bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Christian Life
Authors: Pearson Jordan 
Published: July 2007

Daily duties are very ordinary things. But when done to serve the needs of the Body of Christ they have extraordinary value. No action of the day is trivial or unimportant to true Catholics, for every action done in Christ has ascetic value and leads to perfect union with Him. When the Christian miner plunges down the shaft he is really soaring to Heaven; his wife at home preparing the dinner is, like Martha, preparing a meal for Christ; every pace a Christian takes is another step towards Christ. The Christian Life is nothing more than growth in Christ, and unto Christ, by membership in His Mystical Body, and Christian Asceticism is the process of growth into a perfect man. This is the thesis of an excellent book which has recently been translated into English, and which has inspired these pages.The analogy of the Mystical Body comes to us from St. Paul, who distinguishes an historical Christ Who was born of a woman, Who was crucified and rose from the dead; and a mystical Christ with Whom ‘we are buried unto death’ (Rom. vi, 4), and of Whose body we are members (I Cor. xii, 12). The complete mystical Christ is not He Who was born of Mary, but consists in Christ the Head plus the members ... The expression ‘Mystical Body of Christ’ signifies a mysterious union with Him, which is the basis of an actual reality. This does not only indicate our moral relationship to Him, owing to the fact that we love Him and call Him brother and friend, but implies an ontological union.
The Holiness of Truth
Authors: Jarrett Bede 
Published: July 2007

In venturing to put in front of you, fellow members of the Aquinas Society, one aspect of the teaching of our Master, I do so diffidently; or I would do so diffidently were I not sure that you trill recognise in my attempt merely the effort of a disciple to piece together the deeper teaching of his Master and find in it something which he can use for his own philosophy in life. For this personal reason I have ventured to put together some stray ideas of St. Thomas in order to comfort myself and perhaps, therefore, assist you in the way of life.We can now see it to have been indeed the very privilege of St. Thomas that he was never anything else than a professor: he is the great patron of teachers, for he was never anything else than a Teacher. You will remember that when on his tray to the Council of Lyons he set out north from Naples, he teas attacked by some sickness which accentuated the strangeness of that last phase of his life which so perplexed Reginald, his secretary and companion. You have only to read carefully Tocco’s text in the Bollandists’ Acta Sanctorum to see many evidences of this strange condition of absent-mindedness in which he especially laboured. After the vision, or whatever it was, that took place on December 6th, the Feast of St. Nicholas, 1273, St. Thomas, to the consternation of Reginald, refused to write or dictate another word of his still unfinished Summa Theologica, and at last, still obdurate in this, moved out north of Naples when the papal summons to the General Council came. All through that journey St. Thomas’s natural absent-mindedness became a dangerous menace to him, intensified by that vision which made him fix his eyes on God. When on the road by Ticino he fell over a fallen tree and seemed stunned by his fall, Reginald hurried forward and talked hard to him so that he should forget what had happened.
Science and the Ethic of Reproduction
Authors: Drewitt Norbert 
Published: July 2007

From the unicellular animalcule reproducing its kind by fission in the muddy pool to the mammal suckling its little ones in the snow, the deserts and the primeval forests, there is found an incredible variety of means and ingenious inventions of living nature for the sure attainment of her universal end—namely, the propagation, provision, and multiplication of offspring. From the simple processes of conjugation in the microscopic filaments of a mould to the complex mechanisms for pollination by insects in the flowering plants one is struck by the fantastic twistings and modifications of the great mother of living beings, organic nature, to safeguard the continuance of these means.But it is only where all relevant facts have been collected that theories can be built up and principles abstracted from what has been empirically given. Here, perhaps more than in any field, à priori theories and principles are likely to collapse in the exhaustive evaluation of the individual realities of nature.A man may be convinced of a principle on philosophical grounds. But if he hopes for an oracular ‘confirmation’ from some aspect of twentieth century science he is usually disillusioned. Few things are more treacherous than the surface of physical nature for him who goes unwarily upon it. Principles either emerge from it more or less immediately (e.g. in our considering Quantity as such), or they do not emerge definitely at all. It is usually fruitless and always foolhardy for the student to venture further than the data of research literally allow. A weapon of apologetics welded from a thin collection of facts tends to snap in a generation, perhaps a decade, and frequently as soon as it is used. The misplaced enthusiasm calling it into existence is false and calls down the derision if not of its own age, then most surely of ages that are to come.
‘L'Aube’
Authors: Benenson Mira 
Published: July 2007

