bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Monastic Night's Entertainment
Authors: Swinstead A. E. H. 
Published: July 2007

Few people now read Vathek, and Redding’s Memoirs of William Beckford are probably read even less often. Indeed the book is not easy reading. The Encyclopaedia Britannica calls it ‘prolix,’ and someone recently said that it was the worst biography he knew. With the advent of other biographies of Beckford it may cease to be even useful. Yet the patient reader is not wholly unrewarded. There are passages in it that he would be sorry to have missed, even though the feelings they arouse are not precisely those intended by the author. Thus in a long and reverential account of Beckford’s travels we mark with pleasure that he left Bologna, ‘renowned for sausages and lap-dogs,’ ‘as an earthquake had just before put the land and people much out of humour.’But it is when the Church is concerned, and especially monasticism, that Redding is most interesting. Catholic worship always fascinated Beckford, and its lasting effect on his mind will appear from later extracts. He was at the Grande Chartreuse when he was nineteen. He stayed there three days, read the works of St. Bruno, and wrote with some enthusiasm of the place. Indeed he left some exceedingly poor lines in the album of the monastery, ‘the larger portion being those of the tutor, Dr. Lettice, the pupil being, perhaps, not at the moment duly inspired.’ These favourable impressions never wholly faded, but other experiences were not so happy. In 1780 he made another tour, and in the Low Countries ‘he was active, and visited all the public buildings, and lions in the churches, such as the statuary and pictures.
The Servile State Reconsidered
Authors: Humphries Silvester 
Published: July 2007

A radical contradiction vitiates the political theory of Mr. Belloc. It can be stated thus: the Roman civilisation and the medieval are continuous because in the dark ages the barbarians who dominated in society thought they were Romans and accepted the Roman Empire, although with manifest decadence; the British working classes are in imminent peril of becoming a servile class by the imposition of some elements of slavery, although they will not be called or considered slaves, by themselves or others.The former thesis (that of Europe and the Faith) assumes that society depends on the formalities of the mind: what it intends to accept. The latter thesis (that of the Servile State) assumes that society depends on what the mind actually accepts, regardless of formalities or aspects.
The Charades of Metaphysics
Authors: Anstruther Godfrey 
Published: July 2007

‘He was a great man,’ says Isaac Disraeli of St. Thomas Aquinas, ‘busied all his life with making the Charades of Metaphysics.’The Charades of Metaphysics, or metaphysical charades, as we generally call them, must not be confused with the Physical Charades, invented by Francis Bacon, nor with the Dumb Charades which are our modern contribution to knowledge. They have a distinct character; they are really quite a different game. In these days when so much attention is paid to Morris Dances and medieval folk-lore, it may be a service to rescue from oblivion the varied accounts of this game which are to be found in our literature. I have drawn my quotations, not from the philosophers, but from the great literary writers of the past, because the best judges of any game are the onlookers who take no part in it. And if I seem to have a weakness for Thomases, it is because I feel that on those who received his name in Baptism, the mantle of Thomas Aquinas must surely have fallen.Physical Charades was essentially an open-air game. Gallileo spent his spare time dropping bodies from the top of the leaning tower at Pisa: Newton played in his orchard near Grantham. Metaphysical Charades, on the contrary, was emphatically an indoor game, and for this I have the authority of no less a supporter than Thomas De Quincey.
A Case History of Family Religion
Authors: H.K.G.  
Published: July 2007

The history of family religious life, as a microcosm of the national religious life, seems to me to offer a virgin field for research and documentation. I offer these pages as a study of one family, my own.At the outset I wish to admit a prejudice in favour of continuity, homogeneity and unity in family religious life. It is only through these safeguards—the fruit, by the bye, of singleness of Faith—that we enjoy the blessings of mutual understanding, concord in social relationships and the benefit of a traditional ethical and spiritual culture. Under the group system of religion the nation is committed to a system that makes for misunderstanding and estrangement between group and group, faction in family life, and prejudice and suspicion between individuals. True it is, as says a Kempis: ‘He who seeks to enjoy things alone, forfeits the advantages that are in common.’
The Church and the Modern Theatre
Authors: Mackenzie Margaret 
Published: July 2007

