.

Vincent McNabb, O.P.
The Alleged Absurdity of Algebra
Authors: Temple G.
Published: July 2007

Fidelia Vulnera Amantis

In the September number of Blackfriars Father McNabb has attempted to trace the influence of Cartesian Doubt in the development of modern algebra. Now just as philosophy must not be identified with the fallacies of philosophers, so mathematics must not be identified with the mistakes of mathematicians, nor algebra with the absurdities of algebraists. To make such an identification betokens lack of knowledge of the subject under discussion. It is this nescience of modern algebra which vitiates the strictures passed by Father McNabb.

There are treatises on algebra which give a most unsatisfactory account of complex numbers, just as there are treatises on the Eucharist which give an unsatisfactory account of its sacrificial nature. But neither algebra nor theology is invalidated by the inadequacy of its exposition.

The article by Father McNabb affords an illustration of the lamentable lack of understanding between philosophers and mathematicians. A mathematician taking up the study of philosophy labours under the well-known disabilities due to the difference in the nature of proof demanded in each discipline. A philosopher taking up the study of mathematics is bewildered by the many meanings which the same mathematical term may possess in different branches of study. Thus the word ‘number’ may mean a signless integer, a positive or negative integer, a fraction, an irrational number, a complex number, a matrix, an operation. All these are distinct species of number and a mathematician, writing for mathematicians, often fails to state explicitly to which species he refers. Thus’ the statement that there exists no number whose square is equal to —i requires to be elucidated by a definition of the word ‘number.’ The statement remains true for the first four species of number mentioned above, but is false for the last three species.
Alice Meynell
Authors: Delany Bernard
Published: July 2007

It is but to repeat the general verdict to say that Miss Viola Meynell has written a worthy memoir of her mother. She has been wise in avoiding the expansive, exhaustive, two-volumed, official biography. Her book is a memoir, a reminder, a brief record of things memorable; her aim is nothing more pretentious than to give fleeting glimpses, lively sketches, running commentaries which enlighten by flashes the rare life and work of her subject. A daughter is not always considered the one best qualified to write the Life of her mother : family affection might stress the unimportant things, discretion might suppress essential features, filial piety might withhold a perfect portrait. But Miss Meynell has kept in an excelling manner the balance between reverence and unreserve, and one may ask— knowing well how the question would be answered—Who else could have done the work better? Love is blind—perhaps sometimes; but more often love is keen-sighted and, according to the inspired text, love rejoiceth with the truth. Anyhow, it seems clear that the intimacy of family affection, far from handicapping Miss Meynell in her task, has actually proved to be her pre-eminent qualification in revealing and interpreting her mother.

Alice Meynell has been hailed as ‘beyond challenge the most eminent woman writer since George Eliot and Christina Rossetti.’ Your wife’s prose, wrote Coventry Patmore to Wilfrid Meynell, ‘is the finest that was ever written, and none but kindred genius can see how great it is .... it is the test of capacity in the reader for the understanding of what prose is ... . If I were you I should go mad with pride and joy.’
Admonition
Authors: Maynard Theodore
Published: July 2007

If clean thy heart, no bird’s

Sweet voice shall shrill in vain;

And quick shall be thine ear for words The woods sing after rain.

No willow in the wind Shall bend and thou not see—

O sensitive and happy mind!—

Glow earth and sky for thee.

No horse shall arch his neck And thou not dream of Troy;

And fluttering doves for thee bedeck Venus and her Blind Boy.

No star shall ever shine Save over Bethlehem;

Each rose shall bloom the Rose Divine;

Each bud from Jesse’s stem.

Scour but thy spirit clear Of the world’s sensual rust;

Keep heart and mind and eye and ear Sweet, candid, joyous, just.

Theodore Maynard.
The Parting Guest
Authors: Gray John
Published: July 2007

Of all human situations, that perhaps which marks the end of a visit is the most difficult to define. Its ceremonial contains elements which cannot have varied greatly since the beginning; and yet it must, and does without hypocrisy, appear to be special to this leave taking, isolated from all others. Upon humble door-steps, and where even neither door nor step has been, ritual which is forever associated with ancient breeding observes its due development, the note of slight fatigue, the scarcely perceptible smile. There is no margin for criticism; for all that is evil or less perfect has been eliminated, while reticent benevolence pervades the rite.