France, the home of political parties, lias seen the birth not of another party, but of a supra-party group—the ‘Nouvelles Equipes Françaises.’ The NEF, whose daily paper is L'Aube, stands for a united, Christian democracy, based on Christian principles of social justice, liberty and toleration: but it is well aware that such an ideal is not going to be realised without the most generous and whole-uearted work. The congress which it held in Paris last month showed its spirit: I reproduce here the most significant portions of some of the speeches.The chairman opened the congress by saying that it met under the ‘standard of conquest: the conquest of public minion.’ Financial remedies are insufficient to restore the country. It is necessary to recreate the soul and body of France by reviving her sense of spiritual and human values and by making her into a real community.The Marquis d'Aragon, known in Oxford and London as well as here for his competence in social problems, described his work in a small village of the South. Mere discussion meetings, he said, are useless: people must first understand what they mean by democracy and spiritual values. We do not wish, he said, to behave like electioneers, and induce people, by fair means or foul, to elect a democrat: we want them to become democratic. We must win their consciences, and save them from finding refuge in authoritarian government out of sheer disgust with the vagueness of our present democratic Government. A disciplined democracy can revise the desire for liberty and for those spiritual and moral values without which realism means abject submission to force, and idealism a fruitless and vague appeal to an unknown god.
The Problem of the Great City
Authors: Quinn Edward 
Published: July 2007

It is not easy to express adequately in a single English word the concept implied in the German Grossstadt. It does not mean only metropolis or great city, not necessarily city at all; even a town may have the qualities of a Grossstadt. But if wre have not the word we certainly have the reality. All the great centres of industry, w'here men are gathered together in masses in order to provide for their livelihood and to keep going the great machine of modern civilisation can be described as Grossstädten. In the concrete it is London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds and Newcastle; and even the smaller towns in the industrialised areas share in its spirit, the mining centres of South Yorkshire, the cotton towns of Lancashire, and the dirty villages of County Durham (one of which was described by Edward VIII, then Prince of Wales, as the worst in England).These centres are either sprung out of a transformed countryside or men have come to them from quiet, orderly lives in the country. In either case they present a peculiar problem, which is part of the greater problem of man in the present age. The man of the great city (using this as the nearest equivalent of the German word) is a definite type, quite distinct from the countryman, and requires a distinctive approach on the part of those who are interested in his soul’s welfare.How to make that approach has been the subject of a number of German brochures and even large books which have appeared in recent years.
The Hebrew Prophets and National Crises
Authors: McNabb Vincent 
Published: July 2007

The subject of the Hebrew Prophets and National Crises is one that could hardly be exhausted in a book of slender bulk. I can, therefore, only sketch out some outline of this great and, at the present time, very important matter.First of all, we have to consider the wonderful phenomenon of these Prophets. It is not just a natural thing. It has a supernatural element, made up of all that is natural. The supernatural is not built on the natural, but with it. To some, the prophecies, as recorded, would seem to be nothing more than a very fine forecast by one who paid attention to the laws of nature; just as you might account merely by chemical laws for the writing which a person makes on a page, but that would not account for everything, all the intellectual and spiritual values, contained in it.Another unique element is that, in almost every page, there is a denunciation of the people that recorded those things. You have the phenomenon of a little people transmitting to posterity only one group of writings (I do not think we have any other Hebrew literature of the time of Isaias), and those writings a most appalling account of their own doings. Now that is a very strange phenomenon because, in point of fact, if you asked England to-night to set up a book in English about the size of the Bible, and to transmit it to posterity, what would they put in it?
Education and Evacuation
Authors: Evans Frederic 
Published: July 2007

The war has given many education authorities a new and complicated problem to solve. These are the authorities of evacuation and of reception areas. In the former, between twenty and thirty per cent, of elementary school children have been evacuated to and have remained in the reception areas, a small percentage have made private arrangements for shelter in the country, leaving, perhaps, seventy per cent, of the children remaining at home.Correspondingly the reception areas have had their school rolls increased in number in the same proportion, this necessitating in many cases modifications of the school organization.The fact, however, remains that the well-planned evacuation scheme for school children in school parties has broken down through lack of complete support from the parents living in the vulnerable areas. A twenty or thirty per cent, response leaves the education authority of the evacuation area with the major task of education still to be carried out within its own precincts. At the same time the teaching staffs, in the first place, left with the evacuated children and were billeted in the reception areas. A large proportion have now, however, been recalled. Taking first the problem as affecting the children who refused to be evacuated, the President of the Board of Education, after much pressure, announced in the House of Lords on November 1st, 1939:
Wishing Wells
Authors: Fagan John F. 
Published: July 2007

