bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
‘GLORIOUS WAR’
Authors: Christitch Elizabeth 
Published: July 2007

War has its apologists, defenders, and even glorifiers, however anomalous it may appear, among professed disciples of the Prince of Peace. Dwellers m lands untouched by the scourge have marshalled facts and expounded theories to justify its necessity and desirability. I have heard an armchair critic say that a ‘good war’ from time to time cleared the air, eased economic problems, gave a stimulus to industry, and was a blessing all round ! How far removed from logical Christianity is such a view of men’s relations to each other can be recognised by contrast with the attitude of the Father of Christendom, who never ceased calling on his children during the recent European war to abandon their abominable fratricide and compose their differences by peaceful arbitration. By no force of imagination can we represent the Founder of Christianity Himself as inciting to slaughter; and yet many who call themselves His followers deliberately encouraged revenge, and denied forgiveness to their prostrate enemies.Protagonists of war are now mostly to be found among men who have not encountered it face to face; and again, societies have arisen to prevent its recurrence because it is felt that, while war is an indirect cause of noble and humane actions, it remains nevertheless an evil and a producer of evils. If order is heaven’s first law, then war which means chaos is hellish in nature. The world’s outlook after the recent ‘splendid war,’ which was to end war, does not augur well for future peace;
Where All Roads Lead: II. The Case for Complexity
Authors: Chesterton G. K. 
Published: July 2007

I Began with the power of the Church to grow young suddenly, when she is expected to grow old slowly, and remarked that this power in a creed was one which I could only conceive as thus regularly recurrent under two conditions : first, that it was really true; and second, that the power in it was more than mortal. In the ultimate sense, these are undoubtedly the reasons for what is a revolution that really returns like the revolution of a wheel. But among the secondary and superficial causes of this rejuvenation may be specially noted, I fancy, the very fact of which religious reformers have so constantly complained; I mean the complexity of the creeds. There is a sense in which the Faith is the simplest of religions; but there is another sense in which it really is by far the most complicated. And what I am emphasising here is that, contrary to many modern notions, it owes its victory over modern minds to its complexity and not its simplicity. It owes its most recent revivals to the very fact that it is the one creed that is still not ashamed of being complicated.We have had during the last few centuries a series of extremely simple religions; each indeed trying to be more simple than the last. And the manifest mark of all these simplifications was, not only that they were finally sterile, but that they were very rapidly stale. A man had said the last word about them when he had said the first.
The Voice of the Church in Modern Problems
Authors: Jarrett Bede 
Published: July 2007

The business of the Church in the world is twofold : to teach and to aid. She has to set out the divine truths, issue moral warnings, rebuke and exhort in season and out of season; further, she has the custody of those sacred signs which carry with them the grace of God, and through the communication of which the souls receiving them are enabled to carry out these divine precepts and exhortations. She teaches to the world about her the ideals of Christ, and she gives to the world the power of Christ whereby these ideals can be realised. In short, to use words which have become familiar to this generation, we can say that the Church has to perform the functions both of a priest and a prophet.Now, if in view of these two functions we were to try to judge the Church of our own time in as detached a fashion as we could, we should probably agree that the priestly side of the Church’s office is being performed with a zeal and a response such as no other age of her history can have surpassed. To dogmatise on historical parallels between one age and another would be foolish, because impossible of verification or proof : yet the closest student of history would, I believe, be hard put to discover a period of Christian development when the sacramental system was so much frequented as it is to-day. Merely to consult any of the popular spiritual manuals of the last four centuries and to contrast them with those of to-day is to make one realise the enormous increase of sacramental devotion that has been made in these last years.
Dialogue as a Literary Form
Authors: Cunnington S. 
Published: July 2007

This device, now so nearly obsolete, has in the past been the vehicle of sound knowledge and impassioned thought; but a writer of to-day deliberately hampers his message in employing it. Is it that the construction is discredited through the heavy-handed use of it in pedagogy? It may well be that the union of the pupil’s apt observations and the instructor’s bland copiousness so impregnated the method with tedium that few dare again adventure it.In tracing the history of Dialogue, we find two well-marked streams of development; one in the literature of knowledge and the other in the literature of emotion. It would not be reasonable to recognise its origin in that primitive stage when continuous narrative consisted only in the necessary descriptions, and the story was delivered from the mouths of the characters. We are often reminded of this in the vigorous telling of the Old Testament stories. In the book of Job is the most ancient form of the Dialogue easily accessible to us. There is a prose introduction and a prose conclusion, but the body of the poem is a series of dialogues. Undoubtedly the philosopher-poet utilised an existing epic narrative as the core of his discussion of the problem of evil; and in the dispute between the hero and the subordinate characters is developed a theory of life and conduct. With eastern subtlety, the final conclusion is suggested rather than explicitly stated.In this early example the appeal is to the reason; its intention is to teach, its aim to convince.
The Salvaging of Civilisation
Authors: Huray C. P. 
Published: July 2007

