bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Since Then
Authors: Jarrett Bede 
Published: July 2007

What a whirl of memories are stirred up by this new book of Sir Philip Gibbs! To read its pages is to be confronted by forgotten hopes, by noble plans that failed of their purpose, and again by ignoble greeds that equally failed to secure the accomplishment of their designs. Even the mistakes of postwar policies are hardly less in evidence than the inability of selfishness to establish its controls. A cynic would have merely given a catalogue of the blunders of the politicians; a sentimentalist would have talked glibly of the records of disarmament, of the League of Nations, and of the increase of the standard of comfort of the working man. Sir Philip is neither cynic nor sentimentalist, at least he is neither for very long, though he is sometimes each by turns : however, he chiefly sets himself to the task of telling us the story of what has actually befallen our world since the war ended. By ‘our world’ is meant exclusively the world that went to war. Thus Spain, the first of the dictatorships, the earliest of the new fashion of government, gets no mention : Holland and Scandinavia are equally and deliberately ignored.But the spirit in which the book is written is amply demonstrated on the front page of it: it is called Since Then, The Disturbing Story of the World at Peace. You realise that Sir Philip is considerably disturbed by what has happened since the war ended; and as you read the volume, and especially as you read the last pages of it, you also realise why he is disturbed.
The Cardinal of Lorraine
Authors: Manson ÆLfric 
Published: July 2007

The sub-title of this work is ‘A study in the Counter-Reformation,’ and this indicates its real importance. As Mr. Evennett remarks, the unfortunate name ‘Counter-Reformation’ invites a disastrous over-simplification’: it was not a mere reaction to the ‘Reformation’ —another misnomer—it was a most complex movement’ : it was ‘essentially a hybrid.’ The present volume deals with that curious and interesting group of moderate men—among whom the Cardinal of. Lorraine is the most significant figure —that became a vital centre in France during the period between the election of Pius IV, December, 1559, and ‘the moment when the Fathers at Trent turned their attention to serious considerations in April, 1562.’ The movement culminated and broke down in the Colloquy of Poissy, and petered out in the Conference of Saverne. It was a lost cause—at least in its eirenic projects—but while it lasted it was ‘one of the gravest crisis for Catholicism,’ and its effect can be felt in the attitude of the French hierarchy in the ensuing sessions of Trent.The Cardinal of Lorraine, Charles de Guise, Archbishop of Rheims, was regarded by contemporary Protestants as a sinister and untrustworthy person, and later historians have, on the whole, endorsed their view. This attitude is probably in great part due to the permanent inability of the Nonconformist mind to appreciate any greatness that is rich and diverse and unconfined to one single fanatical aim. Mr. Evennett, completing the work of M. Romier, has succeeded in rehabilitating the Cardinal’s character.
Reason and Faith
Authors: Carpenter Hilary J. 
Published: July 2007

Those who oppose the acceptance of supernatural truth through the medium! of Faith take up their position, theoretically at least, in the interests of Reason. Speaking largely there are three groups in the opposition. There are those who maintain that the so-called ‘supernatural’ is a mere myth of traditional superstition, rather less crude, no doubt, than the fetishes of uncivilised tribes, escaping the grossness of classical mythology (though lacking the artistic merit with which Greeks and Latins adorned their legends), yet nevertheless merely the more or less finished and elaborated results of a tradition ‘derived from semi-barbarous Hebrew peoples.’ We are told by modern Rationalists that ‘we must cease talking of God in the Biblical sense and, as the foundation of the new order, must supplant theology by mental hygiene. Space is too crowded with stars and universes for heaven above and hell beneath.’If the supernatural is in truth such a myth, then Faith is mere credulity. It is no better than a child’s belief in bogies and fairies, and is far less excusable because it is exhibited by those who should have the intelligence to know better. Proud Rationalism frowns upon the puerile fantasies of Faith !The more intelligent antagonists of Faith, however, realise that what is called ‘the supernatural’ cannot be thus easily and conveniently disposed of. To some extent it has to be reckoned with as an aspect of reality. They attempt, therefore, to eliminate Faith on the ground that what is called the supernatural is in fact nothing more than the higher reaches of the purely natural.
The Prayer of Christ
Authors: Walker Luke 
Published: July 2007

