bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Catholic Organisation in Brittany
Authors: Gwynn Denis 
Published: July 2007

More than any other part of France, Brittany has a distinct existence apart from the rest. Its old Celtic language is still spoken habitually among the working people over a great part of its western departments, while in St. Malo, and further east still to the very borders of Normandy, Breton is still the native language of a considerable proportion of the older people, who as often as not are quite illiterate, although in the best sense of the word they are highly cultivated, with their inheritance of traditions that have their roots centuries behind the present day. Brittany includes only five in all out of the ninety more or less equal departments into which (including Alsace Lorraine) modern France is divided. But this small north-western corner is thickly populated, and while it is barely larger than one-twentieth of the whole of France, it contains all but one-tenth of the population. What is more important, Brittany is one of the very few districts in the country in which the population is actually increasing at a normal rate, thereby helping to reduce the steady shrinkage of the whole French population. It is the most conspicuous example of the obvious fact in modern French economics—so obvious that it is now openly, if reluctantly, admitted by the most anti-clerical newspapers—that it is only where the Catholic tradition has remained vital that large families are still to be found as a general rule.That is indeed why this primitive peasant population—made up of small farmers who grow potatoes and vegetables for the Paris and for the English markets and who brew their own cider from the endless orchards that make all the road-sides gay with red apples in the autumn,
Spade and Rood
Authors: Rope H. E. G. 
Published: July 2007

Among the many shibboleths which satisfy the ‘practical men’ who utter them and exasperate the ‘visionaries’ who hanker after reality, not a few are connected with the land. ‘The stately homes of England,’ ‘the playing-fields of Eton,’ ‘our national sportsmanship,’ are examples. ‘England could never grow her own food’ is another. With those chiefly concerned it is axiomatic that fox-hunting and large estates have made England what she is! They have certainly contributed to do so, and the result is, of course, highly satisfactory to—the speaker. ‘We are at the present moment in Great Britain assisting at a third of these turning points in the history of generations, for we have just arrived at the time when only a few old people can still remember an England that was not urban, policed, and dependent upon mechanical and centralised communications. We have just entered upon the time when all living memory of the older agricultural England is passing away.’ If, remembering that ‘there’s livers out of Britain’ and that Britain herself has changed exceedingly, we ask what is the verdict of tradition and experience, the answer is less reassuring. From the very ranks of the English landowners themselves comes a clear, vigorous contradiction of the dominant shibboleths. This is what Mr. Christopher Turnor, a practical agriculturalist, a conservative by conviction, an acknowledged authority, has to say of large farming:‘It is a fact capable of proof in every country of Europe that the subdivision of land or “the conversion” of large farms into small holdings has in every known case led to an increase in the human and animal population and greater productiveness.’
National Catholic Congresses—Some Criticisms and a Suggestion
Authors: Atteridge A. Hilliard 
Published: July 2007

The first National Catholic Congress in England was held at Norwich in 1912. It was a development of the ‘Conferences’ which had been organised by the Catholic Truth Society for many successive years, and it was announced that the Congress was to be an annual event. There was a Congress at Plymouth in 1913, and another at Cardiff on the eve of the Great War in 1914. Then the series was interrupted for years. When the fourth Congress met at Liverpool in 1920, there was some talk of its being followed by a fifth in the following year. Current report even said that Leeds had been definitely selected as the place of meeting. But for some reason the idea was abandoned. It is now announced that in the coming year there will be a Catholic Congress at Birmingham, the first of a new series, meeting, not annually, but every third year.I was present at and took some part in the proceedings of two out of the four Congresses that have been already held During and after these gatherings I heard from not a few of my friends—both clerics and laymen—the criticism that these meetings did not give results of sufficient value in comparison with the expenditure of time, money and effort required for their organisation. It was argued that they were to a great extent something like oratorical field-days, in which there was a good deal of mutual self-congratulation, and very little opportunity for helpful debate on practical matters.
Mrs. Meynell
Authors: Leslie Shane 
Published: July 2007

I have never found the pen move with greater difficulty than in trying to record the impression which is left with me of Mrs. Meynell’s life and death. It is as hard as writing of her poetry and her prose —the prose with which she enamelled Life, the poetry which she laid up as Death’s garland. If the supremely important moment of a saint’s life is the last, to which every thought and deed has long paved the way, the extreme ecstacy of the poet no less is death. Then the last rhythm of life is rendered and the last measure of the soul is counted. If poesy is a divine gift, then God will call account for the poetic stewardship, not for the false rhymes and broken feet—for He forgives technicalities—but for fine arts wasted and supreme inspiration thrown to the dogs.Great poets have deliberately given their powers to evil, and petty rhymesters toss their jingles to perdition. But the great poetry of the world is ever religious. Great prose need not be so. Poetry to be great requires the sublimer touch which only religion can give. Prose can be ironical, fantastical, wise, comic, solemn, almost sublime; but sublimity demands the rushing music, the piercing note, the ordered cadence, the organ’s diapason.Alice Meynell’s prose, culled into a life’s sheaf of Essays, covered all those moods and forms. Out of them could be composed a little Breviary of country life and common-joy things.
Catholic Social Action in England: I. Father Plater and Some of his Critics
Authors: Reeves John Baptist 
Published: July 2007

