bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Cue for Portia
Authors: Benvenisti J. L. 
Published: July 2007

. . . And Mr. Timothy worth a hundred and fifty thousand pound nett if he’s worth a penny. Compound interest at five per cent, doubles you in fourteen years. In fourteen years three hundred thousand—six hundred thousand in twenty-eight—twelve hundred thousand in forty-two—twenty-four hundred thousand in fifty-six—four million eight hundred thousand in seventy—nine million six hundred thousand in eighty-four—why, in a hundred years it’ll be twenty million. And we shan’t live to use it. It is a will. (From John Galsworthy’s To Let.)The passage above comes from the concluding chapter of one of John Galsworthy’s masterpieces. Those who have read the book will recollect the scene. For those who have not I will explain. The old veteran, Timothy Forsyte, has directed his entire property to be formed into a trust which through the provisions of the will will probably remain intact for the better part of a century. The words quoted are put into the mouth of old Gradman, the solicitor’s clerk, and the glee, utterly free from envy, with which he utters them, is one of the most perfect touches in the book.Now you can make a very interesting experiment with this passage. Give it to read to the average educated English Catholic of normal artistic sensibility and take note of his comments. He will admire what rightly deserves to be admired, the sensitive delineation of the lovable Gradman, the success with which the author brings home a sort of primitive force in old Timothy, that huge embodiment of the possessive instinct, a force that reaches beyond the grave and still continues to mould and impose itself on succeeding generations.
Art and Academism
Authors: Brooks Ivan 
Published: July 2007

Academism in painting has been defined as a sort of formalism imposed on art by philosophers and men of letters through too exclusive an admiration for the works of Classical Antiquity. It might also be described as the expression of that which is officially sanctioned by a governing body of painter-professors, endeavouring to control and instruct public opinion and to regulate painting by a sort of schoolmastering system. The Renaissance gave birth to it, and the pedagogues and flatterers who have beset the person and fame of Raffaello Sanzio, living and dead, have fostered it. It grew up side by side with that dignification and ennoblement of painting that is so striking a feature of the sixteenth century, and to it is due the self-consciousness that has haunted the painter ever since. “To this enthronement of Raphael we owe many mediocre and even hateful works. To it we owe the taste for the simpering in religious art; the taste also for modelling that is at once photographic and blurred,. . . the taste for lowered eyelids or for eyes raised piously to Heaven (expressions that the Saints in ecstasy never had), the taste for noble old men, theatrical philosophers, apostles in paper togas; and all this at the expense of truth which has since been found ignoble, of fine colour which has since been thought too material, and of genius which we have treated as madness.”Although the spirit of Academism has persisted for four centuries, during which time it has served as a form of arbitrary criterion whereby the art of an individual or of an epoch may be judged by the layman, there have, nevertheless, always been artists of temperament and of fine sensibility who have ignored the precepts of the Academism of their epoch, and who have sought expression by methods that are less dictatorial and pedantic, and, in fact, more proper to art itself.
Wales—A Foreign Land?
Authors: Evans J. Alban 
Published: July 2007

There is no more deceptive key to a country than its popular seaside resort. For the pursuit of pleasure is curiously the same, whether it be in Brighton or Boulogne. One has to penetrate beyond the promenades and smart hotels to reach the heart of a nation. Of no country is this so true as of Wales. The English visitor, spending his fortnight at Llandudno or Rhyl, is aware of little that distinguishes these places from their English counterparts. There are probably more chapels, the Sunday restrictions are more puzzling, odd snatches of a barbaric tongue may be heard on country ‘buses. And there are the inevitable comic postcards, depicting tourists battling with unpronounceable names. But these are the most incidental of features. The charabanc tour of the countryside, with its well-worn round of beauty spots, does little to impart the true spirit of the land. The country is but a convenient and picturesque hinterland to the seaside town.To Catholics, recognition of the individual character of Wales is of special importance. Wales may, in the practice of government, seem little more than an extended England. But it is a fatal mistake to suppose that the accidents of history have wrought a complete and unquestioning submission. This is not to suggest that there is any want of loyalty among the Welsh. Political nationalism is never likely to be a major issue. But there is a loyalty—of culture and of language—that overrides the artificial bonds of a constitution. The survival of this intense regard for national expression is sufficient proof of how deep-rooted are the things of the spirit.
Universal Diagnosis: The True Menace
Authors: Prince J. F. T. 
Published: July 2007

