bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Worst of a System….
Authors: Gilby Thomas
Published: July 2007

In a quite common and considered estimation, it is at once the strength and weakness of a scientific philosophy in general and of the Scholastic in particular to be considered abstract, universal, and necessary. A settled and valuable mood of the intellectual is satisfied when the mind is imagined as living its proper life in the timeless world of essences, forced only by the needs of its present state to shifting and momentary accommodations with a welter of contingent concrete individual things. But our deepest desire is to know the real, and the whole real. Now the real, if it is anything, is concrete, while for us the concrete is unique, inexpressible, and fugitive; antithetical to a scientific philosophy. Hence the feeling that the cost of a system is the sacrifice of the real.

While the structure of Thomism, as it appears in the text-books or even from a superficial reading of St. Thomas, cannot fail to strike the imagination with the vastness of its conception, the coherence of its parts, and the impregnability of its logic, there is to some a haunting air of unreality about it, which is none the less felt because well-nigh incapable of formulation in the face of such an impressive, or what I might even call crushing, perfection.
The Ethics and Psychology of Neomalthusian Birth-Control
Authors: McNabb Vincent
Published: July 2007

[This paper was read to a group of members of the Guild of St. Luke, St. Cosmas, and St. Damian in London in 1923, and was first published in The Catholic Medical Guardian, the quarterly journal of the Guild (Vol. II, No. 5, January, 1924). We are indebted to the Editor of that journal and to Father Vincent McNabb for permission to reprint the article. Its publication is timely in view of the declaration of a majority of the members of the Lambeth Conference to the effect that where the moral obligation of birth prevention exists, it is open to the parties concerned to employ any method to prevent conception, provided such method be in accord with Christian principles. Father Vincent McNabb’s paper, written seven years ago, is an adequate answer to the Lambeth pronouncement.'—Editor.]

We have deliberately used the phrase, ‘NeoMalthusian Birth-Control,’ because the simple phrase ‘Birth-Control’ is likely to mislead. It is not accurate to say that the Church condemns birth-control. What the Church condemns, or rather what the Church has no power to allow, is not birth-control, but birth-control by sinful methods. The Church has always had a most efficient method of birth-control, by conjugal and virginal chastity. She has never urged what Neo-Malthusians say she has urged : ‘reckless propagation.’ Indeed, her normal action seems everywhere to have resulted, not in such an increase of population as this island has seen since the Industrial revolution, but in a steady maintenance of a high level of population largely dwelling on the land.
Half Truths
Authors: Blundell Margaret
Published: July 2007

On the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of Charles II there appeared in The Times a most interesting article on that monarch and his time by Keith Feiling. The typically English attitude of mind towards the history of that reign expressed in its lines must, however, have roused the attention of Catholic readers, especially his allusion to ‘the half truths of which Oates got hold.’

It is matter for conjecture how many of his non-Catholic readers were aware of the whole truth where it touches Titus Oates and the malignant story of his career. To be sure, no historian defends the man who, according to Macaulay, was ‘the founder of the school of false witnesses.’ Every Englishman has learned at school that Titus Oates was a miscreant of the most evil and mischievous genius; that the men who were condemned to death on the strength of his false accusation were innocent victims of a politically engineered plot which had as its background the end of frustrating the Catholic succession to the throne. The end, in the mind of the average protestant Englishman, was laudable, although it did not justify the means adopted by the Government in this case.
An Englishwoman Prisoner in Afghanistan
Authors: Bordeaux Paule Henry
Published: July 2007

On the 23rd of August of last year Afghanistan celebrated, as usual, the anniversary of her independence by brilliant festivities in the suburbs of Kabul. L’Illustration reproduced a photograph, brought by air, of the new Sovereign, the Emir Habib-Ullah, dressed in national costume and surrounded by members of his government.

Exactly eighty-six years before, the same Review had reproduced on its first page the portrait of an Englishwoman who had witnessed the barbarous revolt at Kabul and who had been imprisoned by Akbar-Khan for many long months.

Time rolls on, and history repeats itself. To-day, as yesterday, Afghanistan stands out as the country pre-eminently noted for riots and civil wars. Hardly are the last speeches ended, the last dances over than the news of the march on Kabul led by the rebel general Nadir-Khan, and the probable assassination of Habib-Ullah is blazoned abroad.
The Wisdom of Saint Thomas
Authors: Pope Hugh
Published: July 2007

‘Where is Wisdom to be found, and where is the place of understanding? The abyss saith, it is not in me; the sea saith, it is not with me. God understandeth the way of it, and He knoweth the place thereof.’—Job xxviii.