Ater looking forward, for what seemed a very long time, to Father Martindale’s Life of Father Plater/ we now find ourselves wondering how anything so thoroughly well done can have been prepared so quickly. The book is not the mere history of an eventful life; it is a skilful revelation of a remarkable personality. Many of us who before only knew Father Plater now feel that we understand him; and in human relations an understanding signifies more than it says.It is not the usual lot of a man to be understood in his life-time by the majority of those who know him. Father Plater was more fortunate than most men in this respect, though even he had his critics. His good nature saved him from serious misunderstandings in the less pleasant sense of that word; but occasionally the differences of opinion between himself and others were serious enough. Most misunderstandings of this sort were solved during his life; but one, and that the most serious, has not only survived him, it still exists with regard to the work with which he was principally identified and which others are still carrying on in his name and spirit.
A Beautiful Church
Authors: Burdett Osbert 
Published: July 2007

The little village of Fluelen that lies at the eastern end of the Lake of Lucerne is chiefly attractive to visitors from that city because it lies on the opposite and most distant arm of the star-shaped water. The white paddle-steamers with their scarlet pennons ply during the season several times a day between the two places. They lie about three hours apart, and those who do not make the circuit of the water nor take their luncheon on board, where it is expensive, alight at Fluelen. There, between two boats, three hours can pleasantly be spent on either side of dejeuner. The vin ordinaire of the village is a mellow wine, and half a litre, enough for two discriminating persons, could be had (last September) for one and fourpence. Sitting on a balcony of one of the cafés that are studded hospitably about the little place, one’s eyes expect to find nothing whereon to linger save the unfenced railway station, about a small gaunt chateau, the narrow quay, the winding street, and the view of the lake about the roots of the mountains. One does not wish for more, but there is such a thing as curiosity.Therefore, especially if one has gone ashore earlier, at Tellplatz, an hour’s pleasant walk on the hither side of Fluelen, along the famous Axenstrasse road that tunnels the mountain-side with natural windows such as are seen in old cloisters, one’s eyes are persistently drawn from the mountain to the village at its foot, where they focus themselves upon a little white church, much stained by weather, whose incredibly thin and tapering red spire stands expectantly like the horn of a bright snail, just protruded.
Where All Roads Lead: The History of a Half-Truth (II)
Authors: Chesterton G. K. 
Published: July 2007

By this time it must be obvious that every single thing in the Catholic Church which was condemned by the modern world has now been re-introduced by the modern world, and always in a lower form. The Puritans rejected art and symbolism, and the Decadents brought them back again, with all the old appeal to sense and an additional appeal to sensuality. The rationalists rejected supernatural healing, and it was brought back by Yankee charlatans who not only proclaimed supernatural healing, but forbade natural healing. Protestant moralists abolished the confessional and the Psycho-Analysts have re-established the confessional, with every one of its alleged dangers and not one of its admitted safeguards. The Protestant patriots resented the intervention of an international faith, and went on to evolve an empire entangled in international finance. Having complained that the family was insulted by monasticism, they have lived to see the family broken in pieces by bureaucracy; having objected to fasts being appointed for anybody during any exceptional interval, they have survived to see teetotalers and vegetarians trying to impose a fast on everybody for ever.All this, as I say, has become obvious, but there is a further development of the truth with which I am more especially dealing here; which concerns not so much the case of these general movements which may almost be called vulgar errors, but rather the case of certain individual ideas that are the private inspiration of individuals. As I said in the last issue, a young man may, without any very offensive vanity, come to the conclusion that he has something to say.
A Don Quixote of the Pulpit
Authors: Bracey Robert 
Published: July 2007