Mr. Wells’s latest book, The Fate of Homo Sapiens, is a pedestrian effort, and to those who revel in his peculiar vein of imaginative prophecy it must come as a distinct anti-climax. Nevertheless, it is an important book, for it is based on the distilled essence of Mr, Wells’s thought during the whole of his career; one feels that it is the final revised edition of his opinions. Here is the bare skeleton of Wellsianism, stripped of everything that its author considered superfluous. The Fate of Homo Sapiens is probably the most topical of Mr. Wells’s books. He has ceased to look for the laws that govern the course of human history and to map prodigious cities of the future. The period of analysis is over, criteria have become fixed, and he now looks out on the world of to-day fully confident that he can both diagnose and cure.The book is primarily an essay in sociology, an attempt by Mr. Wells to sum up the present state of man in the light of his own principles. It is as such that it must be judged. Some of the reviews in the Catholic press gave the impression that it was merely an attack on the Church; this overlooks the more positive elements of the book, which will probably come to be regarded as the official handbook of Wellsian thought.Briefly, The Fate of Homo Sapiens is an outline of Mr. Wells’s social philosophy, together with a series of sketches showing how the modem world helps or hinders (usually hinders) the dawn of greater happiness for all.
Houses of Hospitality
Authors: Fitzsimons John 
Published: July 2007

Not long ago those interested in the forward movement in Catholic social teaching and practice were interested to read From Union Square to Rome, which was Miss Dorothy Day’s account of her conversion to the Church. The story ended with her safely within the fold, and all who read the story and who knew of the work that she had undertaken; were anxious to hear more of it. The American Catholic Worker was always interesting and enlightening, and recently have been published Peter Maurin’s Easy Essays. But until now there was no full-length story of the work being done in New York nor of the dynamic spirit which keeps it going. Last month, however, the gap was admirably filled by House of Hospitality/ again by Dorothy Day; and I have no hesitation in saying that this is one of the most important books not only of this year, but since the publication of the encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891. A bold claim indeed, but one which I hope to substantiate in the course of the article.What immediately puts this book in a class apart is that it is written by someone who has lived and is still living it. It is about the poorest of the poor, the destitute, about the workers and their struggles, not for prosperity, but for the right to be recognised as something more than chattels. It is written from the inside, not by a fur-coated investigator, not by a commission of statistically-minded civil servants, not by a bien pensant slumrner, but by a woman who is one with the poor, the destitute and the outcast.
The Example of Christ
Authors: Mathew Gervase 
Published: July 2007

The knowledge that Christ was both God and man must be the central fact in the life of every Christian. Because He was a man, He has given an example for us to follow; because He was God, He has given us the strength to follow His example, and for every Christian the central lesson to be learnt from Christ is to love, to give and to endure.Looking back over two thousand years, the details of Christ’s life on earth can seem very far away. The setting can seem so very different from anything that we have known; the barren, stony hillsides of Judea, the crowded market places, the small white flat-roofed houses, the groups of orientals moving slowly along the dusty roads. Yet so many of the details are commonplace enough. The birth in poverty, the childhood in a poor household, the years as a workman, and then apparent success, apparent failure, death. All that could have happened, all that has happened, in any country, and in any time. The setting alters, but the rhythm of human life and the problems of human choice remain the same. Everything that is fundamental, the capacity of loving, the power of giving, the will to be alive, joy and agony and death, remain unaltered since Christ lived at Nazareth. Yet if only we could see it, they are no longer the same as they were before the Word took flesh and dwelt amongst us. The life that we know, and the death that we know, confronted Christ. He was man as well as God. He lived and died.
De Regimine Principum and Its Historical Background
Authors: Gumbley Walter 
Published: July 2007

This well-known treatise of St. Thomas Aquinas on the principles of good government was addressed, there seems little doubt, to Hugh II, de Lusignan, king of Cyprus, who died in 1267 at the untimely age of seventeen years. On the death of the promising youth the Saint discontinued his work, when he had reached the fourth chapter of the second book; but the task was completed, not altogether unsuccessfully, by one of his pupils, Ptolemy de Lucca, a Dominican who lived to become bishop of Torcello and died in 1327. St. Thomas included fifteen chapters in his first book, and Ptolemy added twelve more to the second, and completed the whole work by adding two more books, one of twenty-two chapters, the other of twenty-eight, so that of the whole work De Regimine Principum as it appears in the collected works of St. Thomas, Ptolemy’s share is sixty-two chapters out of a total of eighty-one.
I have no intention of giving here a resume of the book whose principles are so well known to students of St. Thomas; I merely wish to indicate the broad historical background in which it was composed.
St. Thomas, we have to remember, was an Italian, and by birth a subject of his distant kinsman, the Emperor Frederic II; being born in the kingdom of Naples, then an appanage of the Imperial a-own. Under Frederic’s harsh rule the Saint lived out his youth, but after joining the Dominicans found peace under the just and therefore tranquil government of St. Lewis IX of France.
Francois
Authors: Norman George 
Published: July 2007

