bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Song of Deborah
Authors: Walker Luke 
Published: July 2007

The Song of Deborah is, then, commonly judged —and on good grounds—to be contemporary with the event which it celebrates. At moments of intense feeling, poetry not too burdened by rules, far from being an artificial, is, on the contrary, a most natural form of expression ; certainly at such times it comes readily to the lips of spontaneous peoples such as the Semites. As the occasion, so is the form ; David’s grief, for example, over the death of Saul and Jonathan produces his poetical lament as given in 2 Samuel 1. 19 ff. A most interesting parallel to the occasion and form of the Song of Deborah is provided by an incident which occurred only some thirty years ago at Madaba, a village a few miles east of the Dead Sea. The Arab tribe of the ‘Azeizât which had settled at Madaba was attacked by another Arab tribe, the Beni Sakher. The ‘Azeizât had hardly succeeded in repelling the attack before their women had composed odes to honour those who had braved, and to stigmatize those who had shirked, the perils of the fight.It is something of that kind that we have here. It is not an epic poem depicting the exploits of bygone heroes, nor simply a song of thanksgiving for some former striking divine intervention. The poet praises and blames, blesses and curses, and he does so because the objects of his blessings and of his cursings are there before him acting on him ; he sings because he must.
The Lambeth Conference
Authors: McNabb Vincent 
Published: July 2007

Throughout the month of July, and until August 8th, the Bishops in communion with the Sees of Canterbury and York will sit in conference at Lambeth. The War which has given the English-speaking peoples, for good or evil, a paramount influence in international politics will therefore add a more than transient spiritual weight to a conference of Bishops discussing world problems in the English tongue.Even without the gravity which comes to it from the world’s greatest war this Lambeth Conference has a significance almost unique. It is no mere local council. Its Bishops are from all parts of the world. His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury in asking Dr. F. B. Meyer, the President of the Free Church Council, for the prayers and sympathy of the Free Churches, could say :“The Lambeth Conference will, so far as we can at present tell, include 107 Bishops from the Dioceses in the Dominions, and the Mission Field, 72 Bishops from the United States of America and about 100 Bishops whose work lies in the British Isles.”
The Stations of the Cross
Authors: Gill Eric 
Published: July 2007

A good deal of misunderstanding appears to exist upon the subject of the Stations of the Cross in Westminster Cathedral, and there is danger that works which should be regarded simply as a necessary part of the furniture of the Cathedral Church—a via dolorosa by which the devout person retraces in spirit the holy procession to Calvary—should become not a means to devotion so much as an occasion for idle sightseeing. It would be deplorable if it became the custom in the Cathedral to “make” the Stations in a spirit similar to that in which a person from the country goes round Westminster Abbey ; and that such a possibility may be obviated I offer the following suggestions.First, then, let us dispose of the vexed question of style. The Westminster Stations are not carved in imitation of a bygone style—Byzantine or any other. Let the would-be worshipper put any such idea resolutely away from him. A visitor in the house of a friend, being invited to sit down, does not approach the proffered chair in the state of mind of a connoisseur at a sale. Neither should a worshipper entering a church think it “up to him” to feel critical.
In “The Garden of Allah”
Authors: Bateman May 
Published: July 2007

A fine book, but a still finer play. That, I think, . will be the final judgment of those who know both intimately.For drama—if it be real drama—does, after all, reveal what the printed word does not. It gets home to the heart in a lightning flash. At the play, the audience is tense and concentrated in a moment of great emotion. There is no likelihood of such interruption as disturbs us, more often than not, by some fantastic freak of nature, when we near the climax of a book. We are gripped, hypnotized almost, by the actor’s art. The actual intonation of the spoken word, the dumb appeal of stricken human figures, only a few feet distant, move us more nearly than the vision of suffering evoked but for the few out of mere letterpress. Theatrical effects are broader, cruder, made by a terser medium. When poignant, as in the case of The Garden of Allah, they are unforgettable.
A Plea for Medieval Studies
Authors: Dwyer J. J. 
Published: July 2007

