bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Juvenile Deliquency: Cause and Cure
Authors: Fairfield Letitia 
Published: July 2007

This subject is often discussed as though it were a peculiarly I modern problem, and one to which a complete solution .A. should be found. It is of course neither of these things, but a permanent factor to be reckoned with in the up-bringing of the young. It is surprising, however, that only of recent years was separate provision made for child criminals, though one would have thought that their immaturity of mind and body cried aloud for recognition in any Christian community. In the eighteenth century a child of eight was hanged for arson, and there is a spot in Holbom I never pass without a shudder, for here a poor waif of twelve, convicted of many robberies, was literally dragged to the gallows screaming pitifully for mercy. At the end of the last century little children were still being committed to adult prisons, where they were subjected to unwholesome extremes of petting and harshness. Separate courts for children and a more suitable range of punishments, including probation, began under the inspiration of a group of Quakers in Birmingham in 1850. In 1908 appeared the Children’s Act, which has been most unjustly represented as a gratuitous attack on parental rights, but was in fact an essential instrument for the protection of children from gross ill-treatment and abuses for which the common law gave no remedy. A new era of humane and constructive approaches to the delinquencies of youth had begun.Forty years later, when a revised and much more generous Children’s Act became law, some 40,707 boys and 3,770 girls under seventeen were convicted of indictable offences, and 27,435 youngsters of non-indictable offences. Very disappointingly, this represented a rise amounting to 26% over the previous year (1947) in those between eight and fourteen years and of 23% in those between fourteen and seventeen. When all the obvious war-time excuses have been made the figures for boys are too high to be contemplated with complacency.
The Treatment of Young Offenders
Authors: Page Leo 
Published: July 2007

Within the limits of a short paper it is possible to deal with no more than a single aspect of juvenile delinquency, if one makes an effort beyond mere generalities. I propose to say something about the punishment of young offenders after their conviction in the criminal courts. To justify and to explain what I say on this matter I shall assume therefore the truth of two statements: the first, that the amount of crime committed by young people to be very serious, and the second that the character of their offences is often very grave.I am by no means one of those who takes the view that the young offender is almost always the victim of circumstance, for whom punishment in die old-fashioned sense of the word is either useless, unjust, or inappropriate. Nevertheless, the most modest experience of the juvenile courts teaches one immediate lesson. It is that delinquents vary so widely in intelligence, as also in material circumstances, that in any decision as to the selection of punishment a court must consider carefully every individual offender. This is a matter not of sentiment or of mercy but of the plainest expediency. If this rule is disregarded, real efficiency of a bench is impossible. It is quite impossible for a court either to do real justice or to get the best results if it measures out punishments by rule-of-thumb methods. Two defendants may have committed precisely similar wrongful acts, but it may well be wholly unjust and absurd to award them the same penalty. I labour this point advisedly because it is the basic principle upon which rests the wise administration of criminal law. Again I emphasise that to accept this principle does not mean in the least that one rejects all severe and painful punishment as necessarily wrong. It means only that an instructed judge regards all punishment as a form of treatment.
The Sinner Who Looks Like a Saint
Authors: Vann Gerald 
Published: July 2007

Le pécheur est au cœur même de la chrétienté... .‘The sinner J J stands at the very heart of Christendom. No one is more competent than he to say what it all means—no one unless it be the saint.’ These words of Péguy might form a text for a great many contemporary Catholic novels: you think not only of Greene, but of Waugh too, of Mauriac. And as you follow the unfolding drama of the lives created by them you sometimes find that in the end the sinner comes to look suspiciously like a saint. Are the novelists justified? Can the sinner be a saint?We shall perhaps find an answer if, to begin with, we examine Peguy’s words more closely. Why is the sinner the central figure? Why is he more competent than others to say what Christianity is about? Because Christianity is the religion of redemption, of rescue, of mercy, of the tenderness of God: because Christianity means the coming of light from darkness, of life from death: the dry bones live again. And it is the sorrowing sinner who knows this process, knows it in his heart, far more than the ninety-nine who need not penance: it is the sinner who knows the need of a Saviour by more than hearsay: it is the sinner who knows the grace of God not as an empty term in a textbook or a sermon but as a reality longed for, fled from, gained and lost again, known as a blinded man knows light and colour.Clearly we are using the word sinner, when we speak thus, in a special sense. Mary, who was a sinner in the city, Peter, who denied, out of cowardice, the Christ he loved, all the millions of human beings who fail from weakness to keep the law of God: yes, you can call them sinners, but they are sinners in a very different sense from those who deliberately turn their love into hate, who coldly deride God and his law, who blandly ignore the reality they have once known.
Eric Gill: A Retrospect
Authors: Chute Desmond 
Published: July 2007