‘Under this simple baptismal name have appeared the documents of a short life which might have been that of a Saint or of a man of genius, perhaps both.’
It was no less caustic a critic than André Therive who made the statement and wrote six columns in Le Temps to prove it.
François really needs no such tribute; the facts are self-evident. Even our national temper which view's with shrinking, if not with actual dislike, additions to the category of precocious prodigies of sanctity, or even of genius, might be vanquished by this record—in letters and rough notes—of the boy whom Auguste Valensin presents to his contemporaries.
François, to begin with, was not a child-saint. He had the ill-health which often helps towards sanctity but so gaily and carelessly borne as scarcely to appear. Obviously he had the seeds in him of a profound spirituality, but Andre Therive only uses the word holiness—‘a little strong ’ as he thinks it—in the most tentative way.
Then François is anonymous. We know scarcely anything concrete about him beyond his name, his profile in an admirable portrait-study as a boy of about twelve, and a later one; we know that his people were rich and we may guess that his home town was Lyons. This anonymity adds to the story a quality of elusiveness, and one might almost use the debased word glamour, from the lack of those data on which normal English biography is founded.
Metaphysics Without Ontology
Authors: Kelly Bernard 
Published: July 2007

The above title outlines Professor Collingwood’s project for the reinstatement of metaphysics in answer to Kant’s question, ‘How can metaphysics become scientific?’ Since metaphysics has hitherto been a mistake about metaphysics, it was time something should be done about it.In the books called Metaphysical ( = the next after the physics = much the same kind of title as ‘Collected Works,’ vol. viii), says Professor Collingwood, Aristotle undertakes two tasks. The first is the study (First Science) of the presuppositions of the ordinary non-metaphysical sciences; the second is the construction of a science (ontology) of pure being, and therefore (natural theology) of God. As first science metaphysics is logically presupposed by all the other sciences, although from the learner’s point of view it is approached only when the other sciences have been to some degree mastered. As last science (wisdom) it will be the ultimate goal of the scientist’s pilgrimage, and the most explicit name for it will be theology.The first chapter of Professor Collingwood’s book is a condensed paraphrase of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. The second separates the two tasks mentioned above and argues, in continuity with Berkeley, Kant, and Hegel, that a science of ‘pure being ‘is a contradiction in terms.The grounds of this conclusion are already visible in the paraphrase of Aristotle in his first chapter (p. g). Speaking of the system of the subordination of the sciences, he says: ‘At the base of the system of universals there are universals which are infimae species, not giving rise to any further sub-species.
Hilaire Belloc
Authors: Harrison F. 
Published: July 2007

How shall we approach him, this unique figure in English literature, and what are we to name him—Englishman and Frenchman, poet and politician, reactionary and revolutionary, essayist, historian, satirist, soldier and seaman, thinker and man of action, sceptic and Christian? In mood merry and sad and bitter, in style exuberant and austere—what common factor, if any, is to be found in him?The key to this many-sided man is at once complex and simple. He is concerned, in a word, with all the activities of man, political, social, artistic and religious, as seen in the light of the living Christian tradition of Catholic Europe; a tradition which has caught up into itself and made its own the civilisations of Greece and Rome and the long searching and finding of the Jews, and which claims to interpret for all time God to man and man to himself. It is, for better or worse, our tradition. It is in the atmosphere we breathe, it is the soil from which we spring, it is so familiar that at times we do not notice it, it is so complex that we all know little of it directly, so simple that we find it hard to accept, so exacting that we snatch at the excuse of fashion and distaste to abandon it, yet so penetrating that we are coloured by it against our will, and bear its marks even in revolt. It is a tradition that has again and again grown weak from within and been assailed from without, it has never been unchallenged and never utterly overthrown, and its fortunes were nevermore vital or more uncertain than at the present day.
God and Jane Austen
Authors: Watts Mary 
Published: July 2007

It is a truth universally acknowledged that in private life Jane Austen was deeply religious. Henry Austen’s Notice stresses her charity, ‘Faultless herself, she always sought, in the faults of others, something to excuse, to forgive or forget. . . . She never uttered a hasty, a silly or a severe expression.’ Her devotion is the other prominent aspect. ‘She was thoroughly religious and devout; fearful of giving offence to God, and incapable of feeling it towards any fellow creature.’But critics have generally held that her religion has not influenced her novels in any major way and have given it little attention. An exception was Angus Wilson in his series of broadcast talks on Evil in the English Novel, in which he maintained that religious belief and practice influenced Jane Austen’s art directly, though his suggestion that the material of her novels, ‘Three or Four Families in a Country Village’, reflects a belief that the salvation of one’s soul can best be achieved in retirement from ‘the world’ seems to me to be mistaken. The more one reads the novels the more one becomes aware that they are written from an essentially religious outlook on life but that this is so absorbed and taken for granted in her thinking that it is only occasionally made explicit. And, of course, it is an outlook profoundly influenced by the reading and preaching available to her in the early nineteenth century, characterized by a reticence in the expression of faith and a keen interest in the moral life—‘By their fruits ye shall know them’.