bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
A Medieval Experiment in Reunion
Authors: Jarrett Bede 
Published: July 2007

The medieval mind was always fertile in experiment. It had all the freshness of a new age that was ceaselessly driven by new circumstances to adapt the fashions of Christendom to conditions violently alien. The restless constitution-making in England, the long experiment in liberty that marks the line of Plantagenet, is part of the same effort; and it is no less visible in the disorderly histories of Florence and Venice. The Cathedrals are one expression of it, the Guilds another, and the Crusades flung valiantly abroad the same temper of adventure, the same daring that would risk defeat or even face certain failure.As the central force of Christendom the Papacy was peculiarly subject to the same romantic influence, as the stories of Hildebrand and of Innocent III abundantly prove. John XXII with his curious career as theologian, as politician, as apostle, is another instance. The greatest foreign missioner of the line of Pontiffs since the days of Peter, he bears witness in the magnificence of his ideals and his unconquerable hopefulness to the same indomitable spirit. To his hand the Orders of Friars, particularly the Dominicans and the Franciscans, were the most fitted and best used instruments. It will be sufficient to quote the opening words of his Bull of 1318 to the Dominican Order, to show how tremendously alive the Church had become, both in head and members, to the need of Catholic propaganda. The Bull is addressed to “our beloved sons, the Friar Preachers in the lands of the Saracens, Pagans, Greeks, Bulgars, Tartars, Alani, Gazaenes, Goths, Ruthenians, Jacobites, Nubians, Nestorians, Georgians, Armenians, Indians, Macolites, and other unbelieving nations in the East and North.”
Encyclical Letter
Authors: Benedict  
Published: July 2007

At the approach of the happy day, when seven hundred years ago, that light of holiness, Dominic, passed from this world’s sorrows to the home of the blessed, it is a joy to Us who have so long been amongst his most devout clients, more especially since the day when We began to govern the Church of Bologna which religiously guards the Saint’s remains, it is a great joy to Us, We say, to be able to call upon the faithful from this Apostolic See to keep the memory of so great a saint. And in doing so we are not only yielding to feelings of personal piety, but also performing a duty of gratitude to the Founder and lawgiver and to his renowned family.Dominic was wholly and thoroughly a man of God : so too was he perfectly a man of the Church, and the Church has ever found him an unconquered champion of the Faith and his Order a stout bulwark of defence. Wherefore not only did Dominic in his days fortify the temple but he took thought for its lasting defence, according to the prophetic words of Honorius III, uttered when he confirmed the Order, “the Brethren of thy Order are to be the champions of the Faith and the true lights of the world.”
Medical Ethics
Authors: McNabb Vincent 
Published: July 2007

We do not know whether the book which has occasioned this article signifies the decay either of ethics or of (what its writer calls) “medicine” ; or of both ethics and medicine, for without a doubt it signifies a decay. A profession such as “medicine,” which deals with the human ultimates of birth, marriage, and death, has an ethical import which might well exercise the genius of a modern Thomas Browne. We must not be taken to indulge in personalities but rather to criticize a state of things and a state of learning if we look upon this work of an Edinburgh Lecturer on Medical Jurisprudence as a pathological specimen which we must patiently diagnose and treat.It is the sub-title that reveals the unhealthy state of things. The book is entitled Medical Conduct and Practice. This is a sufficiently general title to cover the contents of the book ; and to allow the author to give shrewd advice to his Scottish medical readers on “how to get on in the world.”But this non-committal title has the sub-title “A Guide to the Ethics of Medicine.” To most of us whom a University has befriended in youth, the word Ethics recalls that highest branch of Philosophy which the Greeks elaborated in order to endow Christian thought. We recall the Ethics of Aristotle, with many regrets that the true wisdom of that book is now a quarry for the philologist rather than for the philosopher. But the word Ethics stirs up such deep emotions in our heart that we are at expectation’s end to see what will be said of it by a modern brother of him who wrote Religio Medici, and especially by one of those accepted few who have sitten in the chair of Medicine near Arthur’s Seat.
Some Bygone Politics
Authors: Brennell Dorothea E. 
Published: July 2007