Those who are familiar with St. Thomas’s Proemium to his Summa contra Gentiles will recall his words on the meaning of true Wisdom. ‘Sapientis est ordinare,’ he says, ‘it is a wise man’s business to deal with things in orderly fashion, and since the goal or end we have in view must govern our procedure, and since the supreme goal for us all must be the Divine Truth, the study of it should be the one preoccupation of the wise man.’ That is Theology, or the study of God. Now God is made known to us in nature, and the true scientist is he who endeavours to arrive at a knowledge of the Creator through His creation. But besides the Book of Nature there is also the Book wherein God has spoken to us and shewn us the path to heaven, in which He has ‘set before us life and death.’ This is His Revelation, the theologian’s quarry, the true source of his wisdom. Hence the words above quoted from Job are with peculiar appositeness used by the Church in the Breviary Office for the Feast of St. Jerome, the ‘Doctor maximus’ whose entire life was spent in toiling in that quarry.
When the Market Goes Home
Authors: Balfour M. C.
Published: July 2007

It has been market-day across the water, and the market-folk are on their way home and bringing as it were, the market with them.

The boats are coming back from the other side of the bay heaped with empty baskets and with others still full of unsold goods, and crowded with servants and housewives and peasants squeezed together in a seething, bubbling mass, like sheep in a pen to whom have been given of a sudden the voice of jays. The noise is indescribable; quarrelling, arguing, shouting, laughing, with live ducks cackling and hens flapping their wings, with the thud and rattle of the wheezy engines, the splash of the paddles, and the shouting of porters and omnibus drivers on the quay :

‘Matignon et Saint-Cast, à vot' plaisir . . . .’

Plancoët, Plancoët, ‘ssieurs et dames . . . .’

‘ A ... . domicile, à ... . domicile!’

‘Commissionaire, ‘ssionaire . . . .’

—such a hurly-burly as surely only French lungs can produce.

Up the hill they come in an unending procession, huge hooded omnibuses that are evidently the direct offspring of the old diligences, donkey-carts rattling and important, wagons from the country with jingling bell-hung harness on the big horses that stamp and stumble on the uneven cobbles. They are filled—and over-filled—with peasants on their way to far-off villages, or ‘getting a lift’ to nearer ones, with men in blouses, women in gay shawls and linen coiffes, who sit on the shafts, on the sides, who crowd the seats of perch insecurely on the piles of empty baskets.
The New Settlers
Authors: Jebb Reginald
Published: July 2007

There exists in England at the present time a state of affairs which seems to me to call for the close attention of all Catholics.

It is a commonplace to decry the faults of one’s own time. Everyone is in some degree a laudator temporis acti; and hope causes most men to look to the future for remedy of present ills. Yet, when due account has been taken of this human tendency, England today does present to the most casual observer some terribly alarming symptoms. Such things as the vast disorganisation of labour, the growing inability of the Government to find money for the payment of their colossal liabilities, the complete failure of compulsory State education to produce any sort of useful result, the despairing abandonment of the land are evident for all to see.
Religious Obedience
Authors: McNabb Vincent
Published: July 2007

Non semper aliquis obedit legi ex bonitate perfectae virtutis;

sed quandoque ex timore poenae; quandoque autem ex solo dictamine rationis quod est quoddam principium virtutis (ia 2ae. 92. 1. 2m).

It is not always through perfect goodness of virtue that one obeys the law;

but sometimes it is through fear of punishment; and sometimes from a mere dictate of reason which is a beginning of virtue.
Mr. J. G. Muddiman on ‘The Bloody Assizes’
Authors: Balfour M. C.
Published: July 2007

It is not long since a book bearing almost the same title as the one before me now appeared under the aegis of a judge’s name; which, while it set out to give a clear and readable account of the Monmouth rising and its consequences, was a disappointment to the serious student because of its obvious Whig bias and lack of that chief essential of the judicial mind—the sense of balance. Judge Parry, moreover, was content to perpetuate many errors because they fitted in with his own conceptions, and I fear that, backed by the influence of his name and position, they have been strengthened in the mind of the casual reader.

The present volume is unlike its predecessor in all but name; the whole aim and intention so different that in a sense the title is misleading. Mr. Muddiman is not really concerned at all with the rising itself, nor does he attempt to give us dramatic sketches of the characters connected with it; we find here no suggestion of the Walking Gentleman, the Low-Comedy Buffoon, or the Comic Villain, no tolerance for Oates or Tutchin, no special tenderness for Dissenters, and above all no bias against ‘Judge’ Jeffreys. Even the standpoint—and the book is written from the Tory standpoint on the whole—is one of reason, moderation, and restraint. In short, it is necessary to realise from the beginning that these pages deal less with opinions than with facts; and that, while Judge Parry aims at giving us his own New of the period and the personalities who played their parts in it, Mr. Muddiman is inquiring into the foundations on which our knowledge of that period and of those personalities is based.
Papal Injunctions
Authors: Clayton Joseph
Published: July 2007

They belong to history, many papal encyclicals, bulls and briefs; to interpret their meaning, to understand their purpose, and to measure what they accomplished, we must have knowledge of the circumstances that provoked these papal utterances and injunctions.

What can we make of Clericis Laicis of Boniface VIII (was it not annulled by Clement V, first of the Avignon popes?); of the Regnans in Excelsis of St. Pius V (judged to be of doubtful expediency by a later pontiff, Urban VIII); of the Unigenitum of Clement XI; the Dominus ac Redemptor of Clement XIV; the Mirari Vos of Gregory XVI—pronouncements all of interest in the history of the papacy and of mankind—unless we know the conditions and occasions? The commentary of the historian is necessary if there is to be profit from the perusal of these important documents. While it may be urged, truthfully enough, that as the judgments of the Holy See on things temporal, all briefs, bulls and encyclicals are to ‘be received with respect; yet without knowledge of the pressure that urged utterance our respect is liable to be without understanding.