A barrier as of golden gossamer, exquisite in its tenuity, descends; and it is at the same time a mutual screen to cover the nakedness of whatever regret, awkwardness, relief might humanly be present; restoring solemnity; preserving the sacredness of hospitality, recalling its noble etymology. Sooner or later, seldom or often, each has stood on one side or the other of this imagined partition.
The Cardinal Duke of York
Authors: Speaight Hugh
Published: July 2007

Henry Stuart was born in 1725. He died in 1807 in his eighty-third year. The birth of his father, the Old Pretender, had been the occasion of James the Second’s flight from England; and he himself lived to see the opening of negotiations for Catholic Emancipation in this country. He was created Cardinal at the unusually early age of twentytwo, and fourteen years later he was appointed to the bishopric of Frascati. In addition to this, he held the office of Dean of the Sacred College for the last four years of his life. Throughout this long and distinguished career he may be said to have had two interests, and two only, at heart: the service of his family and the service of his Church.

Of his devotion to the Stuart cause much has already been written. He has been alternately maligned by Hanoverian historians and white-washed by the assiduous supporters of the White Rose League. The former have pointed with contempt rather than with pity to the spectacle of this last of the Royal Stuarts begging George the Third for a further subsidy to support him in his old age : while the latter have either blamed him for becoming a Cardinal or else reminded the world of his untiring attempts to secure Papal recognition for his brother as Charles the Third, and later of his own constant, if tactful, assertion of his rights to the English throne. But these desultory tracts of historical controversy are profitless for any save the most dauntless student of lost causes; and neither an emphatic condemnation of Henry Stuart’s conduct nor his political rehabilitation would be likely to have any effect on modern life or thought.
Spring in the Air
Authors: Hallack Cecily
Published: July 2007

The April to which I look forward is a thing of more marvels than the April the colts snuff up on the March winds, with such promises of life ahead that in sheer joy they suddenly send the mud splashing behind them in the paddock, rearing and chasing in the ecstasy of that beckoning festival.

The Easter to which I, as a Christian, look forward, comes after long Lent of February and March with their penance of pruning knife and scourging rain and skies grey-white as wood-ash in that long fast of bare black trees and beaten turf. But all through the forty days, Easter has been in the air; sometimes we have received the promise afar off, even before the immaculate conception of the first snowdrop in its humility. Certainly in March, when the sun is so veiled and weak that only the larks find it, when only jessamine and winter wallflowers give alms of gold, you may know the stir of sap under the dead bracken as you go to early Mass. England begins her preparations in good time, because she has always kept Easter with great liturgical splendour in her orchards and gardens, in field and farmhouse. She brings out the trinity cups of woodspurge and crocuses like gold, frankincense and myrrh, and St. Joseph’s violets, one by one. Then her gold and silver willow, white violets and wild daffodils, anemones under the old pear-tree, bracken fronds like a bishop’s pastoral staff, her yellow chickens and ducklings. In rain or sun, we hear the numes of bird-song, unconsciously obedient to the Motu proprio.
Saints and Birds
Authors: Gumbley Walter
Published: July 2007

Those fortunate enough to live in the country in early spring know well the pleasure that is to be found in watching and listening to the birds. Now legends grow in the country, and when towns were only houses collected together in the country they grew there also. Legends are amongst life’s most precious gifts, telling us, as they do in story-shape how God is love, and how the saints were his friends. Perhaps it is in legends that we get nearest to the real man in the saint. The saints loved God, and therefore all his creatures—a solid fact, not a beautiful phrase. They spent their days helping others to come with them to God, a work which made them the busiest of the busy, and yet gave them leisure to thank God for all He had made and to admire His handiwork. Their love overflowed to the animal creation, the beauties of which inspired them to sing such canticles as we find in the life of St. Francis of Assisi, wherein God is thanked for the beauty He has given to His creatures. No more beautiful legends exist than those which tell us of saints and birds, and even Our Lord’s life became in the middle ages a centre of bird-lore. The wren was placed in the stable at Bethlehem, and the robin got his little red-breast from staunching the Precious Blood, so that ‘Robins and wrens are God Almighty’s friends.’
Theophile
Authors: Clegg Aileen Mary
Published: July 2007

When we first went to the Pyrenees we lived in a tiny village at the foot of the Pic de Ger, about half-an-hour’s walk from Lourdes.

Our village was a charming place. It was made up entirely of farmhouses, little and big, all of them colour-washed, most of them end-on to the road with their cobbled yards beside them, and all of them enclosed behind great gates as if they expected to be put into a state of siege at any minute. Even Monsieur le Cure’s house had originally been a two-roomed farmhouse. So, too, had ours till it had been converted to a villa by an enterprising son of the village. He had knocked away the lofts and the pent roofs with their little dormer windows, and the house now boasted two stories, with the traditional galérie and a series of attics.