Two notable centenaries fall in the present year. On August 6th, 1221, passed to his reward Dominic Guzman. Almost exactly one hundred years later, in July or September, 1321, the world’s greatest poet since ancient times left a world which had treated him hardly in order to make trial of the justice of a world he had hymned in almost inspired numbers.Perhaps to a Catholic it is not fanciful to trace a connection between the two, yet few indeed outside the Church consider what the poet owed to the famigliar di Christo and his sons, whose praises are written in the greatest of his works. Dante Aligheri was born in 1265 ; he was a child of nine when Thomas Aquinas died, a boy of fifteen when the Doctor Universal, Albertus Magnus, passed to join his great pupil. His days were passed in wild times. The year of his birth saw the long strife in England between king and baronage culminate in the battle of Evesham, saw Manfred, king of Naples and Sicily, defeated and slain by Charles of Anjou. He was seventeen years old when the bad blood between Frenchman and Neapolitan found outlet in the Sicilian Vespers and the weary reign of anarchy which followed. In 1310, he saw the suppression of the Order of Knights Templars (so typical a product of the age of faith and chivalry), and in the prime of his years he lived amid the wars and rumours of wars, the intrigues, the treacheries in which his native Florence was involved, the long-drawn-out strife of Guelph and Ghibelline.On all sides the old order was passing and many of the mediæval theories becoming empty of meaning. The glory which had surrounded the Holy Roman Empire seemed waning, while powerful nation-states arose to dispute its supremacy.
Economics for Christians
Authors: Clayton Joseph 
Published: July 2007

By Economics we mean the conclusions arrived at by man in his study of the production and distribution of material wealth.These conclusions are often called, with much solemnity, “laws” ; and if by “law” is meant something that has been observed to happen every time a certain set of conditions are present the word may pass.For instance, the economic “law of diminishing returns” is the simple conclusion that there is a limit to the amount of labour that may be applied profitably to any given area. Half an hour spent daily on the plants in flower-pots or window-boxes should produce a profitable return, and another quarter of an hour may produce an increased return. But two hours would bring a diminishing return, that is, something certainly less than four times the good result of the half-hour’s attention. So with an allotment. Double crops may be obtained by the additional labour of a second person, but six people working on the same allotment will not produce six times as much harvest. A point is always reached by the “law of diminishing returns” when no more labour can be expended profitably on any given piece of work.
The Doctrinal Witness of the Fourth Gospel
Authors: McNabb Vincent 
Published: July 2007

The recent Conference of Church of England Modernists has drawn attention to the Fourth Gospel. In calling it the Fourth Gospel we are not minded to deny that it is the Gospel of St. John, the beloved disciple. Indeed, we should be doing violence to our reason, or our reasons, if we did otherwise than believe it to be the eye-witness and ear-witness of him who leaned on the bosom of the Master. But our chief aim is to denote the historic value of this Gospel which, if it is not the eye-witness of the last years of Jesus was assuredly the eye-witness of the first years of His Church. In both cases it is of supreme value as a witness to that consciousness which has been the unique claim of the Catholic Church.Two preliminaries will clear a way to the centre of our thesis.The Fourth Gospel is a product of Eastern, not Western Christianity. It is a delicate point of history to decide whether it came from Jerusalem or from Ephesus. In either case its witness to the historic development of the Church can hardly be overrated. If it sprang from Ephesus, it arose out of a Christian consciousness which was definitely the work of St. Paul. If it sprang from Jerusalem, it arose from a Christian consciousness which, at the time of writing, owed little or nothing to St. Peter.The oral instruction which Jesus had given His apostles had its limitations ; although it may well be doubted whether it had the limitations of written instruction. It is clear that human intelligences could not retain in a state of active consciousness all the sayings and doings of some three years, so filled with activity as to leave little time even for foodtaking.
Bishop Gore and the Anglican Modernists
Authors: Reeves J. B. 
Published: July 2007