Let me begin by setting down a passage from the now well-known One God and Father of All, by Eric Milner-White and Wilfred L. Knox (pp. 46, 47):A common argument of Roman writers on the same lines may be noticed here, since it sometimes causes great perplexity. It is said that our Lord in the .great prayer in S. John xvii prays that the Church may be one. This prayer is sometimes described as a ‘creative prayer,’ whatever the words may mean. If they mean anything, they would seem to be plain heresy, since they would mean that our Lord was simply God, not God made man and therefore subject to the limitations of humanity which made it necessary for Him to pray. More often the argument is used that our Lord at this supreme moment prayed that His Church might be one; we cannot believe that a prayer uttered at such a moment would not be answered. Therefore the Church must be one. But the Roman Church alone claims to be the one Church; therefore the one Church for which our Lord prayed is the Roman Church.But it would be equally legitimate to argue that at an even greater moment in the crisis of the Passion our Lord prayed, ‘Let this cup pass from me.’ Consequently this prayer could be used to show that, as some early heretics held, He did not really die upon the Cross, but substituted for Himself a phantom or Simon of Cyrene. Obviously our Lord’s prayer in S. John xvii proves nothing more than that the Church ought to be one—which everyone admits. The argument is ludicrous.With some things in this passage I could not, of course, agree, but with one thing at least I do agree, and that is with the dislike expressed in it for calling Christ’s prayer a ‘creative prayer.’
Hungary After Trianon
Authors: Cunningham Charles 
Published: July 2007

If there is one thing which, above all others, impresses the mind of the casual traveller through post-war Hungary, it is the amazing resistance to an adverse fate which the people of this Central European country are presenting. Rhapsody—the word most frequently thought of in connection with Hungary—according to my dictionary means : an enthusiastic, high-flown utterance or composition. Well, in so far as its application to post-war Hungary is concerned, this word means something totally different. Hungary’s greatest rhapsody, something infinitely finer than Liszt ever dreamed of, is the slow, firm, unwearying heroism with which she is meeting the trials of Trianon.Before attempting to show what an amazingly plucky fight Hungary has made since the war, it is necessary that I sketch very briefly the condition of the country before that upheaval.A thousand years ago the Magyars crossed the Carpathians and settled in the fertile lands to the west; and, from, the time of King and Saint Stephen in the eleventh century, when the nation embraced the Catholic faith, to the commencement of the last war, these people have gone on and on, steadily building up a national culture and a national feeling second to none throughout the world. As early as the fifteenth century, under the rule of Matthyas the Magnificent, Hungary was known as the most brilliant renaissance kingdom in Europe. By the fourteenth year of the present century the country had achieved a civilisation which could not but deeply impress all who came within its influence.
St. George and the Dragon
Authors: Stanton A. J. Francis 
Published: July 2007

That ‘an Englishman is never so happy as when he is miserable’ is true up to a certain point, but we nave got far beyond that point; hence there is none to the paradox.Englishmen just now are very miserable indeed, for there is no misery quite so poignant as that which comes from the lowest depths of pessimism. What we need in these days is fervent and true patriotism, and there is a great gulf fixed between patriotism and pessimism.Patriotism is derided and scoffed at in England, though, curiously enough, not in ireiand, Scotland or even wales. Yet there never was a time when we Englishmen more needed true patriots, a rallying cry and a cause. The trouble is that whilst glorying in our history, we are coming to believe that we have no first-class possibility for the future. We are accepting as a first axiom that we are doomed to become a second-rate country. The peril is not so much our politics as our pessimism; not so much the Dole as the Dumps.As a country our hopes are deteriorating, our ideals are drooping, our enthusiasms are withering. We are not moving through the desert, we are settling down there. Over England there spreads the pale cast of cynicism. We are losing heart, and when a nation loses heart, it loses everything. It is not that we are making bricks with a shortage of straw, rather that we are building without a plan. We do not know what to build. We quake and whine in the daily press and in the monthly magazines as though we were for ever vanquished.
A Landmark in Liturgical Art
Authors: M.B.  
Published: July 2007