When Cervantes created ‘Don Quixote,’ the greatest and most delightful of satires, the perfect picture of Spanish national life and manners, that exquisite ‘Book of Humanity’ as Sainte Beuve calls it, he had it in mind to laugh away and burlesque out of existence those foolish romances of chivalry so prevalent in his day, which he held to be in deplorable taste and fraught with harm for the morals of his country. How well he succeeded, all the world knows.Two centuries later, Spain brought forth a second Cervantes, a satirist of hardly less eminence, but scarcely known to Englishmen of the present day. He too produced a ‘Book of Humanity,’ a lively study of national character; he too had it in mind to laugh away and ridicule into nothingness something which he held to be dangerous to Spain and a slur on her good name. And he too, on a more modest stage, achieved his object. His book in its only English translation, that of 1772, lies before us in faded calf volumes, as we write: ‘The History of the famous Preacher, Friar Gerund de Campazas.’The author, still well remembered in Spain, which held a literary festival in his honour as recently as 1903, on the occasion of the second centenary of his birth, was a Jesuit, one Jose Francesco de Isla, whose life covered the years 1703—1781. He was a professor at Salamanca and a popular preacher and director, with pronounced literary tastes and almost unexampled gifts of satire and humour.
The Parson of Salisbury and the Three Painted Coffers
Authors: Eden Helen Parry 
Published: July 2007

At the end of the reign of King Edward the First, there lived in the city of Salisbury a poor, honest Parson, who had in his charge a small church abutting on the market-place and the souls of a few hundred people thereabouts. Of both church and people he was the careful and loving custodian, but chiefly of the latter ; for he held it as a truth indubitable, that though Our Blessed Lord deigns to dwell on the altar, it is merely as a stepping-stone to the souls of the faithful.Under this simple conviction, the Parson—Sir Nicholas by name—toiled his hardest from morning till night to help every man, woman and child in his flock build and beautify, in his or her own heart, a shrine for the Most High. He aided proud, indolent and clumsy sinners to hew new stones for the repairing of their dilapidated or ruined souls; the heaviest stones he carried himself, lent a hand to fit them into their allotted places, and stepped back gaily with the poor wretch, their owner, to admire the progress of his puny fabric and congratulate him as though he were the founder of Rome itself—alter Romulus, says my pious original. For souls more advanced, he was an equal authority on spires and pinnacles, crockets and weather-vanes. All the dizziest flights of heavenly architecture he knew by heart—something from books, something from experience, and some-thing from the inspiration on which he faithfully counted.
Where All Roads Lead
Authors: Chesterton G. K. 
Published: July 2007

A Note on Comparative Religion (II)Since writing in the last issue I have seen something in a popular publication which constitutes a sort of commentary on what I wrote; something that is in form a contradiction and in fact a confirmation. I remarked that Mr. Wells, who had previously maintained that things could not really be assimilated to each other at all, had afterwards assimilated the historic religions to each other a great deal too much. I pointed out that what we call the world’s religions differ not only in the sense in which they are true, but in the sense in which they are religious. They differ not only in what they succeed in doing, but in what they profess to do. One of the most interesting of them, Buddhism, is in some sense the subject of a passage in the current publication called The Outline of Literature, and there Mr. Wells himself is quoted as an authority on the Gospel of Buddha. He begins by saying, ‘The fundamental teaching of Gautama, as it is now being made plain to us by the study of original sources, is clear and simple, and in the closest harmony with modern ideas.’ This may be very consoling; but a man who has turned over a reasonable amount of modern journalism and controversy may still feel impelled to ask : Which modern ideas? Even in the work of Mr. Wells alone, there is so large and rich a variety of modern ideas as to make it a little difficult to be in the closest harmony with all of them. We all have a vague popular impression about Buddhism, that it advises abnegation, the extinction of the ego, and so on; but these phrases might mean several different things.
Lionel Johnson—Poet and Scholar
Authors: Price M. S. 
Published: July 2007

There are some poetical personalities who disdain the heroic equipment to such an extent that to all but a few intimates who care to penetrate below the mask, they must remain imcomprehensible, and therefore, in an age that has no use or time for reticence, uninteresting. A Hugo or a Wilde catch the eye of the crowd, a Lionel Johnson never.He was an Epicurean in the finer meaning of the word, and if it were not common knowledge now that Pater drew his hero from R. C. Jackson one might be tempted to imagine that he took for model his most distinguished pupil. Not an Epicurean in the popular sense of ‘Cueillez dès aujourd’hui les roses de la vie/ but one to whom ‘les roses’ meant all that survives of what was finest in Mediaeval art and life in our age. In the cool-shadowed cloisters of Winchester and Oxford he found his natural environment, and brought to such an environment a white passion for the literature of Greece and Rome, and that ‘native instinct for devotion’ which finally found a resting place in the Catholic Church.He spent six years at Winchester and then passed on to New College, Oxford, and for both these places he felt the deep personal adoration that is usually given to friend or mistress. He loved the peace and the traditions of Winchester, and young though he was, his vibrating appreciation was keenly awake to the architectural and spiritual beauty of that ancient school.
Taillefer
Authors: Dayrell Vivienne 
Published: July 2007