As with the injunctions of a more remote past, so with the collection of encyclicals recently issued by the Catholic Truth Society annotation is needed, if the reader is to be fully enlightened on the papal teaching of our times. It is even highly probable that the documents may be misinterpreted without adequate guidance. ‘The Bible without note or comment’ was the cry of some of our undenominational educators in the past. Papal encyclicals without note or comment can easily lead the minds of men astray.
A Note on O. Henry
Authors: Carpenter Hilary
Published: July 2007

Jeff Peters is a lineal descendant of Mrs. Malaprop; his use of words is even more humorously mal à propos. The introduction of malapropisms is a device much favoured, for obvious reasons, by the authors of humorous literature, and in skilful hands it can result in a high form of wit. In creating Jeff Peters, O. Henry, for example, surpassed Sheridan himself and gave us an even finer subtlety of wit.

It is to be noted, in passing, that when a malapropism is not obvious, it fails to be funny; it fails even to be remarked as a misuse and tends to become accepted in its erroneous or distorted sense. If a panegyrist is reported to have ‘larded his subject with a nice derangement of epitaphs,’ the substitution of words of common speech similar in sound but not in sense is sufficiently obvious to be amusing. But when the substitution is not recognized, ignorance eliminates the sense of the ridiculous. We are not, in short, amused. Thus it is not everyone who will appreciate the humour of ‘fussily decency averni.’

It is curious to remark how frequently a sense of humour, and from another point of view even an appreciation of wit, is the result of a rather snobbish sense of superiority. When a man slips on a banana skin, the cream of the joke goes to his fellow-man who has not slipped but remains proudly upright. A sense of superiority, physical or mental, is a normal condition in the appreciation of humour.
The Crying Need
Authors: Jebb Reginald
Published: July 2007

The truth of the crisis upon which England is entering is becoming clear to a growing number of people. In that fact lies the hope of her ultimate regeneration.

Let us summarize the position.

A little more than a century and a half ago, England —or rather her governing classes—plumped for industrialism. That is to say they deliberately set themselves to destroy what was then in the main a land of peasants, owning and cultivating their patches of land and sharing the advantages of the commons, and to convert it into a commercial unit based upon factories and overseas trade. The immediate pecuniary advantages to a limited, number of people were striking. We had a start of the world, and our expanding dominions provided us with an abundance of markets. The richness of the land itself in coal and iron ore accelerated the success of the experiment. The English developed a machine-sense and a money-mind, and the gradual disappearance of her agriculture was compensated for by the large profits made (by the controlling minority) from the sale of manufactured goods. Banks and a huge system of credit grew apace; for they were the life-blood of the new enterprise. The directness of local production of food and clothing for local consumption and use gave way to the dazzling indirectness of a network of exchanges, in which each mesh of the net gave opportunity to the manipulator to squeeze out his little bit of usury. We became the carrying and banking centre of the world.
The Open Road Again
Authors: Preedy John
Published: July 2007

James’s solitary horseman could walk his horse up to a signpost, and duly following the directions, come upon a village, The clang of hammer upon anvil would lead him to the forge, and the hanging sign of an inn would swing its invitation to him. Should he want squire or parson or cornchandler, there was the local inhabitant fearlessly walking his own village street to tell where they were to be found.

Perhaps it may be an idle and retrogressive sentiment that makes one regret the day when sign-board and signpost met the needs of commerce and transport. The motor and the general speeding up of life have changed all that, and it seems as if a stark ugliness is to be an unavoidable adjunct to life as it is rushed nowadays.
Some Wills of Penal Times
Authors: Pope Hugh
Published: July 2007

How did our Catholic forefathers live in penal days? Was life an unceasing nightmare? Was every other man they met a Topcliff? After the death of Elizabeth it would seem that persecution went by fits and starts. The protracted negotiations for the Spanish marriage, from 1617 to 1623, meant a decided lull in active measures against recusants, though when those negotiations were broken off there was a recrudescence of brutality. It was the same after the ill-fated rebellion of 1715, and a milder outbreak recurred in the Lord George Gordon riots. But such happenings tell us little of the ordinary life of Catholics at the time when persecution was not active.

A great deal of material is at hand now in the publications of the Catholic Record Society, also in several volumes brought out by Mr. John Orlebar Payne. As we peruse these records many curious facts emerge. Apostasies were, of course, numerous. This was inevitable when life became more and more burdensome day by day. Still it is sad to read that whereas in the year 1750 the Catholic congregation at Upton in Berkshire totalled ninety-eight exclusive of the members of the principal family there—Perkins— ‘it is curious to notice how many of the families whose names are there given still exist in the neighbourhood, although there is not now a single Catholic among them.’ The sequestration of estates was hard to bear and there is pathos in the will of John Purcell, of the Hays in Shropshire, who in 1729 said : ‘My will and desire is that the penal statutes be never taken against my mother or any of my brothers and sisters except my brother-in-law Thomas Penson so long, that is, as they do not seek to secure more than the annuities allowed them.’
Park
Authors: Gray John
Published: July 2007

Mungo Park walked on in the belief, absurd as he knew it to be, that he had died. There are catastrophes (so he assured himself) where the victim need not add to his perplexity the pain of suspending his judgment. And this hypothesis was some relief to him here and now—if, as in his anguish he thought, it is here and now. He dismissed as impertinent his own critical question : when did it happen and where and how?