One would think that it was unnecessary to commend the study of history to Catholics, and that they would be quick to recognize the historical action of the Church upon the world of secular society as the chief formative influence in European civilization. Especially interesting would be the study of the “Middle Ages,” as those centuries witnessed some of the most specific developments of essentially Christian ideas.By the Norman Conquest the Church in England was invigorated ; the development of Feudalism was more than counterbalanced by the creation of the system of Law and Administration ; while the conflict between Church and State, which everywhere took place, assumed in England an exceedingly interesting and important form. Nowhere was the idea of Liberty better understood or more strenuously vindicated than by such champions as Becket, Langton and De Montfort. Imagination might sometimes be stimulated by the thought that we ourselves have seen history made, and that the recent startling changes in the map of Europe bring it back again to a strange resemblance of what it was five hundred years ago.
A Note on Cardinal Manning
Authors: Leslie Shane 
Published: July 2007

Mr. Purcell’s Life of Cardinal Manning has so
long held the field and the market that it may be questioned whether it can
be ever supplanted or at most supplemented, for its claim was certainly to
be exclusive and inclusive. A quarter of a century has elapsed since Mr.
Gladstone congratulated the author on writing “the history of a soul, a
dividing of marrow and bone,” and leaving so little for disclosure on the
Day of Judgment. And few critics have questioned the finality of that
utterance.
It is well known that Mr. Purcell differed from most biographers by
committing no sins of omission with the signal exception of an
autobiographical note on the corporate action of the Society of Jesus in
England. Mystery veils this as well as the memory of Mr. Purcell himself. As
an orthodox and humble journalist his name sometimes occurs in the papers of
ecclesiastics. Mr. Purcell had for a time conducted an ultramontane but
unsuccessful venture in journalism, for he later confided to Archbishop
Ullathorne of Birmingham (November 2, 1881), “Since giving up the
Westminster Gazette I have been exclusively
engaged in writing for non-Catholic papers.” His Life of
Manning was presumably written for the same public. By the
year 1887 the Cardinal, being anxious to recoup him for his losses, allowed
him to begin to write a brief Memoir of himself, to be published and
scrutinized in his own lifetime. He lent him one of his diaries on condition
that it should not be quoted, but he had already suggested that Mr. J. E. C.
Bodley should write the final Life, and had given
leave to Mr. Bodley to remove his notebooks and diaries.
What is Happening in Ireland?
Authors: Gwynn Denis 
Published: July 2007

What causes most despair to anyone who tries to persuade people in
England of the real state of affairs in Ireland is the answer that
invariably follows every attempt to overcome a deep-rooted incredulity, that
“we can do nothing until you Irishmen agree among yourselves.” One of the
impressions that affected me most strongly on returning to Ireland after an
absence of four years, was that of a unanimity among all classes such as has
never existed in Ireland before. In a sense, it is the unity that is to be
found among the passengers of a ship which has been set on fire. But the
present unity of political feeling in Ireland is far more deep than any
transient emotion of that kind. It is much more genuine and more remarkable
than was the unity which prevailed in this country during the war. It is no
mere suspension of party strife, but the real and lasting discovery of
common interests and a common outlook upon life.
Go where you please in Ireland, outside the four eastern counties of
Ulster, and you will find only one attitude and one aspiration from Donegal
to Wexford, or from Galway to Dublin. In what follows, I do not speak of
Unionist Ulster. The gulf between the four Unionist counties and the rest of
Ireland is more open and more difficult to bridge over than it has ever
been. Those whose deliberate policy it has been to frustrate the national
movement in Ireland by setting North against South have achieved their
purpose as fully as they could ever have wished.
Plainsong at Quahr Abbey
Authors: Shebbeare Dom Alphege 
Published: July 2007

