bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Half Truths
Authors: Blundell Margaret 
Published: July 2007

On the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of Charles II there appeared in The Times a most interesting article on that monarch and his time by Keith Feiling. The typically English attitude of mind towards the history of that reign expressed in its lines must, however, have roused the attention of Catholic readers, especially his allusion to ‘the half truths of which Oates got hold.’It is matter for conjecture how many of his non-Catholic readers were aware of the whole truth where it touches Titus Oates and the malignant story of his career. To be sure, no historian defends the man who, according to Macaulay, was ‘the founder of the school of false witnesses.’ Every Englishman has learned at school that Titus Oates was a miscreant of the most evil and mischievous genius; that the men who were condemned to death on the strength of his false accusation were innocent victims of a politically engineered plot which had as its background the end of frustrating the Catholic succession to the throne. The end, in the mind of the average protestant Englishman, was laudable, although it did not justify the means adopted by the Government in this case.
An Englishwoman Prisoner in Afghanistan
Authors: Bordeaux Paule Henry 
Published: July 2007

On the 23rd of August of last year Afghanistan celebrated, as usual, the anniversary of her independence by brilliant festivities in the suburbs of Kabul. L’Illustration reproduced a photograph, brought by air, of the new Sovereign, the Emir Habib-Ullah, dressed in national costume and surrounded by members of his government.Exactly eighty-six years before, the same Review had reproduced on its first page the portrait of an Englishwoman who had witnessed the barbarous revolt at Kabul and who had been imprisoned by Akbar-Khan for many long months.Time rolls on, and history repeats itself. To-day, as yesterday, Afghanistan stands out as the country pre-eminently noted for riots and civil wars. Hardly are the last speeches ended, the last dances over than the news of the march on Kabul led by the rebel general Nadir-Khan, and the probable assassination of Habib-Ullah is blazoned abroad.
The Wisdom of Saint Thomas
Authors: Pope Hugh 
Published: July 2007

‘Where is Wisdom to be found, and where is the place of understanding? The abyss saith, it is not in me; the sea saith, it is not with me. God understandeth the way of it, and He knoweth the place thereof.’—Job xxviii.Those who are familiar with St. Thomas’s Proemium to his Summa contra Gentiles will recall his words on the meaning of true Wisdom. ‘Sapientis est ordinare,’ he says, ‘it is a wise man’s business to deal with things in orderly fashion, and since the goal or end we have in view must govern our procedure, and since the supreme goal for us all must be the Divine Truth, the study of it should be the one preoccupation of the wise man.’ That is Theology, or the study of God. Now God is made known to us in nature, and the true scientist is he who endeavours to arrive at a knowledge of the Creator through His creation. But besides the Book of Nature there is also the Book wherein God has spoken to us and shewn us the path to heaven, in which He has ‘set before us life and death.’ This is His Revelation, the theologian’s quarry, the true source of his wisdom. Hence the words above quoted from Job are with peculiar appositeness used by the Church in the Breviary Office for the Feast of St. Jerome, the ‘Doctor maximus’ whose entire life was spent in toiling in that quarry.
When the Market Goes Home
Authors: Balfour M. C. 
Published: July 2007

It has been market-day across the water, and the market-folk are on their way home and bringing as it were, the market with them.The boats are coming back from the other side of the bay heaped with empty baskets and with others still full of unsold goods, and crowded with servants and housewives and peasants squeezed together in a seething, bubbling mass, like sheep in a pen to whom have been given of a sudden the voice of jays. The noise is indescribable; quarrelling, arguing, shouting, laughing, with live ducks cackling and hens flapping their wings, with the thud and rattle of the wheezy engines, the splash of the paddles, and the shouting of porters and omnibus drivers on the quay :‘Matignon et Saint-Cast, à vot' plaisir . . . .’Plancoët, Plancoët, ‘ssieurs et dames . . . .’‘ A ... . domicile, à ... . domicile!’‘Commissionaire, ‘ssionaire . . . .’—such a hurly-burly as surely only French lungs can produce.Up the hill they come in an unending procession, huge hooded omnibuses that are evidently the direct offspring of the old diligences, donkey-carts rattling and important, wagons from the country with jingling bell-hung harness on the big horses that stamp and stumble on the uneven cobbles. They are filled—and over-filled—with peasants on their way to far-off villages, or ‘getting a lift’ to nearer ones, with men in blouses, women in gay shawls and linen coiffes, who sit on the shafts, on the sides, who crowd the seats of perch insecurely on the piles of empty baskets.
The New Settlers
Authors: Jebb Reginald 
Published: July 2007