Like everybody else who is inane enough to write letters to the paper and put an address at the bottom I get a certain number of circulars sent to me—sometimes even that most exciting of all things, an anonymous letter.I have therefore been assured in the past six months that the troubles of the nation in general and my troubles in particular are entirely due to drink: and I have of course been assured that I shall get cancer if I continue to smoke, and, inevitably, that the coming of the Lord draweth nigh.Three circulars came to me (I wish I could say I found them all together on my breakfast table, it would sound so much more impressive—actually they did come within a week of each other), one telling me that Rome was at the bottom of all our troubles (not the Rome of Mussolini of course, but the Scarlet Woman). I cannot remember all the dark and sinister places in which She was featuring—the Colonial Office was one and the Ministry of Education another (I think), certainly She was responsible for the Soviet —Pope Benedict XV having apparently initiated the Russian Revolution so as to get rid of the Orthodox Church.The second circular (in order of appearance) told me that Communism was at the bottom of all present evil—not merely the Bolsheviks but everybody everywhere who refuses to believe that every Communist is necessarily an incarnate Devil.
Sparkenbroke and Hardy
Authors: Gilby Thomas 
Published: July 2007

Since novels are often books of science, as scientific anyhow as the whimsical symbolical sketch that journalism has made of modern physics, they fall under two heads according as the tale adorns the moral or the moral adorns the tale; which is roughly what historians of philosophy mean when they class their creatures by the deductive and inductive methods; the latter coming in with Bacon, Francis to some, Roger to others. Great novels, however, like great systems of thought, are not so easily settled, and in Sparkenbroke there is such unity of philosophy and poetry and prose, such fusion of insight and love and everyday sense, that to criticize it as a didactic piece is like the recent attempt to turn Beaudelaire into commercial verse.Mr. Morgan’s aspiration may be Platonic, yet his art is Aristotelian; ideas are embodied, the universal made concrete, the mind continued into sense. Sparkenbroke may say that Emily Bronte desired more than Marvell could give her: “My outward sense is gone—Gone. Even the green thought in the green shade—gone. No sight in the open eyes; no challenge of the brain; an ‘unutter’d harmony,’ Earth lost, the whole shell of being utterly dissolved’ ‘: he may think his senses a leash withholding him from a higher world of experience, yet often are they charged with spirit without losing their own colouring. Propter melius animae est ut corpori uniatur.
Ebur Castitatis
Authors: Clerissac Humbert 
Published: July 2007

When the Church pays honour to the remains of the Saints, when, for example, she translates them with pomp and ceremony, she wishes not only to invite us to venerate their relics, but also to draw a lesson from their memory. Even when for mere social or natural reasons we gather round an illustrious tomb, there is not just homage to be paid, but also a lesson to be learnt. On a tombstone we read at a glance the whole story of a life, its chief moral features and its meaning. In this we find one of the many reasons that justify the veneration of relics. At the first translation of the body of St. Dominic, so touchingly described by Blessed Jordan, there took place a wonderful manifestation of the merits of the holy Patriarch's life. The miraculous perfume which clung to the hands of Blessed Jordan was a lesson as well as a testimony. Lesson and testimony—both teaching and attesting his admirable purity. But to seize the full meaning of that lesson, we must connect that heavenly testimony with the last recommendations of St. Dominic on his death-bed.Just as St. Francis, when dying, desired to be laid naked on the ashes, so St. Dominic on his death-bed, by an act of sublime simplicity, strips his soul before our eyes. It is sad to see modern historians, blind to the beauty of that scene, toning down its most striking features. Père Lacordaire is perhaps among the few who have gauged its true significance.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Authors: McNabb Vincent 
Published: July 2007

