bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Droitwich Basilica
Authors: Makepeace John Foster 
Published: July 2007

The purpose of this brief article is simply to draw attention to the new church recently erected at Droitwich, and to suggest that its basilica form is more suitable than the Gothic for small village churches. For there can be no doubt that the great Catholic revival which this century is witnessing will lead to a large increase in their number, and that before the end of it there will be a Catholic church in nearly every village in England. And therefore the type of ecclesiastical architecture with which our Catholic descendants will be made familiar is an important question.This new church, dedicated to the Sacred Heart and Saint Catharine of Alexandria, can be easily seen by all, for it stands by the side of the high road between Birmingham and Worcester. Its erection is due not only to the pious generosity of its founder, Mr.W. L. Hodgkinson, but also to his wisdom and ‘vision,’ for the architect, Mr. Barry Peacock, of Birmingham, was instructed by him to embody the idea of ‘the early Christian basilicas as they may be seen at Rome and Ravenna’ ; and this not through any mere artistic preference, but because they are most suitable for a country congregation and provide scope for the mural decoration—the ‘illuminated Missal,’ as Ruskin called it—which is a feature in an Italian basilica. ‘The Mosaics,’ said that great art-critic,‘were its illuminations, and the common people of the time were taught their Scripture history by means of them.’There is an interesting passage in one of Cardinal Newman’s letters from Milan, quoted by Mr. Wilfrid Ward :
Dante in the Earthly Paradise
Authors: Makepeace John Foster 
Published: July 2007

In the last six cantos of the Purgatorio, Dante describes the Earthly Paradise upon the summit of the Mountain of Purgatory. It is the most allegorical, and therefore the most difficult and fascinating, part of the Commedia. A. F. Ozanam called it the ‘apex’ of the Commedia.Six times in the course of it the poet tells us that this was the ancient Garden of Eden, the ‘nest’ of the human race. And the emphasis he thus lays upon this identity of place must give us the right key to the interpretation of the wonderful scenes he there witnesses and takes part in. We propose, therefore, to follow the example of the older commentators who saw their theological and spiritual, rather than their political, signification. Here as elsewhere it is necessary to remember that the poet was, primarily, not a politician but a theologian.In the closing lines of the twenty-seventh canto, Virgil has addressed to Dante his famous last words, ‘Now is thy will free, upright and whole; therefore with crown and mitre I make thee sovereign over thyself.’ And the twenty-eighth canto opens with that most bewitching description of the loveliness of the ‘divine forest,’ its foliage and its birds, which Ruskin quotes in Modern Painters, where he points out the significance of the contrast between its freedom and joyousness and the ‘wild and gloomy wood’ of the Inferno, which even in remembrance, said the poet, still dismayed him.
Carmel and Versailles
Authors: Bracey Robert 
Published: July 2007

Acertain man of the world lately astonished his friends by making a pilgrimage to Lisieux. When he was asked what possible interest he had in the ‘Little Flower/ he replied with a quotation from Scripture :’ If I find but ten just souls, surely I will spare the wicked for their sake/The thought that lies behind these words was a singularly familiar one in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The world and the cloister were then strangely linked together. In reading the memoirs and biographies of pre-Revolution France, one is struck by the fact that almost everyone, courtier, statesman, financier, soldier, man of letters, man of fashion, had some relation or friend in ‘Religion/ with whom he corresponded, whom he very occasionally visited, and on whose prayers and penances and vicarious satisfactions he constantly and confidently relied. Those who prayed little for themselves were unaffectedly rejoiced at the thought that there were those who would pray (and suffer) for them, and in their stead. They had little or no religious heroism of their own, but they knew others were heroically offering their lives that they themselves might be saved. And because of this, they hoped to make a good end and climb up into heaven after all. There was not a little presumption in their attitude, and yet somehow it was generally justified by the result. In the brilliant, luxurious, pleasure-loving, inexpressibly-dissolute circles of Versailles, how very worldly and irreligious were often the lives, but how edifying and devout almost always the death-beds! And if this was true of the courtiers, it was pre-eminently true of the sovereigns round whom they revolved. The explanation thereof was perhaps to be found within the walls of Carmel.
The Sixteenth Century Idea of National Churches
Authors: Clayton Joseph 
Published: July 2007