All the floors had been renewed. From that fact hangs my tale.
Two Books on Art
Authors: O’Connor John
Published: July 2007

The Catholic Church and Art. By Ralph Adams Cram. (Calvert Series; Burns, Oates & Washbourne; 1929; 4/-).

Art Nonsense. By Eric Gill. (Cassell & Co. and Francis Walterson; 21/- net).

The first-named work deals with all that manifestation of the aesthetic instinct which flowered within the influence or the territory of Christendom whilst Christendom was at variance on things mainly human and material; and with its curious deviations and altered canalisations ensuing from Iconoclasm, as well as with the blight which came to it from Manicheeism and the sour-faced offspring Puritanism, that palmer-worm which devoured the leavings of the locust. It is truly a great little book, a masterly synthesis of all the movements which moved anything in the category of things that may be made. It is not only scholarly but abounding in observations which bespeak a right intuition upon a realm much enhavocked by people who are sure of what is not so. But can Bach be called a Catholic musician? He wrote a Mass in B minor which is one of the world’s chief treasures, but of no use to the Catholic Liturgy even were nothing enacted Motu Proprio. A greater than Bach is here, William Byrd, but though he is a very Catholic, even Papist, musician, I do not remember that he is mentioned. He labours under the disadvantage of being English. He also conducted Anglican chapels-royal for Elizabeth in her spacious time. But there is documentary evidence that both he and his organist, John Bull, kept their places at court on purpose to be able to hear Mass and get others to Mass, with impunity.
St. Mark's and St. Luke's Omission of St. Matthew XVI, 17—19
Authors: McNabb Vincent
Published: July 2007

17. And Jesus answered and said unto him : Blessed art thou, Simon Bar Jona, for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father who is in heaven.

18. And I also say unto thee, that thou art Peetr and upon this rock I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

19. I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound also in heaven. And whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed also in heaven.

* * * * *

The omission of this passage from the Gospels of St. Mark and St. Luke is of such significance that it has already occasioned a bulky literature. Those of us who are privileged to experience the peace of being in the Church of the Rock are intellectually unprejudiced towards the discussion, because whatever way the discussion turns, it always turns into a confirmation of the Petrine position. If on the one hand it be argued that Mark and Luke did not know of this text but that it found its way almost at once into the text of the first gospel, we are faced with the fact of such a widespread acceptance of St. Peter’s supremacy that a spurious text could be given citizenship in the gospel written, not by a mere disciple like Mark or Luke, but by an apostle, Matthew.

If, on the contrary, the text was known, as indeed the present writer thinks it was known, though omitted, by Mark and Luke, inclusion in the gospel of one who was an apostle and an eye-witness of the incident is first-hand authority which no later omissions can destroy.
Liberty and Education
Authors: Parry Edward
Published: July 2007

I am all for education, but not at the expense of freedom and family life. When the House of Commons decrees that no child is to live with its father and mother on board a canal boat, it strikes a blow against marriage, and the family, and liberty, which is almost worthy of Moscow. Nor would such a measure be suggested, but for the insufficiency of our educational experts, whose indolence suggests to them that it is an easier job to destroy a home than to make a special kind of school to support a special kind of family. The modern legislator is never so happy as when he is interfering with domestic peace, or hindering a man at his work; and the Government Aunties all know, far better than mere mothers, how children should be fed, clothed and taught. I have no doubt that there are men in the Education Department, like Edward Holmes, the late chief inspector of education, who if given a free hand to-morrow, could devise an excellent scheme for providing the canal boat children with all the education they want, and saving them from many weary hours of scholastic slavery in an unwholesome atmosphere. To do this would necessitate tearing up a lot of futile regulations and obtaining a sum of money from a niggardly Treasury. Not so much, of course, as the Exchequer would spend on a useless airship, or some pictures of bananas to please Empire advertisers, but merely a few thousands for such sanitary buildings and sensible teachers as the scheme would need.
The Vatican Council
Authors: Pope Hugh
Published: July 2007

Once more Abbot Butler has put us in his debt. It was not to be wondered at that the work involved in compiling his fascinating Life of Archbishop Ullathorne should have focussed his attention on the story of the unfinished Council in which Archbishop Ullathorne took so real a part though hardly one of the great protagonists in those immortal scenes.