The strongest human emotion being love, it is not surprising that art
should so commonly have been prompted and sustained by this emotion. And
since the highest love that a creature can receive is that of his Maker for
himself, and the highest he can give is that of himself for his. Maker, it
is not surprising that religion should have inspired and controlled so many
art works.
I am not forgetting the contributions of Paganism. But may it not be
said that they were great in so far as they sprang from the human emotion of
love, or were informed by great ethical ideals and aspirations towards the
worship of an Infinite Being?
In an essay, “Paganism, Old and New,” Francis Thompson shows that the
poetry and beauty of Paganism arise merely from an “idealising
retrospective.” “Pagan Paganism,” he says, “was not poetical . . . the
poetry of Paganism is chiefly a modern creation.” And as to beauty, he says,
“When Heine, addressing the Venus of Melos called her ‘Our Lady of Beauty’
the idea no less than the expression, was centrally modern. I will go
further— it was centrally Christian.”
Concerning Paul Claudel
Authors: Bateman May 
Published: July 2007

We write no longer as we did in pre-war days. We express ourselves more
drastically, go straighter to the point than before. If art has lost
something in the process, truth has, on the whole, gained. Flung in lean
years upon reality, we ourselves nave grown in some ways harder and more
brutal, in others, simpler and more sincere. The moving spirit of the times
has made us impatient of devious ways in life, of compromise. We take short
cuts to our meaning when we have a meaning at all. Weak work, “pretty” work,
mawkish work, is frankly disregarded by all but the most incompetent or
immature critic. The price of paper, the expense of transport and the
increased rates of library subscriptions make us chary of accumulating
purely ephemeral stuff. There is, I suppose, in the hearts of most of us,
some sense of shortened time, of lessened opportunity, to make us
instinctively value what seems powerful and strong in these uncertain hours
which Bolshevism or some other power may lay waste when we know
not.
Writers who once held us through cheap means, or whose work had nothing
to recommend it but some trick of graceful phrasing, have either learned to
think, or dropped out of the widened literary circle altogether, because
they could not meet the demands it made upon them. The writers of the past
who still move us to-day are men who always had something to say that was
worth hearing, and said it with a certain virility and strength.
Christian Socialism
Authors: Clayton Joseph 
Published: July 2007

In this very full and trustworthy account by an Anglican clergyman of
the notable doings of a group of Church of England men in the nineteenth
century two things, in especial, are of interest to Catholics to-day : (i)
The movement called Christian Socialist. (2) The self-governing
workshop.
(1) It was at the time of the first stirrings of the Second Spring in
England—a time when Protestant “society” felt its very foundations shaken by
the conversion of Newman and by “Roman aggression,” and believed all law and
order about to be overturned by revolutionary Chartists—that the Christian
Socialists, whose antecedents may be traced to Carlyle, Coleridge, and
Southey, came to the front. Shocked at the horrors perpetrated on men,
women, and children by triumphant and unrestrained capitalism, at the
sweating, the insanitary dwellings of the poor, at the widespread misery in
a land where vast riches were conspicuous, the Christian Socialists, of whom
F. D. Maurice, Charles Kingsley, and J. M. Ludlow were the chiefs, declared
that the social question must not be left to freethinkers for its solution,
and that the Christian people of God must take their part against “the
unsocial Christians and the unchristian socialists.” The word Socialism has
always been used loosely in this country, and the inability to agree upon a
common and exact definition has provoked a vast amount of irrelevant
controversy.
Euripides and Christianity
Authors: Hill Philip Maurice 
Published: July 2007