The death of Gilbert Keith Chesterton—or “ G.K.,” as we called him—allows us to see his life as a complete and unique whole.Looked at merely as a thing of art, the three score and two crowded years between birth in London and burial in Beaconsfield seem to make a full circle or indeed cycle of doings and happenings. Later on his autobiography will let us listen to the man who made the story telling the story or history he has made. But though every line of it will speak the master-craftsman of words, it will be a masterpiece in the humility of self-effacement. We have no hopes that it will deliberately help us to see his life’s pilgrimage from London to Beaconsfield—from Canterbury to Rome—almost as an Arthurian epic.For one thing we shall be grateful to the artist’s portrait of himself. It will be a vera effigies. It will leave out nothing that would be a loss to truth. And though it cannot speak of how the artist’s life ended in death, it will leave its readers convinced that death came to Gilbert Chesterton in a certain fulness of time and fulness of intelligence.For us who are left there is deep consolation in the way he left us. We saw no slackening of his handiwork; nor any lessening of its power. He did not set slowly like our northern sun. He was as a ploughman turning his best and last furrow when the master said, “Call the workers; and give them their wage. ‘’
Is A Catholic Psychology Possible?
Authors: Elrington Aidan 
Published: July 2007

In view of the manifold interests of contemporary psychology and of the searching criticism in regard to the meaning and foundations of psychology to which we called attention in a previous contribution, the question of the possibility of a Catholic psychology arises with a certain amount of urgency.The Catholic student, whether of psychology in general or other subjects in which psychology may enter, as well as the educated layman interested in such subjects, sometimes asks whether there is any Catholic book on Psychology to which he may turn for guidance. One has had to admit regretfully that, outside the manuals of philosophy written primarily for the use of ecclesiastical students, there do not appear to be any which quite meet the needs of the lay student. It is true that books dealing with various aspects of modern psychology have from time to time been written by Catholic professors of the science. We may mention, for instance, one by Prof. T. V. Moore, O.S.B., of the Catholic University of Washington, D.C., Dynamic Psychology, and another by Prof. John Lindworsky, S.J., of the University of Prague, Experimental Psychology. There are others by continental writers not translated into English, but all of these works deal with scientific psychology, and do not touch upon philosophical problems. When therefore we speak of Catholic psychology we have to ask in what sense the expression is to be understood, and what precisely is to be sought from a Catholic book on Psychology as distinct from any other.
Some Thoughts on Education
Authors: Williamson Claude 
Published: July 2007

Habit is one of those things that everyone knows about, but few can correctly define. The common notion of it as the getting used to a thing, finding it easier to do, acquiring a taste for it, or permitting it to get a hold on one, is all very well as far as it goes, but it does not bring us very far after all. Can we hope to make things any better by invoking the aid of psychology and philosophy? Well, of course it is possible in this way to throw some light on the subject, and especially to render it more interesting by linking it up with the more attractive problems of these sciences; but when all is said and done, our ignorance of important aspects of the question will, from the very nature of the case, still largely outweigh our knowledge.St. Thomas, following Aristotle, has defined habit as “A quality, not easily admitting of change, which modifies its subject, either in the sense of improving or impairing it, in its inner constitution or in the exercise of its activities.” Like all the definitions of Aristotle, this one, for all that it has a rather commonplace air, possesses a really vast depth of meaning.A habit must not, however, be regarded merely as the sum total of a series of impressions, but rather as the unique and indivisible resultant of them all. It bears an analogy, not so much to a cinema film, with its graduated series of distinct though almost similar photographs, which, when flashed rapidly across the screen, produce the illusion of a continuous motion, as to a composite photograph, the distilled essence of several exposures combined.
The Blackfriars Codex
Authors: Gumbley Walter 
Published: July 2007