Civilisation is in peril. Press and pulpit proclaim the fact. Politicians make its salvation their appeal to popular suffrage, and communists hail its fall as an unqualified blessing.Of what nature is the menace to civilisation? Politicians call it Bolshevism, and communists call it the Class War. The politician and his party papers see the finger of Bolshevism in Ireland, in the German Reparations difficulty and in every industrial dispute at home and abroad. All labour members of Parliament, all trade unionists, all co-operators, all socialists are Bolshevists and, ipso facto, enemies of the existing order of society. With equal intolerance, communists regard all who compromise with society and its institutions as lacking in class-consciousness and enemies of the proletariat.The communist is a socialist in a hurry, and that is why he has lost all sense of proportion. It is futile, he argues, to suppose that a majority of the people, who could express their will in a constitutional manner, can ever be converted to the principles of communism. A leaven of communists, a coup d’etat, and civilisation will be overthrown. The real work of conversion can then begin. There must be rigorous suppression of all that is antagonistic to the new order of society. Force alone will prevail with the grown-ups, for their mentality has already been warped. They are capitalistically minded, and only the practical demonstration of the superiority of communism will reconcile them to the new order. The children will present no such difficulty.
The Banquet of Dante
Authors: Makepeace John Foster 
Published: July 2007

There may be some readers of the Commedia who are not familiar with the Convivio, or ‘Banquet’ ; the unfinished philosophical commentary on certain of his odes, which Villani called ‘a beautiful, subtle and very great work.’ And yet its medieval lore, its depth of feeling and (for those who read Italian) its wonderful word-music render it as fascinating as the love-story of the Vita Nuova which Rossetti popularised. One may therefore perhaps venture to introduce such readers to its Fourth Book, in which Dante discourses of ‘true nobility.’Its title is Contra gli erranti, ‘Against the erring ones,’ which he takes, he says, ‘from the example of the good brother Thomas of Aquino, who gave to a book which he wrote for the confusion of all who depart from our faith the title Contra Gentili.’ He undertakes a mighty work, grande e alta opera, and one that has rarely been handled by others, viz. to examine what constitutes natural nobility. To understand this potenza di natura is all-important, because our mistakes about it lead to the confusion of moral values in our social estimates.‘There was a certain emperor ‘—he is referring to that brilliant ‘stupor mundi,’ Frederick the Second, Barbarossa’s grandson, whose authority as arbiter of Sicilian taste was as great as his cunning in deceiving the Holy See—’ who was once asked : What is gen-tilezza?’ We English have no word for gentilezza, because we have not enough regard for the quality itsignifies, the quality which is connoted in ‘gentlefolk/ Elsewhere Dante uses the word nobilta, nobleness, as its synonym.
Western Mysticism
Authors: Whitacre ÆLred 
Published: July 2007

Abbot Butler has written an extremely fascinating book on a subject of enthralling interest. The mystical life is the highest of all practical sciences in the sense that of all others, it matters most to a human being on earth. A purely speculative knowledge of God, however profound, is wisdom, but it is not to be compared in this life with love of God, since here below the mind only thinks God, whereas the will goes out to grasp Him. The mind for ever remains within the logical order, but the will whose every act is based on love seeks to get hold of the reality—that is to say, its term or rest is the ontological. In heaven the converse is true as regards the taking hold of God : the will of a truth will attain its supreme satiety in cleaving to God, but it is the mind, first and foremost, that takes hold of God, the will cleaving to the reality made captive by the mind.In the Beatific Vision, we hold as true that which Hegel perversely endeavoured to apply to this world, namely, the identity of the logical and ontological orders. In the Beatific Vision alone are ‘thought’ and ‘thing’ identified; for the ‘thought’ of God in the created mind is the ‘reality’ of God Himself. When Hegel formulated his astounding philosophy, he was unknowingly formulating one of the most profound doctrines of Thomistic theology concerning the Beatific Vision.
Oberammergau and Justification by Faith
Authors: Stockley W. F. P. 
Published: July 2007