The worst enemies of an art are those of its own household, the people with natural talent but no aesthetic education, and whose technical training too often merely gives them greater facility in expressing and more show of authority in propagating their own bad taste. For how many art schools, even among the best, teach anything of the general and fundamental principles on which all craftsmanship should be based? In an age of classic art instinctive good taste might be looked for as part of natural talent, but in these days the critical faculty is warped before it has time to develop, by low standards in music, literature, architecture and art in the narrower sense of the word, whether domestic, decorative or pictorial. Even Rubens, for all his genius, did not escape the coarsening influences which the later Renaissance left behind it; and his pictures could never be universally loved for their beauty as are those of a Fra Angelico who, although his drawing is not always accurate, had lived in fourteenth century Florence. How many potential musicians might be found in a jazz band, writers among journalists who have never read an English classic, and artists in the perpetrators of the so-called devotional art displayed in ‘Catholic repositories.’L'ouvroir liturgique, quoted in Vestments and Vesture (pp. 220-221) on the subject of professional workshops, says:The unlucky thing is that everyone imagines that he himself possesses that quality of good taste which, in the realm of the beautiful, occupies the position which belongs to good judgment in the realm of reason—innate qualities both of them, but capable of development by practice and study. They require a clear vision, deliberate choice, and the power of drawing the particular out of the general . . . The aesthetic part of the work should be allotted to persons with aesthetic gifts and training.
Contributism
Authors: Le Huray C. P. 
Published: July 2007

Of social panaceas there is no end, and after G. K. C.’s Distributism comes Mr. J. R. Bellerby’s Contributism. As the author of A Contributive Society promises us a criticism of the idea contained in that book during the present year, it would seem unfair for a mere layman in the economic world to enter the lists of criticism before the appearance of that second work. But it may be shrewdly suspected that it is only the latter part of the book, containing the reconstructive ideas, which will be submitted to this self criticism, and an examination of the premises on which the scheme of social reconstruction is based may not come amiss. In any case, the critical volume may be anticipated with unmixed feelings, for how rarely do authors develop into critics of themselves.Mr. Bellerby’s description of what he is pleased to call the ‘economic system’ gives the impression that he has been shown round by someone who regards that system with complacency. It has weak points, he admits, but it is a good machine which only requires better oiling and one or two minor replacements to function perfectly.Throughout his analysis of what he calls the economic system (although many of us are inclined to regard it as the economic scramble), he makes use of terms which, like the words used by Humpty-Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland, mean just what he intends them to mean. He speaks of ‘goods’ not ‘commodities’ —a vital distinction.
A Note on Saint Joan and Bernard Shaw
Authors: O'Connor John 
Published: July 2007

To use the dialect Shaw loves and uses so well, he is ‘as cute as a pet fox,’ and I for one believe him when he says that many Catholics approved of his treatment of Saint Joan. What I refuse to believe is that a man of his cool judgment on so many matters could go ‘blind and bald-headed’ into that intricate subject, Amazing, truly, in the trial scene of his play is the elaborate care with which he states the case for the established order. Yet lo! the snare spread in full sight of the bird, and the birds of the less experienced order have been caught—with chaff. Shaw’s chaff in this case is an error in a matter of fact and a misreading of even the fact under his eyes. He dismisses in a word the whole rehabilitation of Saint Joan, he whitewashes Cauchon thick as plaster of Paris, and he muddles the end of the trial to justify his view of Cauchon.In a recent article in Blackfriars it was well and truly shown how the Dominicans befriended the Maid as much as the said Cauchon would let them, which was very little indeed. It is all very fine for Shaw to ignore everything in the Rehabilitation, which was commanded by the Pope to be reopened after it had failed twice over. It is all finer still for him to ignore the pulverization administered by Andrew Lang to Anatole France’s (whatever his real name was) two-volume sneer at everyone of Joan’s century, but the man who says that all men are liars even on oath in a ‘superstitious’ age, cannot himself escape being thought a somewhat excessive liar. All this Shaw gladly risks, at the expense of ruining the best dramatic points in the muddled trial scene of his play, in order to get at the Church, and not the Church of those days, but of all time.
Charity and Justice
Authors: Fox S. F. Darwin 
Published: July 2007