Though the Council is famous for its definition of Papal Infallibility, curiously enough this was not one of the subjects marked for discussion, even though everybody knew long beforehand that it was to prove the great feature of the meetings. Quite rightly then does Abbot Butler present us with a history of the Council in which the Dogma of Infallibility is the key to all the discussions, even to those which preceded the gathering of the bishops. That the doctrine should ultimately be defined was not only a logical necessity but an historical one, for it is enshrined in the doctrine of the Primacy already defined at Florence. Moreover, as it were unconsciously, the Christian ‘sense’ of the truth of this doctrine lay at the back of all the disputes between the Papacy and the Christian kings which are so marked a feature of European history. Hence in his opening pages the Abbot gives us a really masterly survey of such thorny questions as that of the deposing power claimed by the Popes, and of the effort—begun at Constance and perpetuated in Gallicanism—to make the Pope in some way or other subordinate to an Oecumenical Council.
Fredric Mistral
Authors: L'Estrange. J. K.
Published: July 2007

Whilst Italy celebrates the bi-millenary of the birth of Virgil, Provence keeps this year the centenary of her own Virgil, Frédéric Mistral, born at Maillane, near Arles, on the 8th September, 1830. His memory is still fresh amongst his people, for he died only as recently as 1914, and we may confidently expect a flood of personal reminiscences from many who were privileged to know him intimately, but to the average Englishman, Mistral can be spoken of only as one who has already passed into literary history, and the justification of these lines must be the comparative unfamiliarity of their subject matter to most English readers.

That Mistral is so little known here is perhaps to be ascribed to the fact that his writings are to us, in a sense, doubly foreign. His most important work, Mirèio (Mireille), may be known, as to its theme, through the medium of Gounod’s opera, but, of the latter, two versions exist, one of which falsifies the action of the poem for the sake of a ‘prettier’ curtain. The poem itself has been translated into English, but such is the irony of things, that the more readable a translation, the less it savours of the original, and in the case of poetry one feels dissatisfied with anything but a strictly literal version intended to enable the reader to follow the original, line by line. Mistral is doubly foreign to us, in the sense that even Paris is able to read him only with a French translation en regard.
Financial Control and Birth Control
Authors: Ginns Reginald
Published: July 2007

De nominibus non est curandum is one of those trite sayings of St. Thomas which, outside its context, could easily be gravely misunderstood. He is blaming those who concern themselves more with words than with the realities which words are meant to represent. Words are only signs, and the sign without the reality loses its reason of being. It is a sign-post which points to a place that does not exist.

There is abundant reason for thinking that the implicit criticism contained in these words of St. Thomas is especially applicable to modern times when men seem so strongly attached to words and symbols, and delude themselves into thinking that they possess the realities because they have the words. Democracy, efficiency and rationalisation are words to juggle with, though the realities they stand for seem to be very conspicuous by their absence. Indeed, you can never take for granted what the users of these words mean by them. A request for definitions is always worth while.
St. Dominic
Authors: Pepler Hilary
Published: July 2007

If we make anything, it seems that we cannot avoid making it in our own image and likeness; to this fact I attribute the note of autobiography which creeps into any ‘life’ written by one man of another. We cannot see in another qualities of which we are ourselves deficient; a man that is colour-blind cannot introduce accurate tones into his picture, be his line ever so perfect. It follows that we cannot expect a good life of St. Dominic except from a Saint. Nevertheless, as no one is without some elements of sanctity, each one, according to his measure, will be able to appreciate St. Dominic, in whom these are pressed down and running over. We must not discount his virtues because they appear as perfections of our own, for it is through these virtues that we shall reach him. The philosopher will see St. Dominic as a philosopher, the contemplative as a contemplative, the organiser as a Master General; indeed, each man sees his hero as himself, generously bereft of the frailties and indecisions flesh is heir to. This limitation of our vision is, in a way, a reflection of the mystery of the Incarnation, and, as such, a source of comfort. Man can make or reproduce only what he has seen, but the vision takes form in his own image; the maker is revealed in the thing made. It is not only ‘Dawn’ which, Eblis-like, sits upon the portals of the Underground, but Epstein; it is not Spring arising from the shell, but Botticelli; it is not only the mystery of Father Brown, but the life of Mr. Chesterton in which we are intrigued.
M. Chevalier's ‘Pascal’
Authors: Cary-Elwes Columba
Published: July 2007

The fortunes of Blaise Pascal, that brilliant genius and highly-gifted soul, would now seem to be in the ascendant. Ever since his death he has suffered at the hands of editors and critics, beginning with the Pensées of Port Royal, going on to the calumnies of Voltaire, ending with his adoption by the nineteenth century sceptics. It is only in recent years that Pascal has received his due, and M. Chevalier’s book is the final stage in this rehabilitation. Nor is it merely that the charges against him have been proved to be false, for there is a positive growth in his fame; he is coming to be recognised as a Christian apologist of an original and persuasive quality. It is to France that we naturally look for an interpretation of this great Frenchman, and much has been written there about him in recent years; but there is no book, we believe, which is equal to M. Chevalier’s in its masterly account of Pascal’s life and in its just and sympathetic exposition of his religious philosophy.