The problem of the just pagan has haunted the imagination of Christendom. It troubled Dante. It raises for us the question—What is the relation of all that is noble in the pagan world to the Christian faith? How far was the mind of that world prepared by its past to receive that faith ; how far was that preparative element the outcome of chance or of Divine purpose? And as we regard history in the light of a mere record of human activity or of the unfolding of that purpose, so will our answer be.In the De Civitate Dei, Saint Augustine gathers together the history and the faculties of man and relates them to the Will of God. Eusebius entitled one of his books the Prœparatio Evangelica. Clement of Alexandria wrote in the second century, “To the Jews was given the Law, to the heathens Philosophy, to guide them to Christ.” And later in the same book, “Greek philosophy prepares the soul for receiving faith on which the truth builds knowledge” (). And Augustine himself asserts in his Retractations that “what we now call the Christian religion existed among the ancients and was from the beginning of the human race until Christ Himself came in the flesh ; from which time the already existing true religion began to be styled Christian.”
Dress
Authors: Gill Eric 
Published: July 2007

By the design of Divine Providence vanity has been from the beginning the virtue of male creatures. That he should take a pride in his physical condition and appearance is a necessity of the male, and vanity is designed for his advancement. This fact is sufficiently obvious throughout the whole of the animal creation, and the peacock, though a flagrant exemplar of the principle, is by no means an exceptionally fine bird. On the other hand, we are not aware of the existence of any female creature which so much as vies with her male, and certainly of none that rivals him. And this fact is as remarkable as it is obvious. There is more in it than meets the eye ! Surely it is of Divine origin, and surely a female peacock would be a monstrosity.But however it may be among the animals, among human beings the case is to-day reversed. Drab clothing is so generally the apparel of the male that the vision of the peacock in his finery suggests to us a female thing and, were it not for his name, we should actually suppose him to be a she.
Slave, Serf, Citizen—and the Way Back
Authors: Keable Robert 
Published: July 2007

Mr. G. K. CHESTERTON, in what is really a brilliant essay on the part played by the Church in the history of England, has an illuminating illustration of the influence of Christianity on slavery. He points out that the Church did not agitate for abolition by legislation, but created an atmosphere in which slavery simply could not exist. As for the slave, an interesting process resulted. He had been the stick of his master, to be used for any purpose and broken at will, but under this influence he was first rooted in the ground and became a serf, and then threw out branches upward and roots downward and became a citizen.That atmosphere has taken some time to dissipate. When, in the sixteenth century, the spiritual concept of one Empire under the tutelage of one Church broke down, there emerged from the resulting confusion National States which have increasingly tended to repudiate all direct concern for religion. In the new political entities, the spiritual functions of the Church were first strictly limited but officially recognized ; they have increasingly come to be regarded, however, as in no wise within the sphere of politics. The Catholic Church has long since predicted the result. In our own day we are beginning to see it.
The Meaning of Christianity
Authors: Walker Luke 
Published: July 2007

Changing somewhat the meaning, we may apply to Père Lagrange what St. Paul says of himself: “To the Greeks and to the Barbarians I am a debtor.” In his work Le Sens du Christianisme d'après l'Exégèse Allemande now translated into English under the title The Meaning of Christianity according to Luther and his Followers in Germany, he is concerned to show how the effort to create a distinctively German religion, which should be imposed upon the rest of the world by the ascendancy of the German peoples and of their culture, was doomed to failure ; but at the same time he does not forget to discharge a simple debt of justice.Rome, the heiress of the ancient civilization and the teacher of the Christian faith, he reminds us in his Preface, educated the German barbarians; and Germany brought new forces to Rome. In the great body of Christendom, Germany represented a distinct civilization—distinct, indeed, but one which was not isolated. Even after Luther, Germany, for a long time, seemed as careful to maintain her place in the concert of European nations as she was to show independence of Rome. Even when, at the end of the eighteenth century, she made up her mind to keep more to herself, she yet sheltered her own renaissance under the genius of Shakespeare, and Goethe urged her to draw from Greek sources a sense of proportion and of form, to borrow from the French Theatre its nobility and its beauty.
“End of Europe” Literature
Authors: Randall A. W. G. 
Published: July 2007