Shelley told Leigh Hunt in the duomo at Pisa that a new religion might be founded on charity instead of faith. It is in quite another sense that it is now so often and so passionately declared that what is wanted is not charity, but justice; further, that charity is only possible in an unjust society. It is one of the gravamina against the Gospel that it says so much about charity. ‘Curse your charity!’ was the legend on a Hyde Park banner. And ‘Christian-Socialist’ divines go so far as to say : ‘We do not want brotherhood, but justice.’ The reason is obvious. Brotherhood speaks of sympathy and helpfulness, of mercy and gratitude; whereas what is demanded is rather equal rights.So St. Simonism, that pantheistic and epicurean religion of humanity, had for its object ‘the harmonious development of human society by the establishment of justice, and the increase of well-being and comfort.’ Roaring Camp and Poker Flat have also this aim.
Gregorian Chant on the Gramophone
Authors: Durnford G. M. 
Published: July 2007

It is probable that many students of liturgy and plainsong shared the scepticism of the present writer on hearing that successful gramophone records had been taken of the chant of the Benedictine Fathers at Solesmes. The gramophone. Yes, we knew it had been vastly improved in recent years, and even before the war, on account of the accuracy of its tempo, we remembered welcoming the day when it superseded the unfortunate pianist thumping in his corner after the carpet had been rolled back for an impromptu dance in the long dining room at home. On those and other occasions, however, considerations of tone and timbre were secondary. Then we thought of later records of orchestral pieces—very successful except for a certain hardness which mattered nothing to the brass but lost a good deal to the strings—and lastly, we recalled less successful vocal items in which the human touch was sorely sacrificed to mechanical accuracy.And this latest announcement led to reflection on the chant as the monks sing it. We listened again in imagination to the fine diction of the syllabic recitative, the subdued yet thunderous might of the unison, and felt the rhythm as a tenuous pervading atmosphere, which the singers did not create, but rather glided into, as swimmers might into a moving tide. The prayer-spirit which brooded and hovered and soared and sang, could one conceive of it caged up in a machine, however marvellous? Emphatically no.
The False Fruits of Modern Democracy
Authors: Fox S. F. Darwin 
Published: July 2007

One of the chief characteristics of our time is the growing supremacy of quantity over quality. The latter is being ousted by the former in politics, in culture, in all departments of our civilisation. This struggle can, of course, have various disguises, and it can take place on several planes. Even the most conspicuous mass-movement may not necessarily be directed by quantitative valuations; or it may be first prompted by higher impulses and only later adopt a purely quantitative tendency. And a growing tendency of this kind is noticeable in the whole of modern ‘egalitarian’ democracy. This does not mean that democracy is altogether devoid of ideals, but that its ideals—provided there still be any—are on the wrong plane : on the plane of mere economic factors and of class-struggle, which not only conceal but invariably distort all deeper (ethical and spiritual) considerations. Its ultimate vision is not so much a dignified but a comfortable life : not the complete Christian Man, but the standardised Universal Bourgeois ruthlessly controlled by his equally standardised ‘comrades.’There is, of course, nothing easier or more seductive than reducing everything to ‘economic factors.’ Moreover it has the virtue of simplifying all problems to such an extent as to explain the whole mystery of life in a sixpenny pamphlet which everyone can carry in his pocket. But a valuation of life as a whole under the auspices of economic factors alone puts the cart before the horse : it makes both life and mankind only an appendage to economics.
Charlotte Bronte Goes to Confession
Authors: O’Byrne Cathal 
Published: July 2007