Heresy and schism are not a novelty of the sixteenth century, they exist from the beginning,, and always in the East. The national Church, selfgoverning, refusing all obedience to Rome, abiding in its own decrees of faith and morals, and owning na allegiance to any power without its borders, can still be seen and studied in Armenia and in the Mono-physite Coptic Church of Egypt. Plainly they are not Catholic, but national or racial these separated brethren. So too the Donatists in Africa sought to set up a national non-Catholic Church. And political nationalism, it would seem, was chiefly responsible for the schism that rent the Orthodox Church of the East from the Catholic communion of Rome; as it is responsible in our own times for the independent national Churches of the Balkans.Before the Reformation Western Christendom, with all its troubles, was free from these things. Only with the great revolt of the sixteenth century (’ not a revolt, a revolution!’ ) does the national and territorial Church, with its disdain of the doctrine of unity, its hatred of obedience to Rome, its refusal to admit any authority in the See of Peter, come into being; to remain till our own times a witness of man’s capacity for losing the Catholic faith.Nationality has its place subordinate to Catholicity. Nationality in opposition to Catholicity ceases, ipso facto, to be Catholic. The doctrine and discipline of the various non-Catholic Churches of the West born at the Reformation may, to-day, present a remarkable unlikeness to the forms of sixteenth century Protestantism.
The Passing of Talleyrand
Authors: Bracey Robert 
Published: July 2007

In looking through some old papers, the present writer one day unearthed a contemporary account of the Coronation of William IV in 1831, and in it occurred the following rather striking passage:—‘Two men only were received by those present with marked attention. One was the Duke of Wellington, the other was that living wonder Prince Talleyrand, a man whose equal had not appeared for centuries. The exBishop of Autun, bending beneath the load of four-score years, his long snowy locks floating thickly over his cheeks,, was led slowly up the platform between two of his suite. No sooner had he appeared, than a universal hush took place, all eyes were turned upon him, and every peer and officer seemed to move forward, as if by resistless impulse,, to gaze on and welcome him.’Talleyrand, at this time nearly eighty years of age,, was French Ambassador in London. No name, save that of Napoleon, had for a generation been more familiar to the ‘man in the street’ than his. None could excite a more vivid and perhaps fearful interest. His. ability was held to be almost diabolical. His alleged wickedness had become a legend. To the religious-minded he seemed like Voltaire risen from the grave.. That enigmatic figure stood for perhaps the most important personage in Europe, the Intellect behind the successive Governments of France; it stood for vast wealth said to be unscrupulously made; for the boundless ambition of one who had pulled the strings of inter-national diplomacy for a generation; for a man who had made and unmade Kings. Talleyrand was. esteemed an aristocrat who had been false to his order,, an apostate and excommunicate priest who had been the founder of a great schism and the despoiler of the Church, a Bishop whose Chapter had pronounced him deserving of infamy in this world and damnation in the next, a notorious and licentious profligate, an habitual gambler for colossal stakes, a treacherous.
Dr. Johnson's First Book
Authors: Bracey Robert 
Published: July 2007