For a long time, unquestionably, Pascal’s reputation has suffered among Catholics from his association with Jansenism and from his unfortunate quarrel with the Society of Jesus. In the partisan dust raised by those controversies his chief work and true significance were almost completely obscured. We shall say very little about them, except this that in the matter of the Provinciates M. Chevalier seems to us rather lenient to Pascal.
Romance in Religion
Authors: Quidam Frater
Published: July 2007

Not many of us are favoured with visions, usually through our own fault: for the best of all visions is the right appreciation of the inner significance of all these everyday things we have looked at for so long with unseeing eyes. That, we are sure, is the real character of the visions of the mystics. And these are visions which do not come suddenly and as suddenly fade away, leaving nothing but a memory behind them; they remain for ever.

It was a vision of this kind that came to a certain brother as he stood one night chanting matins in the choir along with the others. Humanly speaking, he did not deserve to have a vision, for he was not in the dispositions which are piously supposed to lead to such favours. His lips were mumbling the psalms, but his mind was far away, and he looked to be bored. To speak the truth, he was tired, and longed for nothing so much as the end, so that he might go to bed. And if you could have seen into his mind and heart, you would have found that the attitude of his soul was no better than that of his body. He was in a mood of dejection and disappointment, for he was young in religious life, and religious life had not come up to his expectations. All his young life he had been a romantic dreamer, for ever lending himself to an imaginative exaltation of the past.
On Two Sides of the World
Authors: Balfour M. C.
Published: July 2007

It began in the Clos-Poulet, it may be said to have ended in the Pacific—and yet I think that its true ending is at home where long ago it began; for it is written in grey, the colour of Brittany skies, the colour of tears—there is no heat or brilliance in it as of southern seas. Surely here or there, this is a breton tale, strayed but returning home at last; so that the record of it has to be pieced together, as it were, on two sides of the world.

It is not difficult to picture the beginning, though Clémentine will tell little of that. But there was a day some fifty odd years ago when there lay in the bay of St. Malo a little ship straining at her cables and shaking out her sails to catch the wind; a ship home-built and home-manned, launched in the harbour yonder and christened, like so many of her crew, by the curé from the grey cathedral that lifts its single spire above the close-walled little city. It is easy to picture her, to know her very make and shape and rig; for year by year her sister goélettes are still built and equipped and sent out from St. Malo to the Iceland and Newfoundland fishings. Year by year in the first days of spring they steal out into the bay from the harbour where they have lain during the winter; year by year they pass out, unchanging, familiar, with the same lines of paint fresh on graceful sides, the same gilding at the bow, the same well-remembered Marie-Joseph, it may be, or the Sainte-Anne, or the Etoile-de-Mer.
Baron Von Hügel on The Petrine Claims
Authors: Walker Luke
Published: July 2007

Towards the end of June appeared a little work entitled Some Notes on the Petrine Claims by Friedrich von Hügel. An intimate friend of von Hügel’s was, apparently, thinking of becoming a Catholic, and had received from a High Anglican a letter containing ‘a reasoned attack on the Roman position.’ Von Hügel set down these notes in answer to this attack. Though written in 1893, they had not hitherto been published. A warm welcome has been given to the book in the Catholic press. In the July Month Fr. Vassall-Phillips, in the course of a long notice, writes : ‘The publication of such an answer from such a pen, coming, after so many years, from beyond the tomb, constitutes an event of outstanding religious importance.’ A reviewer in the July Blackfriars expresses himself thus : ‘Friedrich von Hügel the resolute thinker, is in every line of this precious little book ... . It is to be hoped that in the circles where Friedrich von Hügel is honoured almost as a prophet this little masterpiece of the prophet may direct tired eyes and feet towards the consolations of the Rock,’
A Coming of Age
Authors: Baptist Reeves John
Published: July 2007

It is pathetic to see a young life coming of age merely to die. It is tragic if the death is due to the indifference and neglect of those who have brought the young life into being, and are responsible for its continuance. There is some danger that this year English Catholics may be, not merely witnesses of such a domestic tragedy, but actually the villains of the piece.

The Catholic Social Guild comes of age this year. At its annual meeting, just held in Oxford, it assembled its friends for the customary rejoicings. But the debutante was found to be seriously ill, sick almost to death. Instead of congratulations and good wishes for the future, there was to be heard a thin, tired voice uttering what sounds perilously like a valedictory death-bed speech.