One thing at a time, he answered himself. For he wanted no more than a mind sufficiently at ease to draw inferences from the evidence of his bewildered senses. He did not deny that he felt well. All his reactions were perfect; he had no physical pain; his breathing was right; there was not the least irritation on any part of his skin; no blister, fly-bite, soreness; his clothes, hat, boots seemed ideally part of himself. His stick hung on his wrist; he could hear his watch ticking; he .verified, by touching the places, that his many pockets held their expected contents.
From Roscoff to the ‘Pardon’ of Lambader
Authors: Eden Helen Parry
Published: July 2007

There are several reasons why one should visit Roscoff, apart from the good and sufficient reason —for those who like to take their travelling individually—that nowadays one rarely does. I doubt if the real Brittany—the Bretagne bretonnante of speech, clothing and song—is anywhere less sophisticated; while for an Englishwoman who is one-half Welsh, Roscoff has old affinities, historical and domestic, romantic and homely, but all harmonious and affectionate.

A small granite fishing-haven on the northerly seaboard of Finistere, Roscoff owes the fig-trees and magnolias of its walled gardens to the Isle de Batz, some three miles of rocky island, surmounted by a tall white lighthouse, which lies couchant across the entrance to Roscoff’s almost landlocked harbour. Only a mile or so of channel intervenes between Batz and the mainland; and you can sail across, if you will, and see the island’s only treasure—the stole of St. Pol-de-Leon laid carefully by since the sixth century. It is said to be a Byzantine stole of blue silk tissue, cheerfully embroidered with huntsmen, dogs, horses and falcons; and its accredited owner, St. Pol, was one of those genuine but legend-bedizened evangelists between Wales (or Cornwall) and Armorica, whose antecedents and exploits were (as I have been informed and believe) the bane of the learned compilers of the Dictionary of National Biography. Being entirely incompetent to sift the views of the D.N.B., of the Bollandists, and of the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould, all of whom have lavished themselves with different results on St. Pol, I will only submit that Paulus Aurelianus of Pen hoen in Glamorganshire (or Cornwall) seems to have fled from the onus and honor of a British bishopric, only to be tricked (by a sealed letter borne by himself) into accepting a French one.
The Obsolescent Parrot
Authors: Gilby Thomas
Published: July 2007

Many of the manifestations of the counter Reformation, or rather of its backwash, are becoming almost unpopular, even among Catholics. Rococo was the first to suffer, and Baroque. Then florid counterpoint. Then some of its devotional forms and religious methods, institutions, and thought. Many expressions of the Catholic reaction do not belong merely to the period. Michael Angelo, Palestrina, and the Jesuits, for instance, if not immune from criticism, are anyhow great enough to defy it. There is now an attack on a common catechetical method which dates from the sixteenth century.

In a recent book, Père Tahon, a Scheut missionary in the Philippines and an educational expert, has marshalled the evidence to show that what he aptly calls psittacism, or the system of imposing a bare summary of Christian doctrine on the memory of the child without previous understanding, is Protestant in origin, is not authentically Catholic, exists in the Church as an abuse, and is, besides, contrary to the principles of pedagogical psychology.

The apostolic method of teaching beginners consisted in first presenting the facts of sacred history, and then drawing out from them the doctrinal elements of religion. This narrative method was continued by the Fathers, was formulated by St. Augustine (de Catechizandis Rudibus) precisely as the best way of instructing the ignorant, and became traditional in the Church, until it was largely displaced by a new catechetical method deriving from the polemics of the Reformation.
Jerome of Moravia, O.P.
Authors: Maginty Edward A.
Published: July 2007

Jerome of Moravia was born on the 30th of September 1200, at Olmutz, the Fortress gate of Bohemia, where his father, one of the Minnesingers attached to the Emperor’s Court, had been rewarded with an estate by Frederick Barbarossa. As these Court musicians were, to a man, the creatures of the Ghibelline sovereigns, the son could not altogether escape the taint of heterodoxy that stamped the enemies of the Church, though this malign spirit was largely neutralised by the fidelity of his mother, Ysen-trude, who, as a maid.of honour to the wife of Conrad II of Hungary, had caught some measure of the intense piety that distinguished his daughter St. Elizabeth. At an early age the boy was placed in the care of the Archbishop, who wisely recommended the tempering influence of the severe discipline of the Song School. During his leisure hours between school and chancel Jerome found delight in fingering the psaltery, rota, gigue and symphony, and made the day merry with the simpler songs of the Troubadours. He would listen wide-eyed to his father’s tales of the fifth Crusade and the Wartburg Tournament, though more frequently—for his father’s visits were rare—he would fall asleep to his mother’s stories of Tristram, Parsifal, the Nibelungs, and the Holy Grail. Soon ambition awoke and made the Cathedral school with its midnight Lauds distasteful. At fourteen he entered upon his trivium at Brunn, but he was old enough even then to find a magnet in Cologne, which was nearer Eisenach, the home of Reinmar, Wolfram and other stars in the Minnesingers’ firmament; and nearer also to his father. He attained his immediate goal in 1216. At Cologne the quadrivial course was lightened by his passion for harmony and acoustics, but his hopes were dashed when his father made it plain to him that the knightly singers’ calling was hastening to decay.
A Chair of The Philosophy of History
Authors: McNabb Vincent
Published: July 2007