The Cambridge Conference has created a new crisis in the Church of England. Bishop Gore has publicly complained that a large and important and learned body of men, many of them officials in that Church, hold views which are fundamentally subversive of the whole fabric of Christian belief. To those of the “Catholic party” who ask him what is to be done in this emergency, he confesses he has no short and easy answer to give, but he makes a few suggestions.These suggestions resolve themselves into a strong argument against defections to the Church of Rome. Dr. Gore declares himself incapable of being a Roman Catholic, on the grounds of his certainty that the Roman Catholic Church requires of its members adhesion to propositions which are unauthorized, untrue, and unhistorical.It is impossible not to feel for Dr. Gore some of that enthusiastic admiration which his hearers testified on the occasion of this declaration. He is consistent, loyal, and sincere. Though his loyalty is to principles which are not ours, and his consistency achieved by a logic from which we dissent, we cannot, and we would not, refuse him the honour due to his intelligence, his integrity, and his unflinching courage.
“Novelty”
Authors: Walker Leslie J. 
Published: July 2007

It is a custom with that venerable institution, the Aristotelian Society, to elect each year a new President whose duty it is to open proceedings with a Presidential Address. Dr. F. C. S. Schiller, our President for this year, chose as his subject “Novelty,” and endeavoured to prove first and foremost that novelty exists, “or rather occurs.” One wonders whether this was quite necessary, novelty is so very obvious everywhere. But we suppose that it must have been ; and there are at any rate people, known as Eleatics, who are supposed to have denied its existence, though illustrating it by their own. In any case, Dr. Schiller did prove it; if in no other way, by the very fact that a President of the venerable Aristotelian Society should have talked to us about milliners and tailors and the fashion of dressing one’s hair.He was not quite so successful, however, it seems to me, in establishing his second point, namely, that hatred of novelty exists and is man’s normal attitude. Our President, at any rate, is an exception here again ; and in his philosophic studies has nobly resisted the “inertia, laziness, custom, timidity, stupidity, the whole brood of Habit and Ignorance” which “combine their forces to repulse the new.” He admits that there are exceptions, however ; and mentions as instances the love of novelty in fashion, and the craving for news. Science also has “looked with favour upon novelty in the last century or two.” But this is not enough. Science has not only favoured novelty in the last century or two : it lives upon novelty and always has done so.
The Psychology of Conversion
Authors: Folghera J. D. 
Published: July 2007

I have just been reading—rather late in the day—A Spiritual Æneid, a fascinating book ‘in which Father Ronald Knox tells the story of his conversion from Anglicanism to the Catholic faith. To me these accounts of conversion are always interesting, whether they relate the process that led the convert from unbelief to belief or whether they describe that other style of conversion, I mean that awakening from a dead faith and no works to a keen and enthusiastic practice of the virtue of religion.But although conversions do not fascinate everyone, few who notice them can remain indifferent. The strongest emotions are aroused, anger and repulsion, wonder and scepticism. It sometimes happens that the witness of a conversion is moved to “go and do likewise.” That is to say conversion can become a motive of credibility, a reason for believing. Yet it is curious to notice that, if we except some very recent books, conversion has never before been reckoned among those facta divina of secondary value which, like prophecy and miracles, are the external motives for our accepting revelation as from God.
Charles Dickens and Catholicism
Authors: Clayton Joseph 
Published: July 2007

Charles Dickens must be seen clearly as a representative Englishman, a spokesman of the so largely inarticulate English people, discerned towering above contemporaries as Sir Thomas More or Doctor Johnson is discerned. How, otherwise, can we explain the hatred of Dickens for Puritanism, and his distrust of all professions of Protestantism?The immediate recognition of his genius is evidence that Dickens’s standpoint was understood and approved by the mass of his fellow-countrymen, and this standpoint is very definitely Christian. Of all our great novelists none is more definitely Christian.Throughout his writings Dickens insists on the fundamental beliefs of Christendom. That God rules and orders the whole universe ; that mankind has an Eternal Father, and a Divine Redeemer and Saviour, His Son—these are facts that Dickens takes for granted in all his books. With all his zest for social reforms Dickens never assumes, after the fashion of certain of our latter-day novelists, that God being absent from the universe it is the business of the writer of popular fiction to order a new heaven and a new earth and prescribe a new religion for the children of men.
Cross versus Crescent in Albania
Authors: Christitch E. 
Published: July 2007