‘Last year,’ it said, ‘we made a loss of £86. This year it is £85. The surplus of £74 on the old balance sheet has disappeared and become a deficit of £11. Our expenditure cannot be reduced below its present amount if any sort of organisation and propaganda is to be maintained. Our income is below that—our regular income from subscriptions very much below that. Whether we meet again here will depend upon whether we survive the crisis by increasing our income. If the Guild goes, the Democrat goes, the Year Book goes, and eventually the Workers’ College also goes.’
The Church in Iceland
Authors: Lechmere Joscelyne
Published: July 2007

Attention has been focussed on this relatively far-away island owing to the fact that it celebrates this year the thousandth anniversary of its Parliament. For Catholics it is also a memorable summer as it sees the entry to his See of a first Icelandic Bishop since the ‘Reformation.’ The new Bishop of Holar is of Danish birth and has laboured for many years in Iceland. He has perforce to live away from his see. For Holar, in northern Iceland, which once had a fair cathedral and was a famous seat of Catholic learning is now only a name. I vividly remember arriving there in the late afterglow of a northern summer night after a long day’s ride culminating in a steep mountain slope even in August deep with snow. Holar lies far below in a fertile green valley watered by many streams. Just as Holar now possesses a Bishop and no cathedral, conversely the Faroe Isles, four hundred miles away, have a cathedral without a chief pastor.

At Kirkubae, south of Thorshavn, stands an unfinished stone building in Gothic style. It was never consecrated, and yet it has not been desecrated to any profane use. It remains roofless to the sky, a perpetual reminder of the faith which built it and of those who prevented its completion.
The Corsairs of Saint-Malo
Authors: Balfour M. C.
Published: July 2007

Of them ‘that go down to the sea in ships’ Saint-Malo, assuredly, has never had any lack. For the last five hundred years she has been the home of a sea-faring people; adventurers, discoverers, privateers—sometimes little better than pirates—she numbers them in plenty among her citizens, as we have good and convincing cause to remember. For it must be frankly confessed that not only did they dispute with us the freedom of the seas, but at one time it was not we who always had the best of the argument. In fact, to be honest, we suffered very considerably at the hands of these free-lances; and it is a surprising thing to remember that these men raised the little rock-city of their birth to be a power in France, and a danger to England. When the size of Saint-Malo is taken into consideration, this is a rather remarkable achievement.

Only a few of their names are familiar to us, though many more are preserved in the annals of the little town on the Brittany coast; and perhaps it is worth while to recall something of what is known of them. Commanding their own ships while they were yet boys (Duguay-Trouin was only sixteen); growing incredibly rich and piling up adventures as other lads steal apples; something more than a guild—almost a family, closely interlinked by marriage and descent; merchants sending out their own ships to trade as well as to fight, fighters manning their own ships to defend their trade—to read the story of their exploits is like turning over the pages of a fairy tale.
A Poplar-Leaf
Authors: Martindale C. C.
Published: July 2007

Last time I spoke at St. Dominic’s Priory, Haverstock Hill, to a crowd of boys, one of them had a fit. This shows how far from suited I am to talk to or even about boys. (However, when I was there before, someone lost his false teeth .... I was accused .... but no matter. Perhaps it’s an affair of place rather than person. Or, just fate. To resume . . . .)

I am not going to speak so much about boys, as about anyone who grows up in a place like Poplar, London, E.14; and though I shall talk about Poplar, I am not selfishly forgetting other desperately poor parishes in London, or in many another city, Glasgow for example; Bristol. I suppose that much the same happens everywhere as in Poplar. For example, the parents, either because they must or because they are short-sighted, send their children out to do such work as children can, immediately after they leave school and even before. (I knew a boy who made quite a good business, between whiles, by stealing leafy twigs and sticking them in flower-pots (also stolen) and selling them to old ladies in the suburbs on the assurance that ‘they would flower in October.’ . . . He had already learnt how to steal enough milk out of doorstep-bottles to supplement his insufficient breakfast. But he was an angel-child in school . . . .) Well, at sixteen the young labourer is sacked, because he has to be insured.
A Daughter of St. Dominic
Authors: McNabb Vincent
Published: July 2007

On Monday evening, December the 30th, 1929, Mrs. Sheppey-Greene (née Schuster) died in Charing Cross Hospital. The tragedy of a richly endowed mind and soul cut off in mid-life after a few hours’ illness came with bewildering fitness almost as we were remembering ‘Rachel weeping for her children, who were no more.’