Recently the Dominicans of Blackfriars, Oxford, have become possessors, through the munificence of Miss Jean Smith, of a most valuable liturgical manuscript, a Dominican Gradual, which on examination proves to be contemporary with the establishment of the Order’s special rite by Humbert de Romans between 1254 and 1260. Hitherto only four examples have been known to exist, two of which, including the Codex Humbertinus, are in Dominican hands. Now this newly discovered Codex has been returned to the Order that produced it, but whereas the Codex Humbertinus was recovered, during the French Revolution, only at a great price, the Blackfriars MS. was most munificently restored, as a free gift, by one to whom the English Dominican Province thus owes a tremendous debt of gratitude.The volume was undoubtedly written between 1254 and 1263, seeing that it contains the Mass of St. Peter Martyr but lacks those of St. Anthony of Padua and St. Edward the Confessor, whose feasts respectively were ordered to be celebrated throughout the Order by the General Chapters of Barcelona in 1261 and of London in 1263; whilst the Mass of Corpus Christi, with its famous sequence Lauda Sion, granted to the Order in 1264 has been inserted by a later hand between the de Tempore and the Proprium Sanctorum. The book throughout is written in extremely well-executed lettering, each minuscule letter being 5 cm. high, and there is an abundance of ornamented capitals done exclusively in blue and red, all of exquisite workmanship. The whole consists of 235 folios on vellum, each folio measuring 35.5 x 25 cm.
Dominican Spirituality
Authors: Mathew Gervase 
Published: July 2007

It is a sequel to the Catholicism of the Church that the unity of her members has not necessitated their uniformity; racial cultures have been strengthened by the acceptance of a common faith, and English like French or Irish or Italian types are still most distinctively national when most deeply Catholic. The history of the great religious orders affords a parallel, for the common end to which they are directed, the common faith that has created them and the bond of priesthood, have yet enabled them to maintain a full individuality. The greatest of their saints are those who most incarnate the particular spirit of each order. For they have found their perfection in the fulfilment of God’s will, and God's will has been fulfilled in their obedience, an obedience to tradition as well as to command, an acceptance of custom as well as of written law. Each of the greater religious orders has therefore possessed its own school of spirituality. For “spirituality” is but a clumsy term for the conscious following of a way to God.
Yet it would seem puerile to discuss which order and which tradition in spirituality is the more perfect in the concrete. Each retains the possibility of corruption and each will mirror in its finite contrasted achievement the infinite unity of God, since each will be perfect in so far as it participates in the divine and yet remain inevitably separate in so far as it is participant; “quod in Deo est simpliciter et uniformiter in creaturis est multipliciter et divisim.”
The Sixth Malines Congress
Authors: Gestel G. Van 
Published: July 2007

The Bishops of Belgium have recently made public the convocation of the Sixth Malines Congress. It will comprise three days of lectures and discussion, will be held in the archiepiscopal city, and will be brought to a close by a great demonstration in which tens of thousands of the faithful will participate; but, in view of the fact that Malines is not extensive enough to hold this concourse, the demonstration itself will take place in Brussels, upon the high plateau of Koekelberg which is dominated by the national Basilica of the Sacred Heart. As far as one can judge beforehand, this demonstration will surpass anything that has hitherto been seen even in Belgium, where the popular temperament loves to show itself in enormous public gatherings with processions, local choirs, and hundreds of banners.
It can be maintained without any exaggeration that the religious history of Belgium has been moulded by these Congresses of Malines, an account of which is given in an interesting book by Professor M. Defourny. In the Congresses of 1863, 1864 and 1867 the Catholics of Belgium assembled their forces together and laid the foundations of their corporate public action. It was about 1840 that the Liberal Party in Belgium began to evolve into an anticlerical party, and the Catholics saw themselves under the necessity of defending their rights in the political field and in public life. Thanks to M. Edouard Ducpétiaux, who was the moving spirit in these earlier Congresses and remains one of the greatest glories of Catholic social action and the courageous precursor of social reforms, these Congresses effected the concentration of the Catholic forces and inaugurated their fruitful operation in public life.
First Philosophy
Authors: Drewitt Norbert 
Published: July 2007