There exists in England at the present time a state of affairs which seems to me to call for the close attention of all Catholics.It is a commonplace to decry the faults of one’s own time. Everyone is in some degree a laudator temporis acti; and hope causes most men to look to the future for remedy of present ills. Yet, when due account has been taken of this human tendency, England today does present to the most casual observer some terribly alarming symptoms. Such things as the vast disorganisation of labour, the growing inability of the Government to find money for the payment of their colossal liabilities, the complete failure of compulsory State education to produce any sort of useful result, the despairing abandonment of the land are evident for all to see.
Religious Obedience
Authors: McNabb Vincent 
Published: July 2007

Non semper aliquis obedit legi ex bonitate perfectae virtutis;sed quandoque ex timore poenae; quandoque autem ex solo dictamine rationis quod est quoddam principium virtutis (ia 2ae. 92. 1. 2m).It is not always through perfect goodness of virtue that one obeys the law;but sometimes it is through fear of punishment; and sometimes from a mere dictate of reason which is a beginning of virtue.
Mr. J. G. Muddiman on ‘The Bloody Assizes’
Authors: Balfour M. C. 
Published: July 2007

It is not long since a book bearing almost the same title as the one before me now appeared under the aegis of a judge’s name; which, while it set out to give a clear and readable account of the Monmouth rising and its consequences, was a disappointment to the serious student because of its obvious Whig bias and lack of that chief essential of the judicial mind—the sense of balance. Judge Parry, moreover, was content to perpetuate many errors because they fitted in with his own conceptions, and I fear that, backed by the influence of his name and position, they have been strengthened in the mind of the casual reader.The present volume is unlike its predecessor in all but name; the whole aim and intention so different that in a sense the title is misleading. Mr. Muddiman is not really concerned at all with the rising itself, nor does he attempt to give us dramatic sketches of the characters connected with it; we find here no suggestion of the Walking Gentleman, the Low-Comedy Buffoon, or the Comic Villain, no tolerance for Oates or Tutchin, no special tenderness for Dissenters, and above all no bias against ‘Judge’ Jeffreys. Even the standpoint—and the book is written from the Tory standpoint on the whole—is one of reason, moderation, and restraint. In short, it is necessary to realise from the beginning that these pages deal less with opinions than with facts; and that, while Judge Parry aims at giving us his own New of the period and the personalities who played their parts in it, Mr. Muddiman is inquiring into the foundations on which our knowledge of that period and of those personalities is based.
Papal Injunctions
Authors: Clayton Joseph 
Published: July 2007

They belong to history, many papal encyclicals, bulls and briefs; to interpret their meaning, to understand their purpose, and to measure what they accomplished, we must have knowledge of the circumstances that provoked these papal utterances and injunctions.What can we make of Clericis Laicis of Boniface VIII (was it not annulled by Clement V, first of the Avignon popes?); of the Regnans in Excelsis of St. Pius V (judged to be of doubtful expediency by a later pontiff, Urban VIII); of the Unigenitum of Clement XI; the Dominus ac Redemptor of Clement XIV; the Mirari Vos of Gregory XVI—pronouncements all of interest in the history of the papacy and of mankind—unless we know the conditions and occasions? The commentary of the historian is necessary if there is to be profit from the perusal of these important documents. While it may be urged, truthfully enough, that as the judgments of the Holy See on things temporal, all briefs, bulls and encyclicals are to ‘be received with respect; yet without knowledge of the pressure that urged utterance our respect is liable to be without understanding.As with the injunctions of a more remote past, so with the collection of encyclicals recently issued by the Catholic Truth Society annotation is needed, if the reader is to be fully enlightened on the papal teaching of our times. It is even highly probable that the documents may be misinterpreted without adequate guidance. ‘The Bible without note or comment’ was the cry of some of our undenominational educators in the past. Papal encyclicals without note or comment can easily lead the minds of men astray.
A Note on O. Henry
Authors: Carpenter Hilary 
Published: July 2007