It was a widow’s worm-eaten, tottering chair. And it was set up in a basement in N.W.3. In saying this I have unveiled the mystery lying behind what once I wrote under the title—her title, T00 Much for One. For that undying story which, thank God, I had the wit to write, had been written post haste after the widow R-----, R.I.P., had trudged from her basement to tell me of my mistake in giving her as a Christmas dinner what was ‘too much for one.’

My readers will remember how in that quivering phrase from the bowed, half-blind, four-score year widow I had seen more political and economic wisdom than was being vouchsafed by any university, or avouched by any Government Report. Moreover, when I recalled how high finance and big business were based on the horse-leech cry, ‘it is never enough,’ I saw, and perhaps said that England’s Saviour, if ever found, would be found not in a bank or in a manager’s office, but in a hut or in a basement.

As I honoured myself and my priestly profession by burying the widow R-----in Kensal Green some twelve months ago, I will set down some of the notes I wrote after having speech with her one afternoon in the half-light of her cave-dwelling.

To-day, August 6th, 1927, Widow R-----gave me a complete dramatic Philosophy of History. In other words she showed me the right way of looking at things that happen, and even of things that seem to happen wrong.
Three Wonders
Authors: McNabb Vincent
Published: July 2007

At two things stands my mind amazed, But a third costs my heart its glee :

A woman by a woman praised,

A good poor man to honour raised,

And Christ dead on his Mother’s knee.

Vincent McNabb, O.P.
Towards Canterbury
Authors: Preedy John
Published: July 2007

While a torrid August shrivels up the pleasant green earth, the minds of many Englishmen turn hopefully towards Canterbury. I do not mean that the whole Ecclesia Anglicana in The Church Times sense suddenly feels grateful, obedient, or even reverential in relation to hallowed Canterbury. I do not imagine that this Ecclesia Anglicana waits with more assurance in August than at any other time for a voice of authority to speak out of Canterbury. Nor do I refer in such general terms to the devout few Catholics of the Guild of Our Lady of Ransom, who still go thither yearly, ‘the hooly blisful martir for to seke,’ making their pilgrimage as did their forefathers in the days of Chaucer, ‘from every shiris ende of Engelonde.’ If the average Englishman were heard to say something like this : ‘Last yean I had to miss my first Canterbury festival since I was ten,’ his hearers would more naturally assume that it was cricket rather than the blissful martyr that drew him to Canterbury with yearly regularity.

It was about nine o’clock in the morning of such an August day, when the morning sun gave promise of taking up the baking qualities of the sweltering night it came on to relieve, that I stood in the market square of Bromley, some ten or twelve miles out of London. We had made up a little party, the Lumboroughs and I, to go dowrn to Canterbury by motor-coach. We had been assured that, in the words of the agent, the party would be ‘very select.’ The Franklins and Dr. Smiths had already booked seats. So at the appointed hour we took possession, noting that our fellow travellers seemed a very ‘decent’ crowd.
Green Pastures
Authors: Post J. Shrady
Published: July 2007

Someone has said that all bad Americans go to Chicago when they die; hence perhaps we may infer that all good ones, granted they have any choice in the matter, go South. Even the Semitic gentleman pounding out popular songs in a grubby office just West of Broadway, has caught something of this tendency tp localise the national heart, and is perpetually admonishing the homesick, regardless of their original habitat, to wend their erring footsteps thither.

Yqu cannot understand America unless you know something of the South; and you cannot know the South unless you understand something of the Negro, for it is the black Mammy who is really responsible for the shy friendliness, the gentle courtesy, the lovely mysticism of the little white boys and girls who grow up under her care.

The oversight on the part of my otherwise estimable parents, which prevented me from being born in the South, was partly mitigated by the amply proportioned Mammy who came to rule over our nursery. Aside from her red bandanna and her gold ear-rings, her great fascination lay in the tradition that she was the daughter of a very gorgeous and very black African king. We were convinced that nothing but generations of the purple robe, the homage of prostrate natives and a possible diet of evangelical missionaries, could account for her supreme dignity or the proud lift of her white-haired head.

After the manner of children, we loved and feared her alternately. There were moments, when in her simple piety, we were sure that she walked with the Lord, and others when we were equally positive that she consorted with the devil, beliefs coloured possibly by our own state of grace at the moment.
The Plough and the Mousie
Authors: Gilby Thomas
Published: July 2007

There is a tendency to set up mathematics, in its frigid detachment and unreality, as the very pattern of a science, and even of philosophy. Here St. Thomas’s terse Aristotelianism in mathematicis non est bonum is appropriate to show the indifference of our deepest desires to such an abstraction. For they are attracted by the real which is primarily concrete; by a thing and not by a type; by what the scholastics would call the quod, in opposition to the quo.