The present writer’s earliest recollections are of an old-fashioned square of solid, red-brick, Georgian houses, all long since ‘improved’ off the face of the earth. From the windows of his home, he could see on the front of an adjoining dwelling a stone tablet which bore the legend :Here Edmund Hector was the Host andSamuel Johnson the Guest.This Edmund Hector was a Lichfield man who practised in Birmingham as a surgeon from about the year 1731, and whose praises in graceful Latinity may yet be read on a monument in the church of St.. Philip in that city. His sister was Dr. Johnson’s first love; Boswell saw her fifty years later,’ a clergyman’s widow, advanced in age, a genteel woman, very agreeable and well-bred.’ Hector had been the Doctor’s school-mate in the early Lichfield days, and almost all we know of that period of Johnson’s life we learn from the good surgeon’s reminiscences. He it is who has told us of Johnson’s predominance over the other boys, the submission and deference with which they treated him, how he would help his favourites in their lessons, how he seemed to learn by intuition, how he never forgot anything he either heard or read.When, as a youth of twenty-three, Johnson drifted to Birmingham, it was by Hector’s invitation. Johnson was then poor, unknown, very forlorn. His sole employment so far had been that of usher in a boys’ school, a life to him of most painful and irksome drudgery, ‘as unvaried (he said)’ as the note of the cuckoo.’
An Irish Nativity Play
Authors: Dease Charlotte 
Published: July 2007

It is strange how the wheel of things turns and brings back the world to what it had left behind and thought to have outgrown as too primitive. But the child mind cannot be destroyed in man, and it will always return to those truths that are so simple because they are so profound.Thus after several centuries we have again the Mystery Play—scenes taken from the World’s Great Drama—constructed on mediaeval traditions regardless of modern criticism and acted in the early spirit of Faith.The latest edition in this revival of the Mediaeval Mystery is the Irish Nativity Play that took place every Saturday and Sunday during the month of December in the Town Hall, Dalkey, County Dublin. Written specially by Katherine Tynan, the play was acted by seventy children from the Killiney and Dalkey National Schools, under the clever management of Lady O’Connell. For three months they had studied, practised and lived in the atmosphere of the play, bringing into this Irish village something of the spirit of Oberammergau. For one month they acted the piece to audiences ever growing larger. Now the curtain has dropped, and the seventy little actors have gone into obscurity until next Christmastide, when they will again call the crowds to listen to the Mystery.The play begins by a prologue, Lionel Johnson’s Christmas in Ireland, set to an old Irish melody and sung by representatives of the five provinces—Leinster, Munster, Ulster, Connacht, Meath.
Citizenship
Authors: Worts F. R. 
Published: July 2007

In this book is published the series of Lectures delivered by Sir W. H. Hadow on the Stevenson Foundation, in the University and City of Glasgow, 1922. The Lectures are remarkable for their extraordinary treatment of this important subject. If they seek to define Citizenship finally, or, at least, fully— if they aim at giving the average, intelligent citizen of to-day an understanding of his citizenship as something real and worth the having, something which is at once a complexity of rights and a complexity of duties—if their object is to give a clear practical instruction rather than to contribute to an academic controversy concerning civic values—then, most regretfully, they must be marked down as a failure. Indeed, these Lectures are wrongly entitled. They do not deal directly with Citizenship: they discuss Political Theory in its wider reaches. In the main, they present a restatement of the old problem of the Nature of the State; and, reduced to a subordinate part of this thesis, is the abstract relation of the member of the State to the State itself.Citizenship can be viewed from at least two standpoints : one, a study in political speculation—interesting in its review of historic arguments and philosophic conclusions; two, a study in practical politics—a detailed consideration of the realities constituting the fact called citizenship which (let us remember) is possessed by more than twenty millions of the members of our State, which is used by them, and which to be used rightly must be understood in its practical values, immediate and ultimate, by each single possessor.
Variety
Authors: Downing Eleanor 
Published: July 2007

Variety is a great deal more than the spice of life : it is one of its necessary ingredients. We might conceive of, we might even—under certain pressing circumstances—eat a rice pudding without nutmeg; but who can conceive of a world without variety!Picture to yourself, suggests a recent writer, an afternoon tea at which all the ladies were attired exactly alike. I think the guest unwittingly introduced to such a function would invent a swift excuse for exit. Imagine, then, a world in which all the trees rose at precisely the same angle, like telegraph poles; in which all the leaves were of uniform shape and colour; in which all the hills were like the hills in a child’s geography; in which the stars punctured heaven at painfully precise intervals; a world in which all men thought in the same way about the same things, and did the same things under the same circumstances at the same time. I think that, as we found a way of absenting ourselves from that hideous tea-party, we should also find a way (laws of gravitation notwithstanding) of slipping off the edge of this uninteresting planet.Monotony—as mediaeval and Chinese torturers have discovered but too well—is the nightmare par excellence of the human mind. Man’s nature craves variety, and God has supplied its need. Consider the infinite variety of bird and star and leaf—no two alike, since time began, on any tree, earthly or celestial.
Saint Joan
Authors: Jarrett Bede 
Published: July 2007