The friars of St. Dominic were grieved that this sister of the Third Order was taken when, as they thought, her life of varied usefulness was just opening into flower. Yet they could not withhold the further thought—and it was an end to grief—that He Whom their sister had served was accounting her life not an opening flower but a ripened fruit.

Those who knew Rose Schuster best could not picture her as choosing, even for an hour, a low rather than a high way to God. I have heard her reply to the question, how did she come by her deep knowledge of the Bible, by saying that she had a governess who insisted on the word of God being committed to memory. But it was evident that the girl whose faithful memory was learning God’s word had a still more faithful heart that was learning from God’s word how best to do God’s will.

Some two years after her mother became a Catholic she followed her mother into the Church. But indeed she never followed anyone but Him Who is the way, and the truth and the life. The only life her robust mind could seek was the gift of truth.
The Virgin Without a Face
Authors: Balfour M. C.
Published: July 2007

This is the story that I have been told of the ruined chapel in the Bois-Marie.

When the sun sets peacefully behind clouds, there comes an hour of hushed stillness. And on the edge of the Bois-Marie, where there were no trees, but only broken ground, tangled with bramble and bracken and dappled with hollows where the rain lay, the quietness of all the world seemed to gather and brood.

It was a high place, lifted up on the cliffs that stood with their feet in the water, and little was visible that was not sky or sea of the nearer land rising and falling as it travelled into the distance. There were no houses, no ploughed fields, no trimness of man’s work. There was only the high breast of the earth, pale and clear and quiet; the grey sea, the luminous grey sky, and the grey hush that followed the sunset.
A Note on the Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist
Authors: Walker Luke
Published: July 2007

In an article on ‘St. John’s Witness to the Blessed Sacrament’ in a former number of Blackfriars, Fr. Vincent McNabb wrote as follows:

It was no main purpose of St. John to show that the Son of God was a worker of miracles. No evangelist records miracles so sparingly. But it remained for the last of the evangelists to remove the last of the misunderstandings about the Holy Eucharist by recording the transubstantiation of water into wine at the wedding feast (John ii, i-ii). As the Catholic doctrine of the Holy Eucharist is based on two miracles, Transubstantiation and Multiplication, and as the miracle of Multiplication had already been recorded by the three Synoptists, St. John’s mention of the miracle of Transubstantiation completed the necessary proof of the possibility of the Real Presence.

This passage seems to me to be misleading on several points, and also to contain, at least implicitly, views which it is difficult to accept. In view of the importance of its subject no excuse need be offered for discussing it here. I venture, therefore, to set down as clearly as I can some of the objections which, it seems to me, can be legitimately urged against it. I will deal first with what Fr. McNabb calls the miracle of Transubstantiation, and secondly with the miracle of Multiplication.
The Man Who Tried to Convert the Pope
Authors: Knox R. A.
Published: July 2007

Most of us are aware that, at intervals during the last three centuries, efforts have been made by well-meaning persons to realise the pathetic dream of a re-united Church, something not quite Protestant and not quite Catholic, based upon those principles of compromise which are so dear to the English heart. But none of them, I suppose, has ever been made with so little appreciation of the facts, so quaint a misunderstanding of values, as that described by its author in a book entitled ‘Journal of a Tour in Italy in 1850,’ by George Townsend, D.D., Canon of Durham, published by Messrs. Rivington in 1851. I am suspected, I do not know why, of being infected with that April Fool’s Day spirit which delights to palm off literary frauds on the public. Let me explain, then, that the volume really exists, and that my quotations are all genuine. Nor let it be supposed that I am the victim, any more than I am the author, of an imposture. Canon Townsend has his niche in the Dictionary of National Biography; he is no fiction of a Tractarian humorist, he is solid fact. A visit to Durham might even supply us with his portrait, but I have felt the pilgrimage to be unnecessary. I think I see the old gentleman well enough as it is; white-chokered, well-tailored, earnest, whiskered after the fashion of his time. He had got his canonry, I suppose, before 1840, and was not therefore affected by the findings of the Ecclesiastical Commission, which cut down its value to a beggarly thousand a year; he liked, clearly, to do himself well, and was not infected with the enthusiasm of the Evangelicals.
The New Morality of Lambeth
Authors: Ginns Reginald
Published: July 2007

Having learnt by experience how frequently the evil that a man does falls back upon his own head, our wise forefathers gave us the proverb which says that curses always come home to roost. This is brought back to our mind by the significance of the declarations of the recent Lambeth Conference along with the explanations or excuses since offered by the Anglican prelates responsible. It is another case of the proverb. It has taken three hundred years to overthrow the calumnious accusations of the reformers concerning the morality of the ancient monasteries, and it is to Protestant historians like Gairdner that we are indebted for much of the labour involved in the destruction of that false accusation. Does it not seem that the curse has come home to roost when we find the chief authorities of the Anglican body publicly and officially teaching that unnatural vice in sexual relationship is right and good provided that it be done ‘in the light of Christian principles’?