Yet you should hear some of the people most inclined to regiment a variable and highly individual reality into the uniformity of a system speaking on the Rationalisation of Industry! ‘Ne voyons nous,’ says M. Blondel, ‘se constituer sous nos yeux deux Thomismes, l'un qui est un instrument de verité, de recherche, de haute conduite, l’autre dont plusieurs voudraient faire un procédé administratif et une sorte de caporalisme intellectuel?’

The Greeks were aware of the danger of sacrificing the real to the reason, which is almost forced on us by the nature of both, for knowledge must be general to be rational, and things must be individual to be real. Even the poets reflect this unhappy necessity of fixing the fleeting in the cold pastoral; of a Grecian urn. Small blame, then, to the scholastic who seems at times, perhaps unconsciously, to lapse into a Wolfian mood, and to confine his metaphysics to the eternal possible. The intellect is imagined to live its life in the world of essences, while the world of facts is just the haphazard outcropping of certain types; and just as number is neutral to anything from the unit upwards, so are essences with regard to fact-determinations which are, in consequence, almost destitute of intellectual value. Santanyana can be capped by the scholastic manual.
The Pope's Social Encyclical
Authors: McNabb Vincent
Published: July 2007

As readers of Blackfriars are likely to have and to have read the Encylical itself, we shall have begun to satisfy our duty to our Holy Father if we call attention to some of its main statements and principles.

It is just a little disconcerting that our Holy Father has to acknowledge that gratitude for the Rerum Novarum of Pope Leo XIII was not universal even among Catholics. Thus he is obliged to write of the Rerum Novarum :

Despite this widespread agreement, however, some minds were not a little disturbed, with the result that the noble and exalted teaching of Leo XIII, quite novel to worldly ears, was looked upon with suspicion by some, even among Catholics.

The same paternal rebuke of Catholics is to be found in another passage dealing with Workmen’s Associations or Trade Unions which had been advocated by Pope Leo XIII :

The lesson was well timed. For at that period rulers of not a few nations were deeply infected with Liberalism, and regarded such unions of working-men with disfavour, if not with open hostility. There were even Catholics who viewed with suspicion the efforts of the labouring classes to form such unions, as if they reflected the spirit of Socialistic or revolutionary agitators.
Titchfield Abbey
Authors: Mott Agnes
Published: July 2007

In a verdant field, bespangled with daisies, stand the ruins of a noble mansion once known as Palace House, Titchfield. A little to the right may be seen the soft grey tones of a Gothic window in a ruined wall, the relics of an ancient Abbey that once stood upon this site. At the rear is a large pond, formerly part of the Abbey Fishponds. High brick walls surround the turreted mansion with its Tudor chimneys, whilst an older stone wall abuts the ruined archway.

The spot is peaceful and serene beyond compare; here and there are ancient timbered barns, whilst hard by flows the ‘silver Meon’ : the stream whose praises were so often sung by that famous fisherman, Izaac Walton. The river is spanned by an old bridge, at the side of which snugly lies a little Inn, ‘The Fisherman’s Rest.’ The undulating land is well wooded. Between the trees may be seen the old roofs of Titchfield village and the shingled spire of its Saxon Church.

Sea-gulls swooping over the fields proclaim the nearness of the sea. Titchfield was once an important harbour in Hampshire, until the river was artificially blocked at its mouth and the sea marshes reclaimed for cultivation.
The Making of a Friar-Preacher
Authors: McNabb Vincent
Published: July 2007

‘Friar William of Montserrat of the Order of Preachers having been sworn, said that some sixteen years ago or thereabouts he came to the Roman City, there to keep Lent.

‘And the Lord Pope who now is who was then Bishop of Ostia received him into his house.

‘In those days Friar Dominic, the inventor and first Master of the Order of Preachers, was at the Roman Court. He often came to the house of the Lord Bishop of Ostia. Hence from that time he had knowledge of him.

‘The behaviour of the said Friar pleased him so that he began to love him. Very often he talked with him of what concerned the salvation of themselves and other men.

‘Now it seemed to the witness that Friar Dominic was of great religious holiness, greater than any man he had ever seen, though the witness had spoken with many religious.

Moreover it seemed to him that he was the greatest seeker Delator] of the salvation of mankind he had ever seen.

‘In the same year he, the witness, went to Paris to hear Theology; because he had promised and given his word to him that after having read Theology for two years and he had put his brethren in order they would both go together to convert the Pagans who dwelt in Persia and other southern parts.’
Disarmament and Reparations
Authors: Parry M. Sidney
Published: July 2007

One of the great questions of the day is disarmament, linked almost involuntarily though not of necessity with war debts and reparations. Appeals have been made for the nation to have the will to peace, and thus save the world from disaster. The ten years long discussions on disarmament have produced so far no very definite results. Nations still believe that without security no disarmament is possible. A pact to renounce war as a means of settling international disputes has been signed by all the leading nations of the world, and yet armaments increase, and preparations for a fresh war are being made, until today more money is being expended upon such preparations, and upon armaments, than was expended before 1914, when the storm broke over Europe and the world. Nations cry peace, when there is no peace in their hearts, as was frankly stated by the present Pope in his Encyclical of 1922.