Jeff Peters is a lineal descendant of Mrs. Malaprop; his use of words is even more humorously mal à propos. The introduction of malapropisms is a device much favoured, for obvious reasons, by the authors of humorous literature, and in skilful hands it can result in a high form of wit. In creating Jeff Peters, O. Henry, for example, surpassed Sheridan himself and gave us an even finer subtlety of wit.It is to be noted, in passing, that when a malapropism is not obvious, it fails to be funny; it fails even to be remarked as a misuse and tends to become accepted in its erroneous or distorted sense. If a panegyrist is reported to have ‘larded his subject with a nice derangement of epitaphs,’ the substitution of words of common speech similar in sound but not in sense is sufficiently obvious to be amusing. But when the substitution is not recognized, ignorance eliminates the sense of the ridiculous. We are not, in short, amused. Thus it is not everyone who will appreciate the humour of ‘fussily decency averni.’It is curious to remark how frequently a sense of humour, and from another point of view even an appreciation of wit, is the result of a rather snobbish sense of superiority. When a man slips on a banana skin, the cream of the joke goes to his fellow-man who has not slipped but remains proudly upright. A sense of superiority, physical or mental, is a normal condition in the appreciation of humour.
The Crying Need
Authors: Jebb Reginald 
Published: July 2007

The truth of the crisis upon which England is entering is becoming clear to a growing number of people. In that fact lies the hope of her ultimate regeneration.Let us summarize the position.A little more than a century and a half ago, England —or rather her governing classes—plumped for industrialism. That is to say they deliberately set themselves to destroy what was then in the main a land of peasants, owning and cultivating their patches of land and sharing the advantages of the commons, and to convert it into a commercial unit based upon factories and overseas trade. The immediate pecuniary advantages to a limited, number of people were striking. We had a start of the world, and our expanding dominions provided us with an abundance of markets. The richness of the land itself in coal and iron ore accelerated the success of the experiment. The English developed a machine-sense and a money-mind, and the gradual disappearance of her agriculture was compensated for by the large profits made (by the controlling minority) from the sale of manufactured goods. Banks and a huge system of credit grew apace; for they were the life-blood of the new enterprise. The directness of local production of food and clothing for local consumption and use gave way to the dazzling indirectness of a network of exchanges, in which each mesh of the net gave opportunity to the manipulator to squeeze out his little bit of usury. We became the carrying and banking centre of the world.
The Open Road Again
Authors: Preedy John 
Published: July 2007

James’s solitary horseman could walk his horse up to a signpost, and duly following the directions, come upon a village, The clang of hammer upon anvil would lead him to the forge, and the hanging sign of an inn would swing its invitation to him. Should he want squire or parson or cornchandler, there was the local inhabitant fearlessly walking his own village street to tell where they were to be found.Perhaps it may be an idle and retrogressive sentiment that makes one regret the day when sign-board and signpost met the needs of commerce and transport. The motor and the general speeding up of life have changed all that, and it seems as if a stark ugliness is to be an unavoidable adjunct to life as it is rushed nowadays.
Some Wills of Penal Times
Authors: Pope Hugh 
Published: July 2007