Before the waiting long-bows bent and sprang, Before a thousand arrows broke the sky That misty dawra on Senlac . . . was a clang Of arms, and Taillefer rode by Tossing his sword on high.To us who battle but who cannot live,Happy was he, this Taillefer, who might In one superb and joyous gesture give The careless courage and the young delight, The splendour of the fight.We too, we are not cravens, but our eyes Shine with no wonder, lighten with no mirth, Where is the god-like glory of surprise,The chivalry, whose star shone on our birth Upon this earth?The crash of spears is round us and we know The lances glitter for us, but we dare A harder thing than courage : for the foe Dear, lordly Laugher, that assails is Care.. . . . O ride before us too, and teach us so To laugh like thee, Taillefer.,Vivienne Dayrell_
Is it Modernism?
Authors: McNabb Vincent 
Published: July 2007

The late Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford has published what we must call a scholarly and painful book. Only a scholar brought up in the atmosphere of a modern University could have written as Bishop Headlam has written on ‘Jesus the Christ.’ Even the ‘Map,’ which is duly heralded on the title-page, has that note of scholarship which the older Universities, with their dogged craftsmanship, keep amidst a machine-mad world.It goes without saying that there is a long, well-documented account of ‘Modern Criticism,’ which the Bishop chivalrously calls ‘learned criticism.’ As his Lordship does not altogether agree with the findings of the learned criticism, he therefore saves us from the charge of paradox in our having suggested that a work can be at once scholarly and painful;i.e. the fruit of research, yet wide of the truth, or, in other words, learned but wrong.Everywhere is seen the scholarly hand of the Biblical archeologist. We have most fascinating accounts of the road-system, which indeed has a place of honour in the Appendix. In a book of some 340 pages, more than a half are given over to that geographical, political and ecclesiastical learning which naturally springs up in an atmosphere of modern books. The student, therefore, who is seeking an almost cinematically vivid picture of the times of Jesus Christ will be grateful to the Bishop of Gloucester for his book. We have said much in saying that there are pages in it as thrilling as a work of fiction.
France and Birth Control
Authors: Gwynn Denis 
Published: July 2007

In his new study of The Problem of Population, Mr. Harold Cox presents the popular case for birth-control with his customary lucidity and with that command of statistics that can compel conviction for any argument. But one rubs one’s eyes with amazement to find so stalwart a champion of individual liberty carried, by his enthusiasm for what he regards as the moral duty of birth-control, into advocating the most intolerable of all forms of State interference with personal rights. Can it indeed be Mr. Harold Cox who declares emphatically (p. 153) for the compulsory sterilisation by State-appointed practitioners, of large classes of mankind? ‘To sum up,’ he concludes roundly, ‘those persons who, as the result of physical or mental defects, are unfitted to produce children should be sterilised, with their consent or with the consent of their guardians, at the expense of the State.’ One wonders whether Mr. Cox himself, or any one of his friends whom he might name at random, would be able to satisfy a Government medical board that they possess that ‘freedom from any heritable taint’ which he postulates as being the essential condition of the right to have children. If words have any meaning at all, Mr. Cox expressly asserts that anyone in whose family there is hereditary disease— be it blindness or consumption or mental instability— must be ruthlessly forced to undergo a sterilising operation.Mr. Cox bases his case upon the sordid conditions that over-population has produced in all countries ancient and modern—in the west of Ireland before the famine of the forties, or in the teeming villages of China, as much as in the slums of Glasgow or Liverpool.
Professor Contardo Ferrini
Authors: Christitch A. 
Published: July 2007

Twenty years ago there passed away in Italy one of the greatest exponents of Roman Law, whose researches won him a foremost place in the world of science, wresting for his native land the laurels which had hitherto been held by Germany, in the domain of Jurisprudence. The name of Contardo Ferrini, well-known as it is to present day jurists, bids fair to become familiar before long to every Catholic, inasmuch as the beatification process of its erudite bearer has already been introduced at Rome. The present Holy Father, intimately acquainted with the life and merits of Ferrini, was a warm supporter of his cause in 1905. It is therefore confidently hoped that good progress will be made during his pontificate. Pius X had already intimated the consolation it would give him to raise a university professor to the Altar.The life of the modest, retiring scientist is a fresh proof that there is no contradiction between F aith and Science. The man for whom his teachers, the historian Mommsen, and the Byzantinist, Karl Zacharia von Lingenthal, prophesied a brilliant part in the restoration of a branch of learning then neglected in Italy, was a daily communicant, and spent every spare moment in converse with his Divine Master. ‘I pray God/ wrote Ferrini to an intimate friend,’ that prayer may never expire on my lips as long as I live, for that would be the end of my supernatural existence.’ Contardo Ferrini was born at Milan in 1859.