I wonder how many people have spent five minutes today thinking about the Incarnation.’ The speaker was Father Vincent McNabb. It was during the first world war and the Rosary had just been said in the Gills’ living-room kitchen on Ditchling Common. In default of a chapel, Compline was sung nightly in this long low candle-lit room. At one end two candles burned beside a crucifix on the mantel-shelf, at the other a stone niche flush with the whitewashed wall enshrined a small figure of Our Lady suckling the Divine Child; lights and shadows flickered around their feet from a wick floating in a bowl hollowed out of the same stone. Between these two focal points of light, members of the families and of the workshops, guests and friends, stood on either side of the refectory table so as to form two choirs. Eric acted as cantor or maybe one of the girls; more often Betty whose voice was as plumb in the middle of the note, as English-sweet as her father’s.Later on, Compline came to be chanted in one of the new workshops and finally in the Guild Chapel. But neither the shadowy resonance of the lofty shop nor the quietude of the white chapel ever recaptured quite the same spontaneity of intimate absorption in the Church s twilight prayer as transfigured nightly that cottage kitchen.Hopkins’ Crank was at that time a neat square toy of a house on the western fringe of the Common, an untouched Georgian squatter’s cottage, preceded by a porch and diminutive fenced garden. Here amid sweet william, honesty and marigolds there grew two rose-bushes of the kind which, on stems furry with prickles, bears amid many deep-grooved leaves large flat single blooms, white or magenta.
Colour‐Bar in the West Indies
Authors: Devas Raymund 
Published: July 2007

But let the reader be sure to notice at the outset that it is of the southern half of the West Indies that I can speak with experience. There are so many islands in the whole chain, extending as it does for a thousand miles and more; and, whereas all resemble one another in some respects, in other ways they can be, and are, astonishingly different. Naturally, therefore, one should only dogmatise about those of which one has first-hand knowledge. The islands I know are Trinidad, Tobago and Barbados, and (omitting the French islands) the Windward group, which now includes Grenada, St Vincent, St Lucia and Dominica.One of the charms of the Colony of Grenada is that, full of coloured people as it happens to be, there is no colour-bar. I use the word charm, because it is the reverse of charming when in company with a cultured coloured man to be obliged to halt and reflect We may not enter here. It must be admitted, I suppose, that in this matter, at least among the English islands, Grenada is at the moment unique. Not for very long, however, can it remain unique, because in the West Indies the colour-bar does appear to be breaking down: very slowly in some places, but surely. And this is not a question of what one would like, or of what one hopes for, but of the inevitable development of these islands, which are still colonies but which, as all the world knows, are aspiring to federation and even finally dominion status. As an aside, I may remark that highly exclusive hotels have found it impossible to keep their doors closed against delegates from the Governments of other islands who happened to be coloured men.
Catholics and the Novel
Authors: Braybrooke Neville 
Published: July 2007

Like a well-used hackney-coach, the stricture that in all spheres critical standards are declining is beginning to creak: it is a commonplace in everyday criticism whose place is so common that like other similar phrases—‘learning for its own sake’ and ‘the cultures of freedom loving peoples’—it is a statement which now employed seems all but empty of content. Narrowing the stricture here to the treatment meted out to the novel, one is forced to the conclusion by the standard of current criticism exhibited in fiction-reviewing that the decline is one caused principally by ignorance: ignorance about the purpose of a novel and the history of the novel. This charge which is general must regrettably include much of the Catholic press, where the confusion only becomes greater by the haphazard use of the term ‘Catholic novel’. For this reason therefore in the present essay an attempt will be made first to trace the emergence of the novel in English fiction and, secondly, to see how in this larger context what is termed the ‘Catholic novel’ came into being. Finally the actual term ‘Catholic novel’ will be examined.A novel is a large diffused picture comprehending the characters of life, disposed in different groups and exhibited in various attitudes, for the purpose of a uniform plan. . . . This plan cannot be executed with propriety, probability or success without a principal personage to attract the attention, unite the incidents, unwind the clue of the labyrinth, and at last close the scene, by virtue of his own importance.—Smollett.
An Aesthetic Vacuum
Authors: Shirley M. 
Published: July 2007