The first night of Mr. Bernard Shaw’s play, Saint Joan, at the New Theatre in London was an event of consequence not only in society circles, but in artistic circles as well. Not for many years had Mr. Shaw produced a new play in London. Since his last, the war had fallen, altering in varied ways his audience, altering no less Mr. Shaw himself. How would its effects be seen in his attitude to Saint Joan? Of course he would remain Shavian, but how? Would he approve or disapprove? At what angle would he cut across popular conceptions and show the world upside down?The skill and artistry, the imagination and fine historical and dramatic sense of Mr. Charles Ricketts had been invoked to give due and proper setting to this Chronicle Play. Playgoers were enchanted with the result. To some the feast of colour and design, the humour and imagination shown in it, the delicacy, the effectiveness of scenery and dress, were the most impressive and haunting part of the performance. We cannot touch on these, however; we must leave their praise to those who have been happy enough to have seen them.But the play? Well, Bernard Shaw has shown himself a thorough John Bull. Not that he is really an Englishman, for he hails from across the Irish Channel; but he is, if he will forgive us for saying so not so much an Irishman as a native of ‘John Bull’s other island.’ Of course he has his usual gibes at England and the English.
Christ is Risen
Authors: Soloviev V. S. 
Published: July 2007

It is the first decisive victory of Life over Death. In the truceless war between these two—living Spirit and dead Matter—we read the whole story of Creation. Many victories had been claimed for the spirit before the Resurrection of Christ, but none that was not indecisive and incomplete: half-victories, all of them, and after each the enemy succeeded in consolidating his advantage, through the very new types which Death created and in which Life seemed to triumph. What a triumph for life it seemed when, amidst the inert mass of inorganic matter, myriads of living things began to stir and swarm—the rudimentary forms of the vegetable and the animal world ! The spirit of life had made the dead elements its own, had used them as material for types of its own creating, had pressed the mechanical into the service of the organic process. What a wealth of types, countless yet continually multiplying! How subtle, how bold, how carefully adapted were its works, from the infinitesimal zoophytes to the gigantic flora and fauna of the tropics. But Death only laughed at all this splendour: Death is a realist, not to be hoodwinked by beautiful images and symbols, not to be deterred by premonitions and presentiments. Death knows that the beauty of nature is only a glittering pall, hiding a corpse that is for ever falling into decay.What! (you say)—is not Nature immortal? No, that is a lie—often repeated, but a lie.
George Psalmanazar, Imposter and Penitent
Authors: Bracey Robert 
Published: July 2007

Should we enter some old-established library of size and respectability, we shall be pretty sure to notice on its topmost shelves the sixty volumes, seldom dusted and never opened, of the Universal History, a vast compilation which appeared between the years 1760 and 1790, and which, though perhaps of no critical value, contains an infinity of matter never brought together before or since. Bishop Warburton, the one-time dictator and tyrant of the world of literature, used to speak with contempt of this work as ‘miserable trash’ and ‘infamous rhapsody’ ; but Gibbon, a very much better judge, says that the excellence of a great part of it is ‘universally admired/ and that some portions of it in particular are’ executed with erudition, taste, and judgment/ Now by far the greater number of the volumes in this series that deal with Ancient History were written by the subject of the present sketch, one of the most extraordinary characters the eighteenth or indeed any century ever produced—George Psalmanazar.What Psalmanazar’s real name was has never been discovered, any more than his parentage and the country and place of his birth. The name he fashioned for himself was taken from that of the Assyrian king mentioned in IV Kings xvii, 3, while the intimate friends of his later years believed him to be a Frenchman born in some part of Languedoc. He appeared in London in 1703, being then about twenty-four years old. His amazing story at once rivetted public attention.
Catholicism and Economics
Authors: Dawson Christopher 
Published: July 2007