Why is there no peace? Because jealousies, greed, fear and hatred are still in men’s minds, says the Pope. They have forgotten the moral laws that guide individuals and are equally applicable to nations. All the more need is there for a reaffirmation of the Law of Nations. Up to the Middle Ages men respected the Canon Law of the Church : they looked to the See of Peter as the exponent of the Moral Law, codified as it is on the Canon Law of the Church. That Law of Nations, which is, in itself, the embodiment of the Natural Law, implanted in men’s minds by the Creator, is a guide to men’s lives in their private dealings. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.
Light—Or Otherwise—On ‘The Leakage’
Authors: Devas Dominic
Published: July 2007

One is somewhat at a loss to know whether the fact that so much is being written on the so-called ‘leakage’ question necessitates an apology for adding yet more, or affords an excuse for so doing. Acting on the latter hypothesis, I propose to hazard on paper a few thoughts on the subject, based mainly on experience gathered when giving Missions,

And to begin with I would ask the question : is the leakage—lamentable as all admit it to be—larger than we ought to expect? In this connection we should surely bear in mind two important factors—firstly, the great increase in our numbers during the last hundred years, together with the evident fact that we are no longer a secluded body, but mingle far more freely than of old with our non-Catholic neighbours; and, secondly, that the non-Catholic world round about us has altered almost beyond recognition so as to merit with some show of truth the epithet pagan so often applied to it. Not so long ago, in days which men of forty can easily recall, certain accepted Christian standards of morality and church-going were as vigorously maintained outside the Catholic Church as within. This no longer holds good, and the young Catholic, in moving outside his own Catholic circle, almost necessarily mingles with militant irreligion; militant because, though seldom avowedly such, to ignore religion is tantamount to proclaiming its futility.
A Romance of the Mission Field
Authors: Bowen Francis J.
Published: July 2007

The return to Europe of Bishop Francis Steinmetz, Vicar Apostolic of Dahomey, after thirty-eight years in French West Africa, recalls a romance of missionary enterprise which is worth recording. He belongs to the Lyons Society of African Missions, founded by Mgr. Marion de Brésillac in 1856. The holy founder applied in the first instance for Dahomey, but was refused by Propaganda on account of its evil reputation. It was considered the most pernicious district of the West African Coast from the malignity of its climate and the barbarity of its population. Instead he was allotted Sierra Leone, itself a sufficiently difficult post, as events were to prove. It was only at a later period, after his death, that it was found practicable to attempt the evangelisation of Dahomey : that, therefore, Bishop Steinmetz has been able to rule his tropical diocese for twenty years or more, and return to Europe in full health and vigour, is eloquent testimony of the progress made in the Dark Continent.
Two Oriel Men in Ireland
Authors: Quigley E. J.
Published: July 2007

Two Fellows of Oriel walked daily in the calm and classic ways of Oxford. They were bosom friends, and, men said, kindred spirits, burning and shining lights of their college, then the leading Oxford college in culture, studies, and famous names. The elder, tall, strenuous, robust, talked didactically, rather pompously, but with precision of thought and word. He was an author of text-books on Logic and on Rhetoric, and on the Johnsonian principle, that ‘who drives fat cattle should himself be fat,’ was a living embodiment of the science and the art of accurate thinking and correct phrasing. He was Richard Whately (1787-1863).

The delicate, pale youth by his side, another Fellow of Oriel, listened and learned from Whately—and learned with lasting profit to himself and to the men of all time, logic and rhetoric. Both were parsons, staunch Protestants. In their walks several times they met poor strolling Irishmen, ragged, hungry Papists, toilers from the fields, beggars, ballad singers. The dons were almost heedless, unobservant of the poor human clods, their religion, their country. If any seer or sybil had told those master-thinkers that one of them would become a bitter opponent of the faith and fortunes of Ireland, as a leader of politics and religion in the fateful isle, and that the other would after a forlorn expedition come to love Ireland and be a prince of her faith—both Richard Whately and John Henry Newman would have laughed, logical and rhetorical laughs. Yet Fate destined the Oriel men to drift, to part, and to live in Dublin, not under the same roof as at St. Alban’s Hall and at Oriel, but within five minutes’ walk of each other’s houses.
The Meaning of Conscience
Authors: Carpenter Hilary J.
Published: July 2007

Conscience is a fact of common experience. It will be universally recognised that there is within the human consciousness some principle, some norm or measure, apparently unbiassed and involuntary, which seems to claim authority in regulating or attempting to regulate what is known as moral conduct. In other words, there is something of the Jekyll and Hyde in every man, and broadly speaking Jekyll is the personification of the voice of Conscience. But while there is universal recognition of the fact, there is less unanimity as to the precise significance of the fact of conscience. In a broad division there are two opposite views, in one of which conscience appears as rational, in the other as emotional. The latter is the view adopted by modern experimental psychologists in their attempt to analyse ‘moral consciousness.’