How did our Catholic forefathers live in penal days? Was life an unceasing nightmare? Was every other man they met a Topcliff? After the death of Elizabeth it would seem that persecution went by fits and starts. The protracted negotiations for the Spanish marriage, from 1617 to 1623, meant a decided lull in active measures against recusants, though when those negotiations were broken off there was a recrudescence of brutality. It was the same after the ill-fated rebellion of 1715, and a milder outbreak recurred in the Lord George Gordon riots. But such happenings tell us little of the ordinary life of Catholics at the time when persecution was not active.A great deal of material is at hand now in the publications of the Catholic Record Society, also in several volumes brought out by Mr. John Orlebar Payne. As we peruse these records many curious facts emerge. Apostasies were, of course, numerous. This was inevitable when life became more and more burdensome day by day. Still it is sad to read that whereas in the year 1750 the Catholic congregation at Upton in Berkshire totalled ninety-eight exclusive of the members of the principal family there—Perkins— ‘it is curious to notice how many of the families whose names are there given still exist in the neighbourhood, although there is not now a single Catholic among them.’ The sequestration of estates was hard to bear and there is pathos in the will of John Purcell, of the Hays in Shropshire, who in 1729 said : ‘My will and desire is that the penal statutes be never taken against my mother or any of my brothers and sisters except my brother-in-law Thomas Penson so long, that is, as they do not seek to secure more than the annuities allowed them.’
Park
Authors: Gray John 
Published: July 2007

Mungo Park walked on in the belief, absurd as he knew it to be, that he had died. There are catastrophes (so he assured himself) where the victim need not add to his perplexity the pain of suspending his judgment. And this hypothesis was some relief to him here and now—if, as in his anguish he thought, it is here and now. He dismissed as impertinent his own critical question : when did it happen and where and how?One thing at a time, he answered himself. For he wanted no more than a mind sufficiently at ease to draw inferences from the evidence of his bewildered senses. He did not deny that he felt well. All his reactions were perfect; he had no physical pain; his breathing was right; there was not the least irritation on any part of his skin; no blister, fly-bite, soreness; his clothes, hat, boots seemed ideally part of himself. His stick hung on his wrist; he could hear his watch ticking; he .verified, by touching the places, that his many pockets held their expected contents.
From Roscoff to the ‘Pardon’ of Lambader
Authors: Eden Helen Parry 
Published: July 2007

There are several reasons why one should visit Roscoff, apart from the good and sufficient reason —for those who like to take their travelling individually—that nowadays one rarely does. I doubt if the real Brittany—the Bretagne bretonnante of speech, clothing and song—is anywhere less sophisticated; while for an Englishwoman who is one-half Welsh, Roscoff has old affinities, historical and domestic, romantic and homely, but all harmonious and affectionate.A small granite fishing-haven on the northerly seaboard of Finistere, Roscoff owes the fig-trees and magnolias of its walled gardens to the Isle de Batz, some three miles of rocky island, surmounted by a tall white lighthouse, which lies couchant across the entrance to Roscoff’s almost landlocked harbour. Only a mile or so of channel intervenes between Batz and the mainland; and you can sail across, if you will, and see the island’s only treasure—the stole of St. Pol-de-Leon laid carefully by since the sixth century. It is said to be a Byzantine stole of blue silk tissue, cheerfully embroidered with huntsmen, dogs, horses and falcons; and its accredited owner, St. Pol, was one of those genuine but legend-bedizened evangelists between Wales (or Cornwall) and Armorica, whose antecedents and exploits were (as I have been informed and believe) the bane of the learned compilers of the Dictionary of National Biography. Being entirely incompetent to sift the views of the D.N.B., of the Bollandists, and of the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould, all of whom have lavished themselves with different results on St. Pol, I will only submit that Paulus Aurelianus of Pen hoen in Glamorganshire (or Cornwall) seems to have fled from the onus and honor of a British bishopric, only to be tricked (by a sealed letter borne by himself) into accepting a French one.
The Obsolescent Parrot
Authors: Gilby Thomas 
Published: July 2007