The days have passed when, on the Continent anyhow, to be on the stage was to be outside the Church. This was brought home by the Master-General of the Dominican Order, at a meeting of the English Catholic Stage Guild last summer, when he, who had been its Director, spoke of the activities and spiritual life of the Stage Guild of France.The theatre is the prodigal daughter of the Church; she was born of the Church and her first playgrounds were in the churches. Now in a ‘far land’ she is, at least in this country, in spiritual destitution and has hardly the strength to arise and return to her home, but the Church, her mother, has set out on the road to meet her.In England, it is true, the theatre did not go of her own accord from the Church, she was carried away from it in the arms of public life. We may find in the pages of Shakespeare many traces of the Church’s influence and much hankering for the home that the theatre had been torn from; but since Shakespeare the Drama in England has been purely secular, but not as in countries where it was in active rebellion, and not until our own day, irreligious. The Puritan element in the country looked at the theatre askance and not until late Victorian days was it considered a respectable institution.
A Book That Shook an Empire
Authors: Carter Barbara Barclay 
Published: July 2007

When a hundred years ago Sivio Pellico published his Le Mie Prigioni, the description of his ten years’ imprisonment in an Austrian fortress, it was with no political purpose. Partly, one may guess, as the result of those terrible years, and partly because, before the intensity of his religious experience during those same years, all else paled and became insignificant, on his release he turned away from politics, and all his writings henceforth would be on religious and moral themes. And if he published the story of his sufferings, it was at the instance of his parish priest, with the sole aim, as he says,of helping to comfort the unhappy by showing the evils I suffered and the consolations that attended on the worst misfortunes; to show that through myi long torment I did not find humanity so wicked, so unworthy of indulgence, so poor in noble souls as it is often made out to be; to invite noble hearts to love much, to hate no one .... and to repeat a truth well-known but often forgotten: that Religion and Philosophy create strong wills and calm judgments, and that without these united conditions there can be no justice nor dignity nor sure principle.’When an eminent Protestant told him that he had been converted to Catholicism by an eloquent passage in praise of confession, Silvio Pellico felt he had not written it in vain. That his book should seize the imaginations of Europe and do more than any other to shake the Austrian domination in Italy, was neither in his expectations nor intentions.
Maha-Pralaya and Last Judgment
Authors: Gilby Thomas , Coomaraswamy Ananda K. , Tollast Robert 
Published: July 2007

Vedic tradition envisages the voyage of the individual after death as a passing on from one plane of being to another; and though there is the possibility of perpetuity on any given plane until the End of Time, when all Determinations are resolved, there is no conception of the possibility of a return to any past state. The later doctrine of reincarnation, in which the possibility of a return to a previous condition is conceived, seems to reflect an edifying tendency of the religious and psychological extensions, perhaps incorporating popular, non-Vedic elements.The voyage has its end on the Farther Shore of the Sea of Life. When land is made there, the contingent Self knows itself as the Supreme Self, absolute space in the heart is known as the absolute space body of Being and Non-Being, and the Sea of Life is counter-seen by the Self as the multiplicity of its own identity. Voyaging, we are given intimations of that Paradise in Union consummating Thought, in Ecstasy consummating Will, and in the Consent of Art; knowledge, love, and work becoming Pure Act. There is in fact an ever present possibility of Immediate Enfranchisement by return to the Centre of our Being, to the Eternal Now, one and the same wherever and whenever we may be, in Heaven or on Earth. But as we are speaking in terms of Time, the possibility of severing in this way at one stroke all the knots of the heart remains only virtual. What we foresee is an Enfranchisement reached by a process of ripening and preparation; our ado is not with the Comprehensor, but the Wayfarer.
Cobwebbed Schoolmen
Authors: Anstruther Godfrey 
Published: July 2007