‘Moral consciousness’ is the somewhat undefined name given nowadays to the complexity of emotions and instincts which precede, accompany and follow a moral act, producing feelings of ‘moral’ satisfaction or disquietude as the case may be. Upon examination, however, it is found that all these emotions and instincts are placed in the order of bodily reactions to stimuli. They are confined, in other words, almost entirely to the material order, and in effect the highest and especially human faculties, namely reason and rational will, are disregarded or eliminated. This position, it should be noted, is justified by the circumstances in the sense that it represents the findings of purely experimental psychology. No one should be so foolish as to deny the authority of any science within its own sphere. It is only when any science presumes to argue to conclusions outside its own sphere that it lays itself open to criticism from without.
The Cockroach and the Tortoise
Authors: Delany Bernard
Published: July 2007

‘When Colin March, a younger son of the famous diplomatist, played in a British Embassy garden abroad, his foreign nurse gave him a tortoise. “A useful beast,” she explained, “it devours cockroaches; they are its passion.” Colin wanted to see this beneficent passion at work. So he captured one of the Embassy’s many cockroaches and put it down in front of the tortoise’s nose, like an early Christian presented to a lion. The tortoise eyed the offered feast, and mused deeply. The cockroach did not muse. It was a cockroach of action. Without any apparent need for reflection it bolted for cover, like a flash of blackness, right into the tortoise’s shell, and hid itself in that profounder thinker’s armpit.

‘The cadet of a dynasty of ambassadors was charmed with the cockroach’s wit. He filed the whole affair in a pigeon-hole of his ‘cute little mind. As he grew up, he would often chuckle to think of it. Piquant parallels would occur to him. For a fox to go to earth under the kennels, for landsmen to put to sea to escape from a press-gang, for cannon-fodder to hide at the back of the cannon—this was the wisdom of life put into a kind of practical epigram, salt and impudent.’
Wowsers
Authors: O'Connor John
Published: July 2007

Example is the best definition,’ says Sainte-Beuve. Far from it, say we. It is the easiest, as small boys find out before their preceptors. It is the test, the touchstone of definition, but it is not definition, so how can it be the best? French clarity, where art thou?

Now what is a Wowser? It would be easy to define by examples. Stiggins and Chadband were Wowsers with a difference : they embodied only a sect, a thing, virulent and intense; even if drowned in Dickens’s scorn of all the tribe. The thing was extant in his day (when has it not been?), but the inspired nomenclature was in the womb of time, if this be not an indecent expression by now (for the Wowser works like the coral insect, defiling words deep down by identifying them with defilement in his imagination, and he rages like the tempest against Beauty and her father, Freedom-of-Heart, and her mother, Simplicity).
Bolshevism, The New Sectarianism
Authors: Gilburgh N. W. T.
Published: July 2007

The present weakness of Western civilization may be more apparent than real, and in part the exaggeration of a press-hysteria which, concentrating on the plight of the modern and mushroom centres of industry and finance, makes little account of the deep-rooted strength which Europe draws from its countryside, traditions, and religion—convictions inarticulate perhaps, but largely operative. Still, a menace to our culture looms so heavily on the Eastern frontier, and its economic achievement is so impressive, its application of the dialectic of materialism so ruthless and complete, and its direction so intelligent, that it is easy to be overawed by the mere size of Bolshevism, to admit over-readily its claim to a universalism, and, granting it a weight in the order of ideas which it certainly possesses in the order of fact, to miss seeing it for what it is, a sect.

Then, considering its anti-God campaign and its emphasis on economical and mechanical facts to the exclusion of any other, thinking of it as a resolute common-sensism that scoffs at everything it cannot see, picturing it in a bright hard light and religion as a thing for the twilight, it is easy to pass over the fact that the whole movement derives its impetus from the worship of an ideal every bit as slavish as that of the religion it displaced, and without the justification. Prostration to the lord of eternal life and death is at any rate a pretty natural sort of attitude; abasement before a man-made projection, an ens rationis, the human herd considered as an economic group, however vast the herd, however insistent the economic pressure, is a definite degradation.
The Seed that Grew Secretly
Authors: McNabb Vincent
Published: July 2007

‘And He said : the Kingdom of God is as if a man should cast seed into the earth—and should sleep—and should rise night and day—and the seed should spring and grow up whilst he knoweth it not.

For the earth of itself bringeth forth fruit—first the blade—then the ear—afterwards the full corn in the ears.

And when the fruit is brought forth, immediately he putteth in the sickle, because the harvest is come.’ [Mark iv, 26—29.]

10th May, 1932. Eureka! To-day in a home of contemplative nuns to whom I am presuming to give a retreat, I seem to have found what for years I have sought in vain to find. St. Mark, who has so few parables, has yet this one that is to be found in no other gospel. The questions that have troubled me for years were, first, if St. Matthew and St. Luke knew of this parable, why did they pass over it? and, secondly, why did St. Mark, that is St. Peter, think it should not be passed over?