To-day when, encouraged by the ostensible causes of and excuses for the Great War, the oppressed of centuries raise their heads, it behoves Catholics to look around and abroad, noting how fare their brethren in various parts of the globe. Troubles in foreign as well as adjacent lands are too often dismissed with the comfortable assurance that “these people are always fighting among themselves.” If enquiry reveals that grave wrongs are perpetrated with impunity, but also that interference entails risk of financial loss in great commercial transactions, the subject is laid aside and attention directed elsewhere. Thus only can be explained the indifference of Christian communities who equip missions for the Far East, to the desperate plight of Christians close at hand struggling for the right to live under the powerful pressure of ever-triumphant Mohammed.Constantinople is popularly supposed to be the last stronghold of the Turk in Europe. In reality he is ensconced nearer home amid the impregnable fastnesses of Albania, whence he harries the Christians within reach, imposing his will on these fated slaves who still resist the shining lure of the Crescent. Among the recalcitrants are the Miridite, Malissori, and other Catholic tribes who mistakenly took it for granted that Turkey shared the defeat of her allies in the late war, and that they need no longer submit to the rule of Mohammed but could govern themselves on Christian lines.
Roman Tourists
Authors: Steuart Francis A. 
Published: July 2007

“All roads lead to Rome,” and all these roads x \ bring tourists and pilgrims. The latter are the more interesting of the two classes although both are very often intermixed. The pilgrim, whether he is a religious pilgrim or an antiquarian one, at least knows what he ought to see, or wants to see, but the tourist merely sees sights that are there, those that come in his way, or are thrust upon him. Hence one gets priceless questions addressed generally to hotel concierges or guides. The writer himself heard an anxious American ask: “I say, can you tell me if there is anything to see in Rome?”And for this class is there? They come without any interest or knowledge, and wonder what Roman history was all about. Did not (according to the legend) another American drive to Cook’s Tourist Office in the Piazza d’Espagna and demand a guide to show him “all Rome.” “How long are you going to stay?” asked the wily official. “Well, I guess about an hour and a half.” The official said this was insufficient for all Rome, but, as a carriage was on the spot, their guide could give the tourist the opportunity of a hasty visit to St. Peter’s, and to the Coliseum. Having driven off, they stopped at the latter. “Well,” said the American looking up at the ruin, “Which is this?”
Some French Books of 1921
Authors: Randall A. W. G. 
Published: July 2007

The experience of the Great War seems so far to have left little mark on French literature, and the reader of current French novels, poetry and drama will often find himself wondering what the cause of this may be. He will discover in French political and social life enough evidence of the fact that France in the last seven years passed through a terrible war and emerged devastated, robbed of hundreds of thousands of her sons, but unbroken and proud. In literature, however, so the observer will often think to himself, all this appears to have changed nothing. On the stage, in fiction and poetry, we might be in 1914, before the shadow of the disaster was to be seen or thought of. England, Italy, Germany even, have, in their imaginative and intellectual life, ‘reacted’ more thoroughly to the war than has France, most terribly stricken of them all.Without criticising this ‘stationary’ character of contemporary French literature or in any way assuming that it will be permanent, we can readily find a reason for it. More than any other of the belligerents France lost her young intellectuals in the great struggle. The men through whom she speaks to-day, in her art and literature, are very often those who were accepted classics already in 1914, incapable of radical change or departure from the style they have made their own. The young writers who should now be writing alongside of them, and eventually succeed them, are dead.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Authors: Burdett Osbert 
Published: July 2007