We should be tempted to laugh were the blasphemy not so horrible. All who had followed the trimming and compromising of the Anglican leaders were quite prepared to see them bow to expediency in this case also by declaring that birth-prevention was allowable. But it is the hypocrisy of that phrase ‘in the light of Christian principles’ which sticks in our throat: we were not prepared for that, for we did not think they had fallen so far from Christ.
The Stairway of the Gods
Authors: Belloc Elizabeth
Published: July 2007

Above the narrow valley of Champéry the Dent du Midi makes a dreadful caricature of the Trinity. The three great figures loom up against the sky, huddling together in evil conclave, leaning backwards in attitudes of insolence and pride. When the light is behind them their stony faces brood darkly in the shadow, a living monument to the mystery of evil; when the sun beats on them they stare over into Savoy, blank, cruel, unanswering; mouthless and eyeless, yet they grin and mock as if eternally amused at the helplessness of the human intellect faced with the unanswered question of evil. Their snow-streaked robes fall in gigantic folds about the granite cliffs where they sit enthroned; there is a suggestion of vast elbows and shoulders, of dreadful muscles and sinews, of huge limbs reposing, of fearful power waiting and held in reserve. Yet somewhere amidst that mighty solidity there is a hint of heaviness, of blankness, of —stupidity. They are a trio of darkness; and though the light is on them, it is never in them, and though the clouds gather about them as if to hide their great Council from human eyes, the frightened watcher has a suspicion, deep down, that their staring pride is valueless to the heavens and their mighty cogitations are empty and unwise.

Immediately beside the third great figure is a fourth point, the Haute Cime, higher than all three, standing up like the back of a throne; the cliff falls down from it in a great sweeping curve and gathers again into the solid bastion of golden granite called the Dent de Chaux.
Metz Revisited
Authors: Wilkinson Maurice
Published: July 2007

It is now sixty years since the surrender of Marshal Bazaine’s army in Metz, and only the very old can have a personal recollection of that fateful war, and only the extremely aged can have taken any active part in it, if indeed any such are still alive.

I was in Metz as a boy when we were as near to the war of 1870 as we are now to the war of 1914, and it so happened that owing to certain circumstances the events of that all important drama were early impressed on my mind to an unusual extent. I soon became fascinated by it and as I grew older read anything that bore on the subject and eagerly listened to any stories from those who had taken part in it. ‘The war,’ as we always called it, was the one outstanding event in Europe to my mind, and it has haunted me ever since.

Since that day I never re-entered Metz or Strasbourg until the year 1929, but twenty years ago I went over the battlefields round Metz, walking over the then frontier from Pagny-sur-Moselle. A dislike of seeing the German uniforms in those provinces had grown up with me, though I was not, and never have been, antiGerman as such. Indeed, the recovery of the lost provinces ought to go far to end the Franco-German hostility, just as in the sixteenth century Sir F. Walsingham said of Calais : ‘That was the great obstacle to any Anglo-French friendship, but now that it has gone (ie., the French have it), where is the difficulty?’
Your Adversary the Devil
Authors: Quidam Sacerdos
Published: July 2007

The subject of the devil and his power to do evil to man is seldom discussed in the pulpit with all the exactness of sound theology. A missioner will descant on the mighty intelligence of Satan, and his relentless attack on the human race. He may even draw pictures of the dreadful state of a soul that has irrendered to the devil, and become completely possessed by him. He will warn his hearers that the devil is a powerful adversary, and that their strength is small and puny compared with Satan’s. In all this there is a good purpose, and the missioner’s words are often a very useful goad for the sluggish type of character that requires more vivid and more fiery (often in a literal sense) motives of action than the somewhat cold idea of duty to God. But there is a want of exactness and balance if no mention is made of the precise limits of Satan’s power over man, and there is the danger of causing unnecessary fear. One could wish that more attention were devoted to a careful explanation of the method of Satan’s attack, and of the limits of its efficacy.

A very important point to make, first of all, is that the devil can never act directly on the human intellect or the will. In other words, the devil has no means of getting inside a man’s soul and taking possession of man’s free-will. St. Thomas gives the following reason : to be within another is to be within his terms (terminos, limits),