Charlotte Bronte’s father, the Rev. Patrick Bronte, was born in Ireland on Saint Patrick’s Day, 1777, at Emdale, near Rathfriland, in the County Down. His father, Charlotte’s grandfather, Hugh Prunty—his Scotch Presbyterian neighbours called him Brunty—came from somewhere in the south of Ireland, but where exactly his paternal home was he could never ascertain. When he was twenty-two he made a runaway match with Alice McClorey of Ballynaskeagh, a neighbouring townland. Alice McClorey was a Catholic, and her brother, with whom she lived, and her relatives were much opposed to the marriage, which took place secretly in the Protestant church of Magherally. After a brief honeymoon the young people returned to live in a two-roomed thatched cottage at Emdale, near Rathfriland, where ten children were subsequently born to them, and all of them were brought up Protestants.The eldest son, Patrick, shortly after entering Cambridge in the year 1802, changed his name from Branty, the name signed in the Register of the University, to Bronte. Prior to that time there were no Brontes in Ireland. Being an Ulsterman, although born of a Catholic mother, the Rev. Patrick Bronte was of the ultra-Protestant type so peculiar to the North-East corner of Ireland. A speech against Catholic Emancipation was his one venture into the arena of the politics of his time. To the members of his family he passed on a legacy of intolerance, but, of the three sisters, to judge from their writings, Charlotte seems to have inherited more than her share of it.
The Rock of Saint Aaron
Authors: Balfour M. C. 
Published: July 2007

The town of Saint-Malo is well known to the tourists who land there on their way to Paramé or Dinard or the remoter summer haunts of Lower Brittany. Well known at least externally, and as to its more obvious features—the old walls, the single pointing spire, the great castle of the Duchess Anne, the beautiful surrounding waters—but scarcely at all beyond these. And yet there is much to know for those who care to look for it; a whole world, as it were, of history, of tradition, of by-ways that lead into a rather wonderful past.There is, for instance, a very ancient and picturesque quarter not far from the Cathedral, yet only to be reached by twisting alleys and narrow lanes, where you will pass by the Cour La Houssaye; this is no more than a widening of the way, a little airier than its surroundings, perhaps, but not so important as its name would convey. Yet here stands the House of the Duchess Anne, where she lodged before she carried the white Ermines of Brittany into the shield of France; a haunted place, as the old grandmothers will tell you, with its ancient walls, its turret stair and the window whence she saw the Rider on the White Horse .... but that is another story and not the one that I wish to tell you to-day. So we will pass on and, threading these tortuous ways, come presently to a narrow quiet street at the end of which stands the House of the Dames-de-Saint-Aaron and behind it the little chapel—very rarely open to visitors—which is the real core and heart of the city, and to every Malouin, doubly, trebly, sacred ground.
Never Tire of Doing Good
Authors: Montgomery Francis 
Published: July 2007

A peasant proprietor had two sons. The elder was impressed for military service and sent to America, where he had to remain for many years. On his return he found his father dead and his brother rich in the possession of all the family property. He went, therefore, to his brother’s house, and to his question, ‘Don’t you know me?’ he received for reply only a surly ‘No.’ When he humbly made himself known, his brother told him to go to the granary, and there in the loft he would find an old chest, which was all his father had left him in his will; and with that the uncouth brother turned on his heel and left him without further welcome.Our traveller, therefore, went up to the loft and found there only an old worm-eaten chest. ‘What in the world,’ said he to himself, ‘can I do with this rotten old box? However, blessed be the will of God ! it will perhaps do to make a fire with,’ for it was winter and extremely cold. He, therefore, put it on his back and, returning to his lodgings, borrowed an axe, and, as he was chopping it up, he came on a piece of paper which was behind a secret sliding panel at the bottom. He took it up and, reading it, found it to be a receipt for a large sum of money deposited on loan by his father. On presentation the sum was given up to him, so that now he was rich.