During the autumn two exhibitions appeared in London, which although widely different in stylistic characteristics and historical circumstance, admit an identity of purpose. Careful comparison might prove provocative in that both, although possessing a similar sense of direction, have failed to attain to the same measure of success in the communication of this principle. One of these shows consisted of work by the early Netherlandish painter, Gerard David and two of his followers, while the other, the first to be held at the Ashley Galleries, was confined to examples of church art and smaller devotional pieces by contemporary artists. It could be argued that any critical comparison would be unfair, even fruitless, and viewed superficially this is so. We are here concerned with technical arrangement only in so far as it detracts from, or heightens, the artist’s power to broadcast his message, rather than with a deliberate attempt to try to prove the existence of technical parallels which in fact are not there.Briefly the issue is whether religious painting can flourish without the endurance of a broader tradition strong enough to support certain weaknesses in the artist’s vision when the grander impetus, such as was found in the major epochs of European art, is dwindling or lost. Mr Wyndham Lewis in a somewhat shallow commentary on the show impatiently dismisses its value on account of David’s lack of notable genius, regarding it as a dismal venture. Looking for corroboration he quotes from M. J. Friedlander’s introduction to the catalogue where he wrote thus, ‘In the history of art David represents the end, the tuneful knell of the fifteenth century in an ageing city (Bruges) ‘.
Psychology and Catholics
Authors: Burns Charles 
Published: July 2007

It is obviously impossible in a brief article to discuss the relation between the corpus of Catholic belief, tradition, and their pastoral applications on the one hand, and the enormous mass of half-digested material which is modern psychology, on the other. I have chosen to throw out a few hints as to the kind of problems which agitate the mind of anyone who is concerned with the subject. I am dealing with two terms of a discussion which to many Catholics appear to be irreconcilable.
I hope that those who keep their Blackfriars back-numbers, or can get hold of them, will re-read a long and searching article, by Father Victor White in the number for August 1945 entitled ‘Psychotherapy and Ethics’, for these notes are prompted largely by that essay, and the long interval of time is a measure of its vivid effect upon my thought. I will doubtless appear to have overstressed the difference between us, which is probably far more one of theory than of practice. I may thereby also give some wrong impressions by overstating the case for psychology; this is perhaps inevitable in any debate.
I do however regard the reconciliation and synthesis of religion and psychology as of far greater importance than that between ‘religion and science’ which agitated a previous generation.
The Unity of the Church
Authors: Butler Christopher 
Published: July 2007

The question of the reintegration of Christendom has been brought before the public of this country recently by an article and a series of letters in The Times, and before the whole world by the Holy Father’s address on Christmas Eve. I hope that some of the following remarks may help to explain to non-Catholics why it is that we Catholics do not seem to be able to join in whole-heartedly with some of the attempts that are made from time to time to effect that reintegration by a process of corporate reunion of the separated Christian bodies; although we are at least as anxious as any other body to see reunion achieved. And we believe that we hold from God the key to reunion.There is a homesickness for visible unity in the Christian world today, thank God. The crisis of our civilization, the growth of secularism, the menace of conscious deliberate organized antiChristian forces have no doubt in part occasioned this heightened sense that Christians must unite in face of common perils. And again, the serious disadvantages (to use no stronger language) that attend upon Christian missionary effort, both at home and abroad, through the mutual contradictions and competition of the various Christian communions, are perhaps more vividly realised at present than at most times in the past three hundred years. But surely the driving force of what I may call the reunion movement is something deeper, more native to Christianity as such, than even these grave practical considerations. Surely the dynamism of the movement, or movements, comes from a growing conviction that disunity can only be justified by a virtual denial of something that is of the very essence of Christianity, that it would mean contradicting the intention of God Incarnate. Did he not himself remind us that a kingdom or a house divided against itself cannot stand?
The Substitution of Science for Religion
Authors: Taylor F. Sherwood 
Published: July 2007

The first step towards the investigation of the extent to which science has in fact taken and may continue to take the place of religion is to decide the sense in which we are to understand the word science. First, we are to discuss not scientia but ‘natural science’, and this is not a sharply definable conception. Natural science is the knowledge and theories that are obtained by the scientific method. The scientific method starts from observations, verifiable by repetition or, where repetition is not possible, by the making of similar observations. These observations lead by the method of induction to statements about classes of observations, which statements we dignify with the name of laws. These laws may be used as material for the deduction of other laws which are only accepted if verified by their prediction of what experiment confirms.The observations of science are never wholly accurate (except when they are enumerations), but their degree of error is usually known and so we can arrive at comparatively reliable statements about what has been observed. The inductions made from these observations are of a degree of reliability dependent on the number of observations used and the accuracy with which these are expressed by the generalisation. Some scientific laws, then, make statements which are very unlikely to be appreciably modified, while others are considerably less certain.The scientific laws are not a disconnected set of rules; they are unified by the theories or suppositions concerning the nature of what science studies. Thus the atomic theory links together hundreds or thousands of laws in physics and chemistry, explains them, and suggests new lines of investigation. These theories are the more likely in proportion as they link together a wider range of laws (and so of observations) and as they are fruitful in leading to new knowledge. Some theories, such as the atomic theory, are practically accepted as fact; others, such as Wegener’s theory of floating continents, as fruitful conjectures.
The Church of England & Catholic Unity
Authors: St John Henry 
Published: July 2007