Never in the world’s history have economic problems played such a large part in human life or had such a direct influence on human thought as at present. Economics have come to overshadow politics, to absorb into their sphere the entire social question. Even the man in the street has learnt that his personal welfare is intimately bound up with an economic system. He may be indifferent towards politics, Sceptical of the value of philosophy and science, hostile towards religion, but in economic matters his interest and prejudices are keen. Hence the rise of Socialism—the success of an economic gospel and an economic interpretation of life. Hence too a new spirit of criticism towards religion, which is felt to be indifferent towards the things which are so vitally important—it is ‘the opium of the poor’ which drugs them into contentment with their lot, and indifference towards their true interests.This excessive preoccupation with economic problems is, however, abnormal and temporary. A healthy society is no more troubled about its economic organisation than a healthy man is troubled about his digestion. The present unrest is a symptom of disease, as well as a symptom of necessary change. Modern society is traversing that critical period of its existence, which the Ancient World also went through during the century that preceded the Augustan Peace. In both cases the material resources of society have outstripped its moral control. It is the crucial moment in the life of a civilisation—a time when societies and individuals are beset by temptations to violent remedies and excessive hopes, alternating with apathy and despair.
The Medical Aspect of Lourlies
Authors: Counsell H. E. 
Published: July 2007

The author of this work, The Facts of Lourdes, has held his position since 1917, and had previously worked at Lourdes under Dr. Boissarie. The book is one of intense interest not only to Catholics, but to those of all creeds, because no one could get Up from reading it without being certain that cures of a kind outside the ordinary laws of cure do take place at Lourdes.: The object of the book is, however, to show the general public what is the work of the medical bureau, and to demonstrate that the blind acceptance of all cures’ as miraculous is very far from the truth, and that a very thorough investigation of all those who claim to be cured is made by expert physicians and surgeons of all nationalities and creeds.1 The Bureau is hampered in its work by at least two things, one of which it should be at once the care of medical men sending cases to Lourdes to remove, viz. insufficient certification. Doctors will send cases with the bare statement that the patient is ‘very ill,’ has ‘agraphia,’ ‘constant cough.’ On many a page Dr. Marchand implores doctors to co-operate with him and send full reports, with laboratory reports and X-ray photographs where necessary. The object of the Bureau is not to add haphazard to the list of miracles, but to investigate and demonstrate inexplicable cures. The second difficulty is of course much greater, because it arises from the attitude of mind of the patients themselves.
Jean Baptiste Labat
Authors: Bracey Robert 
Published: July 2007

It is not a little curious that, with the exception of a chapter in one of Lafcadio Hearn’s most delightful books, nothing seems to have been written in English about Père Labat. Although one of the greatest of the old travellers, and often quoted or alluded to, we never recollect meeting with one single article concerning him in any other book or periodical: and of our encyclopaedias and biographical dictionaries, very few notice him or his labours. However, out of his own interesting and voluminous works, and with the help of some French books of reference, it is not difficult to reconstruct his life. Perhaps the fullest of all accounts of him is that given by Dr. Rufz, the historian of the Island of Martinique.Jean Baptiste Labat was born in Paris in the year 1663. When nineteen, he received the Dominican habit in the Convent of the Annunciation in the RueS. Honor?. The succeeding eleven years, he spent partly in Paris, partly in Provence, where he preached a little, and taught philosophy and mathematics at Nancy. He had already felt attracted towards the foreign missions of the Order, when one day he read a Letter from the Dominican Superiors in the French West Indies, appealing for volunteers, the greater part of their missionaries having recently fallen victims to the yellow fever. His mind was quickly made up, he sent in his name, obtained the necessary permissions, and betook himself to La Rochelle to await the sailing of a ship for Martinique, and to furnish himself with passports, credentials, books, outfit, and mathematical instruments.