Mr. Dudley Wright’s note on Charles Lamb and St. Thomas (Blackfriars, February, 1933) opens up an attractive question which has never been treated with any fullness—namely, how many of our eighteenth and early nineteenth century writers were familiar with the works of the Angelic Doctor.In 1814 Hallam wrote as follows:‘Perhaps I may have imagined the scholastics to be more forgotten than they really are. Within a short time I have met with four living English writers who have read parts of Thomas Aquinas: Mr. Turner, Mr. Berington, Mr. Coleridge, and the Edinburgh Reviewer (Macaulay). Still, I cannot bring myself to think that there are four more in this country who can say the same,’
Newman and the National Church
Authors: Tindal-Atkinson Aelwin 
Published: July 2007

From whatever angle the Oxford Movement is examined, it is impossible to disregard the spirit of alarm which informed its opening phase. Reforms long overdue were beginning to take effect; further reforms of a more searching character were to follow. Outworn institutions and rusty machinery could not remain untouched when the national spirit was demanding radical developments in political and social institutions. Excluding a small body of the clergy, Englishmen of all ranks within and without the Established Church regarded that body and its ministers as an institution dependent for its existence upon the Body Politic. For them the Church of England was little more than a State Department; and in common with the rest this too must submit to the reforms which it urgently required.Since the days of Elizabeth the National Church had been immediately sensitive to every political development: each successive crisis had struck it violently and left deep scars. With the termination of the Stuart period and the rejection of ‘Divine Right,’ the great days of Caroline High Churchmanship had come to an end. The High Church party as an effective power died within the Church, whilst the Non-Juring Sect languished into insignificance from lack of an object. The volumes of Caroline divinity remained untouched on the library shelves: theological interests, rules of Christian Perfection and Sacramental Doctrine had become unfashionable.
Newman's Analysis of Development
Authors: Humphries Silvester 
Published: July 2007

The notion of a development of Christianity is found in Tertullian and in Vincent of Lérins; indeed it is an immediate conclusion from the words of Our Lord, ‘I am not come to destroy but to fulfil.’ Yet no one gave the subject especial attention before Newman. The historical spirit is not rarely alien to the mind of the theologian, and theology has been received with little sympathy since the rise of modern historical science in the eighteenth century.Newman, widely read in the Fathers, but saturated in the spirit of the Oxford of his day, approached the question by attempting to explain away a suspicion that the Roman Catholic Church of 1845 was the same body as the Primitive Church of historical research. Startling divergence seemed to reveal, as well as to conceal, an ultimate identity. His reconciliation of this seeming contradiction was the conclusion, but not the purpose, of his writing the essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. The historical, theological, philosophical and psychological vistas which the book opens up are manifold: we can here concern ourselves only with its analysis of the subject itself.
The Centre Party
Authors: Pottmann Karl 
Published: July 2007

Catholic political action in Germany dates from the period after the Congress of Vienna. Three main questions influenced its growth; the spread of Liberalism; the Austro-Prussian struggle for leadership among the German states; and the Kulturkampf. The question of Austria or Prussia was really settled in 1866 in favour of the latter, but the problem lingered on until recently under the name of Particularism (Rights of Federal States), though it had comparatively little influence upon the thought of the Catholic party. Liberalism and the Kulturkampf had a more determinate effect. Liberalism and, later, its counterpart Socialism resulted in the separation of Catholic political theory from the commonly held political theory of the period; a result of the Kulturkampf was to form this theory into a political party.It was natural that Catholic politics and thought should be opposed to the Liberal conceptions of society and the State. Were not most of the mcontrary to the Church’s doctrine of natural design? Thus in 1838 the mighty genius of Goerres already foreshadowed the rise of German Catholicism against the current political creed.
Two Portrait’s From de Vigny
Authors: Wilson Cecil H. S. 
Published: July 2007