Generalization about national or racial characteristics is a dangerous—if, for one’s leisure moments, rather fascinating—game, above all if played with no sense of humour. The Germans and their followers in this and other countries have cultivated the sport to a most tiresome degree. Very systematically and very solemnly they have constructed a marvellously complete index of mental and spiritual characteristics, tabulating opposite each the particular race which, in their opinion, embodies those characteristics. The game then consists in tracing, in the mixture of races inhabiting Europe since history began to be recorded, the proportion of this or that racial element and the precise intellectual, physical, or social characteristic for which it is held to be responsible.It is, of course, far removed from the intention of this essay to assert that there is nothing in anthropology, even in German anthropologists. The question under discussion, which concerns the growth in Europe of our day, above all in Germany, of what may be called an “end of Europe” literature—the reason why this has been introduced with this apparently irrelevant remark is that, in the first place, the methods of the German race-theorists will form a good object-lesson for use later on in this article ; second, because tht writer wished to be above all suspicion in himself making a generalization concerning national characteristics. It is this—and it will be seen that it differs from German race-theories in being based, not on an entirely questionable assumption of racial elements in this or that nation, but on the proved and generally observed practice of representative German historians, philosophers, and scientists.
The Problem of Yugoslavia
Authors: Christitch E. 
Published: July 2007

To free a country is one thing. To consolidate it is another. In some cases the latter task is more difficult. Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, now reunited after centuries of separation, are fusing so violently that intermittent sparks often threaten conflagration. Freedom, and the application of true Liberal principles have put an end to political murders once endemic in the Balkans (we find them nearer home nowadays), but discord and local jealousy prevail. Each branch of the race has found out that the other is far from perfect, and the disappointment is extreme. At first, quarrelling was conducted in best parliamentary style.“You won the war,” said Croat to Serb, with hyperbolic magnanimity. “We cannot forget the tremendous sacrifices you made. You are the first factor in our new State. You have great prestige and honour abroad. You are bound to dominate. There is little regard for us who are shoved altogether in the background.”“Flatterer!” retorted the Serb, disconcerted at having his chief arguments forestalled and finding his merits arrayed against him. “Mine was but the rough work, and now it is your turn to shine. How can an uncouth soldier compete with you in the arts of peace? You are immeasurably beyond us in the higher paths of civilization. Croat savants, artists, scientists are proficient in all we had no time to think about. Why should you dread being swamped by the handful of us extant after the war?”But the exchange of polite, bitter remarks soon gave place to envenomed diatribes, and the order of compliments was reversed. At the present moment opinion is sharply divided on the constitutional form of the new State.
Thoughts on the “Anglo-Catholic” Convention
Authors: Stockley W. F. P. 
Published: July 2007

An “Anglo-Catholic Convention of Priests” has been held this summer at Oxford. Learning and piety, goodwill and good works, enthusiasm not without convenient forgetfulness, together with plenty of dicta, a la Podsnap’s “I don’t admit America,” have there been patent to all respectful observers. Another Anglican Congress of Fellowship was held at the same time in Oxford. Perhaps a third of the Anglicans therein taking part were of the same religion, or religions, as those in the Convention of “Anglo-Catholics.” Those of Fellowship had also their “don’t admit it.” Nor can they be gainsaid, when they declare that “Anglo-Catholicism” is not the Church of England in esse ; nor yet when they maintain that the Reformed Church of England never before Ruled these “Anglo-Catholic Priests,” nor their words, nor their works, nor their ways, until this day and hour.“Let us give a rest to the religion of sacrifice,” seemed to be the dominant note at this Anglican Congress of Fellowship; “let us trust for religious reunion, to goodwill, charity, and philanthropy. Let us not exclude our brethren of the Free Churches, far nearer our faith than are our separated brethren of Rome. Let us take their Protestant orders ; let us exchange orders as equals.”The late Rev. John de Soyres wrote to the present writer as follows : “Of course Pope Leo is quite right; we have no orders in the Roman Catholic sense ; but we are content with our orders as all Protestants understand them.”