My starting point will be some words of Bishop Hensley Henson, written in his Journal during the early stages of the Malines Conversations.‘In the afternoon I read Pusey’s Life. His essay at negotiating a union with the Roman Church appears to have run the normal course, and experienced the normal fortune. Eager approaches from the Anglican side; non-committal compliments on the Roman; restiveness and reproaches in both camps; extravagant Anglican expectations, and then sharp disillusionment when the Roman authorities finally speak. I cannot doubt that the present essay will repeat the too familiar-history.’If we discount a certain bias and exaggeration in the writer’s expression of opinion, it can hardly be said that his forecast was not a true one. Bishop Bell’s summing up in his account of the Conversations in Archbishop Davidson’s Life, though sympathetic and optimistic, does not in essentials differ from Bishop Henson’s.‘Of their effect on the Church as a whole’, he writes, ‘Who can speak? There has been progress in understanding, in charity, in desire. So far as the longed-for rapprochement was concerned, the fundamental difficulties remain unsolved. But channels of thought and methods of study have been started, from which perhaps in later days some great gain may result.’And now, once again, twenty-two years after the publication of the Malines Report, The Times correspondence of last November, on ‘Catholicism Today’, has revealed on both sides of the dividing line a deeply-felt desire for rapprochement, and a widespread sense that the way to increasing unity of heart and mind lies in the growth of friendly contacts and in conferences, on the theological level, between representatives of the different parts of divided Christendom.
Eastern Traditions in Christianity
Authors: Mathew Gervase 
Published: July 2007

When I agreed to speak this afternoon I thought it would be more useful if I spoke to you personally and informally, rather than if I attempted to give a set lecture on so vast a subject. Besides, I would like to begin by making my own standpoint clear, and I can do that more easily if you will let me be personal.I have great sympathy and great respect for many of those who are working towards reunion. But I have never classed myself among them, partly this is because ‘reunion’ has never seemed to me an immediate and practical problem. Perhaps because, all my life, so many of my closest friends have belonged to different communions and religions from my own, I can realise what a gulf still remains of mutual misapprehension, and how unlikely it is that that will be done away with within a space of time measurable by the historian. And then I have always consciously avoided the use of the term ‘reunion’ since it has seemed to me ambiguous in modern English. Possibly I am here influenced by the fact that, when I was a young man, ‘reunion’ was commonly used in England in the sense of ‘reunion of the Church’, and that as a phrase is incompatible with either the Catholic or the Orthodox conception of the Church’s indivisibility. But the need of mutual charity will always be an immediate and practical problem. All through history in every religion and in.every Christian communion there have been members who have been infected by the spirit of religious intolerance. That spirit of intolerance has been always a father of lies leading to calumnies of individuals and to distorted travesties of the doctrines of others. It has had its roots deep down in the spirit of hatred and has flowered in season into acts of gross physical cruelty.
The Unity of Mystical Experience
Authors: Pepler Conrad 
Published: July 2007

First of all I must apologise for borrowing the striking title from Professor Gilson without intending to present the same pattern in the matter of mystical experience as he presented in that of the philosophical. In Gilson’s deservedly famous work, the author traces the swing of the pendulum in the history of philosophy from the pure rationalism which is willing to admit ‘two truths’ rather than accept any tutelage from theology to that attractive over-simplification which he calls ‘theologism’ in which all human thought is made theological. The unity of such experience is to be found in the constant swing of the pendulum along the same path.It would be possible to show some similar swing in the realm of mysticism from the moralism which leaves no room for passivity with God to the excessive passivity of quietism. We might begin with St Peter and St Paul or St Ambrose and St Augustine, where the seeds of such divergence might be unearthed. But such is not the plan of this paper; for the experience to be considered is not simply European, nor yet even exclusively Christian. And the unity which we hope to disclose is not the uniform motion of the pendulum, but the union of synthesis in the central point of reality.There can be little doubt that there are men not Christian nor European whose experiences in the realms of religion, to say the least, bear a close resemblance to the experiences described by the greatest of Christian mystics. Writers—and many of them are not writers only for they have set out to taste the experience as well—such as Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard, or even in another direction Ananda Coomaraswamy, have made this abundantly clear in the last twenty years.