Amidst the welter of memoirs of the Napoleonic era De Vigny’s Servitude et Grandeur Militaires always seems to me to hold a peculiar charm and attraction. The very opening sentence of the book strikes that keynote of gentle melancholy and disillusion which is so characteristic of the high-souled Captain Renaud with his famous Canne de Jonc. ‘ If it is true, according to the Catholic poet, that there is nothing so painful as remembering happy days in the midst of misery, it is also true that the heart finds a certain happiness in recalling times of hardship and slavery, in a period of freedom and calm.’ This same air of philosophic detachment and experienced judgment pervades all the author’s reflections on the rottenness of the military system of the age and the hollowness of military glory. Incidentally the book contains also in the story of Laurette ou le Cachet Rouge, one of the tenderest and most poignant love-stories ever written.In the course of the Captain’s memoirs there stand out in clear detachment the portraits of two of the leading protagonists in the great struggle for supremacy, one of the Emperor himself, the other of the most chivalrous and high-souled of all England’s naval commanders, the illustrious Admiral Collingwood.
Rome in the Writings of Cardinal Wiseman
Authors: Borenius Tancred 
Published: July 2007

A great and peculiarly many-sided historic character like that of Cardinal Wiseman must always offer a number of angles of approach to the student. Speaking more particularly of his literary work, the power of retaining after death the art of making friends (to use the phrase of Hazlitt) is one which Wiseman may be said to have possessed in an exceptional degree. As a constant and ever-appreciative reader of Wiseman—nowadays, I venture to think, read far less than he deserves to be—I may perhaps in the course of years have developed some points of view which it is worth while setting out in a connected fashion: though I should perhaps warn the reader that I shall have no startling discoveries to announce, no unknown material to make public.The peculiar importance which attaches to Rome as a key to the personality and achievement of Wiseman springs, of course, primarily from the fact that so long a period of his youth and early manhood was spent there almost without interruption: practically the whole, that is, of twenty-two years, from 1818 to 1840. And the call of Rome was one which Wiseman had felt ever since his earliest youth; in that incomparable first chapter of what is, I think, perhaps his most lovable book, the Recollections of the Last Four Popes and of Rome in their Times (1858), in which he describes in so marvellously graphic a fashion the arrival of the first party of English students, sent to re-occupy the English College at Rome—in that chapter he reveals that the history and antiquities of Rome had formed the bonds of a little college society to which he had belonged, no doubt as its moving spirit, at Ushaw; and when much later in life he received the congratulations of St. Cuthbert’s College upon his elevation to the Cardinalate, the phrase which came quite naturally to him, in explaining why he had left Ushaw so early, when barely sixteen, was that of ‘the splendid temptation of Rome,’
The Necessity of Revolution
Authors: Prince J. F. T. 
Published: July 2007

He is an inept apologist who urges that if the poor suffer the pangs of hunger, the rich too suffer the pangs of indigestion, that surfeit is no less painful than want. It is a mischievous casuistry that reminds us that nervous prostration is as often an attendant of prolonged satisfaction as of perennial anxiety as to where the next meal is coming from. Happiness is indeed relative to our wants, which are limited by our environment and by individual and social temperament. But it is dangerous to argue that between this class and that there is nothing to choose so far as the subjective enjoyment of life is concerned. In the brute economy, the lives of sheep-devouring wolves and wolf-devoured sheep enjoy doubtless the same average of pain and gratification; we can predicate of each vessel the same fullness according to its capacity in nature’s, scale. But Dives and Lazarus are not (I mean in the subjective order) the analogues of sheep and wolf. For Lazarus is a man: Dives too: the primate mammal, homo sapiens; though each may feel some difficulty in predicating it of the other.These are incredulous times and we must be very careful. We are most of us as fatuous when we explicate the problem of pain as when we attempt to analyse the economy of its distribution amongst men. We remember having it explained to us in early youth that pain is primarily a prophylactic whose function is to sound the alarm of lesion and disease lest (fatally) they go unperceived.
Those Were the Days
Authors: Preedy John 
Published: July 2007