When Sir Arthur Eddington writes that “Religion first became possible for a reasonable scientific man about the year 1927” and when apologists expound their novel vindications of the classical cosmology in the light of quantum mechanics, it is clear to a metaphysician that both sides have missed the point. For the metaphysical approach to reality, with its immediate determinations in psychology and cosmology, either transcends the contingent data of individual research, or it does not exist. Yet apologists and even representative metaphysicians have not always appreciated this essential preliminary to philosophy and apologetics.
Hence it is all the more a remarkable fact when a non-Catholic writer appreciates it, independently, it would seem, of any manifest contact with a philosophical tradition. And in spite of the charges of buffoonery and leg-pulling sure to be brought against him from academic strongholds, the fact that he penetrates again and again to radical metaphysical realities, scattering pseudo-scientific question-begging postulates right and left in his convinced insistence, evidently commands our conscientious attention. We do not praise him precisely for his individual work, but rather because he is representative of an approach greatly, but often vainly, sought. The added fact that he is a professional mathematician, nurtured in the atmosphere of modern physics and thoroughly familiar with it, inevitably inclines many of us all the more to give him a hearing—not because he is a physicist, but because he is a physicist who has gate-crashed the conventional postulates of the physicist philosophers of the last three decades—intelligently, that is to say, and not by mere reaction.
The Origins of the Anglican Ministry
Authors: Congar M.-J. 
Published: July 2007

The distinctive position of the Anglican communion consists in its claim to be at once Catholic while non-Roman, Reformed while non-Protestant. For the maintenance of this claim nothing is more crucial than the vindication of the reality of its Orders and Sacraments. The more the importance of the idea of the Church is re-discovered and reappreciated, the more important is seen to be the reality of the Eucharist and the Liturgy. Hence Anglicans have come to realize that if their Orders and Eucharist are open to question, their very existence as a Church becomes equally problematical.
The intervention of Pope Leo XIII in this question of the validity of Anglican Orders and the decision of his Bull Apostolicae Curae are familiar to all. Equally familiar is the fact that there are some who hold that neither the intervention nor the decision were final, either because they maintain that, in view of what some Catholic theologians themselves have said regarding the relative and practical character of the Bull, the judgment was not irreversible, or because they dispute the accuracy of the matters of fact on which the unfavourable judgment was based. In this way the majority of Anglican ecclesiastics and scholars are accustomed to contest the historical argument on which Catholics rely.
Property, Capitalist and Human
Authors: Gill Eric 
Published: July 2007

The question of property is now again receiving the attention it needs. Catholics have for too long assumed that there is no difficulty about it. They have taken for granted that Communists and Socialists wished all the means of production, distribution and exchange to be public property and that Capitalists supported private property. They have taken for granted that it is a principle of Christian teaching that private property is a natural human right and that, therefore, Capitalists were on the whole in favour of Christianity, or at least that Capitalism was not anti-Christian. The development of Capitalism in the direction of large combines, cartels and monopolies has been so gradual that it has passed unnoticed that this development has involved the destruction of private property among the masses of the people. The growth of Communism and Socialism has therefore seemed to be mere wickedness.
But the events of recent years have opened our eyes. At last we are able to see that the development of Capitalism with its accompanying development of machine industry has in fact undermined and to a large extent destroyed the reality of private ownership and individual appropriation, and that, in consequence, the development of Communism and Fascism is inevitable, that in fact these movements are the logical conclusion and consummation of Capitalism.
Take as a simple example such a thing as the Great Western Railway. Before the coming of the railways there were the Stage Coach and the Carrier. Any man with a horse and cart could run a passenger service or could carry goods from town to town.