The art of Hawthorne is the most beautiful thing; that has come out of America. Perhaps its fantastic quality of imagination, in which beauty kindles from word to word as colour will in tapestry or in the red glow against the dun background of a Yanina embroidery, picked out here and there with fragmentary touches of gold thread, is due to the fact that his sense of beauty was a changeling and had no father in American soil. His subject is the Puritan conscience, whose fine and rigid quality was reflected in a stern law, the first refuge of frigid men who had entered a strange continent with all the forces of nature arrayed against them. Transplanted into a soil unprepared for them, the pioneers, who had revolted from their original home, identified their foes without with their foes within, so that nature everywhere became the enemy, and life itself sinful. To have been born at all was the first sin to these Puritans,—who suffered from the most dreadful of all human superstitions, expiated by sacrifice. To them repentance meant wearing sackcloth and ashes. But there is an old word not open to this confusion, the word resipiscence. It means, as repentance should be held to mean, change to a better frame of mind. This they neglected. The means were confused with the end; punishment was enjoyed for its own sake, and suffering became a man-eating idol after the manner of Moloch.What, then, could a sensitive and imaginative descendant of these Puritans do but play around the border of forbidden things,
George Herbert
Authors: Makepeace John Foster 
Published: July 2007

The first, that with any effectual success attempted a diversion of this foul and overflowing stream,’ wrote Henry Vaughan in the preface to Silex Scintillans, ‘was the blessed man, Mr. George Herbert, whose holy life and verse . . . gave the first check to a most flourishing and admired Wit of his time.’ Perhaps this attempt to divert the ‘foul stream’ and check an ‘admired Wit of his time’ may explain why, as he tells us, he at first ‘sought out quaint words and trim invention, curling with metaphors a plain intention/ since in the Sonnet sent to his mother as a New Year’s gift from Cambridge in 1608, he asks :My God, where is that ancient heat towards thee?… Doth poetrieWear Venus’ Kverie? onely serve her turn?Why are not sonnets made of thee? and layes Upon thine altar burnt?for undoubtedly some of his poems in their allegorical obscureness and subtlety of expression rival those of the wearers of ‘Venus’ liverie.’ The subtlety, however, Is only in the form in which he has chosen to express familiar religious truths in order to allure those who would be attracted by it.But, indeed, as Vaughan’s words suggest, it was his own ‘holy life’ that was the first and most powerful element in the remarkable influence he exercised over his contemporaries, and it was this that gave meaning and charm to his poetry.His mother, the gracious lady whom Donne regarded with such affectionate admiration and used to address as ‘The Lady Magdalen Herbert, of St. Mary Magdalen,’ was a notable woman in her devotion to the education of her seven sons. Her husband had died when Edward, the eldest, was sixteen years old, and George, the fifth son, was four.
Mr. Belloc on the Jews
Authors: Burdett Osbert 
Published: July 2007

By the time that these lines are in print Mr. Belloc’s latest book will have been reviewed in many papers; and I cannot but fear that, if it is taken as gravely as it deserves, it will provoke impatient comment from both English and Jewish readers. For it has been written deliberately to raise the Jewish question, to make it a conscious issue, and to insist that only by the frank acceptance of this issue on both sides can an impending calamity be forestalled. At the moment, for reasons which Mr. Belloc explains, there is only one section of the community alertly conscious of the Jewish problem, and anxious to raise it, namely the Anti-Semites, who are eager to take the first opportunity of attacking the Jews. The rest of us, including the Jews themselves, do not want the question raised at all, and even deny its existence. They severally declare, or wish it be assumed, that the Jews are not an alien nation, but fellow nationals only differentiated by a religion peculiar to themselves. It would not be surprising therefore if the first effect of the book were to excite an irrational Jewish protest, scepticism and annoyance in the general mass, and among the Anti-Semites embittered disappointment that one as alive to the issue as themselves should yet deliberately dissociate himself from their antagonistic policy. For in matters liable to acute controversy the disinterested seeker after truth and consideration is rarely welcomed.Mr. Belloc is not an Anti-Semite.