Recently there came into my possession a faded copy of the Gloucestershire Chronicle of October 28th, 1876. Its immediate interest for me was an account of the death, truly described as melancholy, of a member of my family. Whilst shooting wild fowl on the banks of the Severn with two friends, he had swum out to reclaim a widgeon winged by one of them, and was drowned in spite of his friends’ efforts at rescue. In the obvious way peculiar to the period the coroner is reported as having addressed the jury thus: We seem to have all the evidence. It is a most melancholy case; certainly one of the most melancholy that I have had to sit upon for some time. It is a very sad thing—a young fellow, whom most of us knew, went out for amusement and lost his life. I suppose the water was cold? .... It is a melancholy and sad case. . . . No doubt the poor gentleman met his death accidentally and that will be your verdict.’After indulging in what I must call a certain vicarious concern in this grief that was, I turned my attention to the remainder of the paper, so unfamiliar in its size, its closely printed columns, and its lack of pictorial illustration. There is a certain measured tread in the style of newspaper writing, even in the advertisements, of those days. We observe the same characteristic in the old bound Tablets and Punches of the ‘70’s. To us who are accustomed to find our persiflage light and airy, there is an inverted comicality in the older ways.
Beauty Loses Herself
Authors: Pepler Conrad 
Published: July 2007

A modern proverb has arisen as a star to guide the erring artist: ‘Look after Truth and Goodness, and Beauty will look after herself.’ But let the artist beware. Such a star may prove to be a will-o’-the-wisp. At first sight the proverb appears to contain the complete ethic for aesthetics, reducing the tough problem of beauty to a simple and practical formula. How attractive to unite the Good and the True in holy wedlock and then turning discover Beauty the bridesmaid carrying the train behind. Simplifications, however, have their dangers. To bring them in touch with reality requires such care that in practice they become most complex, disclosing many an attractive but misleading view. A simplification should only be the completion of thought, never the commencement. For Mr. Gill this proverb has come as the answer to a long process of reasoning, as appears from this volume. He thus avoids the only serious pitfall. But other artists who begin with this motto may not be so fortunate.Truth belongs to the mind, goodness to the will, and beauty is the fruit of both the mind and the will. Any being in its perfection will be true in its correspondence to God’s idea of it; it will be good in its dependency on God’s will; and will be beautiful in its reflection of the harmony of God’s mind and will, which have produced the first two effects. Therefore beauty follows necessarily from the truth and goodness of a thing. Concentration on the first and the second produces the third automatically, since it is nothing less than the harmony between those two.
Louise, Duchesse de la Valliere, Carmelite
Authors: Trouncer Margaret 
Published: July 2007

In a long narrow gallery of Versailles seldom opened to the public hangs a picture by Nocret of Louise Duchesse de la Vallière in court dress of the late seventeenth century. There is something strangely haunting about the beautiful aristocratic face with its great sad eyes ringed by dark circles. For all her fine parure she has the air of one whose nights are spent in weeping. And now her life has been written by one who seems to have crept into her very heart and learnt its whispered secret; a work so different from the usual ones on Louis XIV’s mistresses, and justly crowned by the Académie Française.Here is the story. In 1661, the sixteen-year-old Madame Henriette d’Angleterre married Louis XIV’s brother. Among her ladies-in-waiting was Mlle. Louise de la Baume le Blanc, of Blois, aged seventeen. She had fair hair and innocent almond-shaped blue eyes, ‘ses yeux longs,’ and though she limped slightly, she was very exquisite. Madame herself said she was ‘douce, précieuse, admirable’ . . . ‘dans ses beaux yeux une douce langueur.’ As a little girl in Tours and at Blois, she had been greatly neglected by her mother and allowed to run wild. She had seen the King for the first time on his way to marry the Spanish Infanta. It was strange that on the high chimney of her chateau was the device: Ad principem ut ad ignes amor indissolubilis which by a strained translation is interpreted as foretelling her love for Louis and then its sacrifice to the fires of a greater love.