Many of the manifestations of the counter Reformation, or rather of its backwash, are becoming almost unpopular, even among Catholics. Rococo was the first to suffer, and Baroque. Then florid counterpoint. Then some of its devotional forms and religious methods, institutions, and thought. Many expressions of the Catholic reaction do not belong merely to the period. Michael Angelo, Palestrina, and the Jesuits, for instance, if not immune from criticism, are anyhow great enough to defy it. There is now an attack on a common catechetical method which dates from the sixteenth century.In a recent book, Père Tahon, a Scheut missionary in the Philippines and an educational expert, has marshalled the evidence to show that what he aptly calls psittacism, or the system of imposing a bare summary of Christian doctrine on the memory of the child without previous understanding, is Protestant in origin, is not authentically Catholic, exists in the Church as an abuse, and is, besides, contrary to the principles of pedagogical psychology.The apostolic method of teaching beginners consisted in first presenting the facts of sacred history, and then drawing out from them the doctrinal elements of religion. This narrative method was continued by the Fathers, was formulated by St. Augustine (de Catechizandis Rudibus) precisely as the best way of instructing the ignorant, and became traditional in the Church, until it was largely displaced by a new catechetical method deriving from the polemics of the Reformation.
A Chair of The Philosophy of History
Authors: McNabb Vincent 
Published: July 2007

It was a widow’s worm-eaten, tottering chair. And it was set up in a basement in N.W.3. In saying this I have unveiled the mystery lying behind what once I wrote under the title—her title, T00 Much for One. For that undying story which, thank God, I had the wit to write, had been written post haste after the widow R-----, R.I.P., had trudged from her basement to tell me of my mistake in giving her as a Christmas dinner what was ‘too much for one.’My readers will remember how in that quivering phrase from the bowed, half-blind, four-score year widow I had seen more political and economic wisdom than was being vouchsafed by any university, or avouched by any Government Report. Moreover, when I recalled how high finance and big business were based on the horse-leech cry, ‘it is never enough,’ I saw, and perhaps said that England’s Saviour, if ever found, would be found not in a bank or in a manager’s office, but in a hut or in a basement.As I honoured myself and my priestly profession by burying the widow R-----in Kensal Green some twelve months ago, I will set down some of the notes I wrote after having speech with her one afternoon in the half-light of her cave-dwelling.To-day, August 6th, 1927, Widow R-----gave me a complete dramatic Philosophy of History. In other words she showed me the right way of looking at things that happen, and even of things that seem to happen wrong.
Towards Canterbury
Authors: Preedy John 
Published: July 2007

While a torrid August shrivels up the pleasant green earth, the minds of many Englishmen turn hopefully towards Canterbury. I do not mean that the whole Ecclesia Anglicana in The Church Times sense suddenly feels grateful, obedient, or even reverential in relation to hallowed Canterbury. I do not imagine that this Ecclesia Anglicana waits with more assurance in August than at any other time for a voice of authority to speak out of Canterbury. Nor do I refer in such general terms to the devout few Catholics of the Guild of Our Lady of Ransom, who still go thither yearly, ‘the hooly blisful martir for to seke,’ making their pilgrimage as did their forefathers in the days of Chaucer, ‘from every shiris ende of Engelonde.’ If the average Englishman were heard to say something like this : ‘Last yean I had to miss my first Canterbury festival since I was ten,’ his hearers would more naturally assume that it was cricket rather than the blissful martyr that drew him to Canterbury with yearly regularity.It was about nine o’clock in the morning of such an August day, when the morning sun gave promise of taking up the baking qualities of the sweltering night it came on to relieve, that I stood in the market square of Bromley, some ten or twelve miles out of London. We had made up a little party, the Lumboroughs and I, to go dowrn to Canterbury by motor-coach. We had been assured that, in the words of the agent, the party would be ‘very select.’ The Franklins and Dr. Smiths had already booked seats. So at the appointed hour we took possession, noting that our fellow travellers seemed a very ‘decent’ crowd.