‘You must be a believer,’ said an Irish Protestant, ‘to go to Oberammergau.’ Perhaps this good paterfamilias, revealed what the shock of the actualities of Catholicism awoke in him—the sense that he was a vague Theist, or perhaps, as theologians might say, some sort of Monophysite, but that he was disinherited from the Incarnation, and was but confounded, when taken inside the household of faith. All round him in Ireland the faithful lived, bad and good; and had the Faith. But he never went into the only places that best be called churches, nor divined the instinct for reality, the knowledge of the true proportion of things, the supernatural insight, belonging even to the most untried faith.It is, indeed, no light mantle of greatness, worn (thought Dr. Martineau), by even the humblest Catholic, belonging to a religion passing times and lands, in which there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither bond or free, of which kings have been the nursing fathers, and queens the nursing mothers, for which princes have laid down their crowns, and where, daily, wealth hides its pomp under the rough robe of the cloister (that place in which the Christians still have all things in common); the religion that cares not for race, nor language, for feudalism nor revolution; in the sense, that, whatever turns up among‘the rapid, blind,And fleeting generations of mankind,’the Church will be always there, at home under Charles the Great, and in English haphazard colonies, that Church of the French Jesuits,
The Poems of Alice Meynell
Authors: Mary Benvenuta Sister 
Published: July 2007

I imagine that there is hardly a living mortal, be he poet or acknowledged critic, who, called upon for an appreciation of Mrs. Meynell’s poetry, will not approach his task feeling as might a surveyor called in to take the measurements of the Holy of Holies. The everyday reviewer will have the shamefaced consciousness of hobnail boots added to that of the surveyor’s incongruous calling.Mrs. Meynell was undoubtedly one of the greatest poets of an age of great poets. The greatest we may not call her, since some extra merit must be accorded to the difficult achievement of excellence sustained throughout bulky volumes; but making necessary allowance for differing tastes, perhaps it were not too much to call her the most perfect poet of the nineteenth century. What other has so matched the perfect word to the perfect thought? Where else than in the hundred or so brief poems she gave to the world, shall we seek vainly for a commonplace line or phrase, or a word put in merely to fill up the measure of rhyme or rhythm? Had she chosen to put her art before her life, her vocation as poet before her vocation as wife and mother, possibly the inimitable quality of her poetry might not have lost by quantity—wherein, however, such rare excellence as hers is hardly to be looked for, perhaps not even desired. We best appreciate the faultless specimen of some rare flower in its cloistral solitude of the hot-house.
The Mediatorship of the Blessed Virgin
Authors: Mcnabb Vincent 
Published: July 2007

The Decree of the Sacred Congregation of Rites (12th January, 1921) authorising the Office and Mass of our Lady ‘Mediatrix Gratiarum’ (Mediatrix of Graces), has given rise to a theological discussion on the nature of this mediatorship of our Blessed Lady..The most common, and perhaps the most convenient, formula of this mediatorship is :All Graces come through Mary, the MotherThis formula has two meanings. First, all graces come through Mary because Jesus Christ, the Divine Redeemer, came through her. Second, all graces come through Mary because her intercession is now a preliminary of the distribution of all graces. We will discuss these two meanings separately.All Graces come through Mary because Jesus Christy, the Divine Redeemer, came through her.(1) Our Blessed Lady’s greatest title is that given by the Council of Ephesus, namely, θϵoτóκoζ Deipara” Mother of God. For His own inscrutable ends God chose to take flesh miraculously in the virgin womb, arid after the free consent of Mary, the wife of St. Joseph of Nazareth.(2) Our Blessed Lady did not merit as such the Incarnation. St. Thomas says that no one could have merited the Incarnation condignly (ex condigno), ‘yet the holy Fathers merited the Incarnation congruously by desiring and beseeching; for it was becoming (congruum) that God should hearken to those who obeyed Him’ (III Qu. 2, Art. 2, Eng. trans.).
Some French Books of 1922
Authors: Randall A. W. G. 
Published: July 2007

In an article on French literature during 1921, which was published in this review last April, emphasis was laid on what was named the ‘stationary’ character of present-day French literature. The principal cause of this, it was suggested, was to be found in the abnormal loss of her young writers and intellectuals which France suffered in the war. In the course of the past year a change seems to have come about. Without giving any comprehensive account of French literature for the last twelve months it would be impossible to state all the reasons for this impression, but close students of France’s literary production would probably agree that, although it would be idle to generalise too confidently, more idle still to talk with any definiteness of new ‘tendencies,’ yet there has been a greater spontaneity, a greater virility, less aimlessness or wanton experiment in the past year than during any year since the Armistice.In fiction, which it is natural to take first, that being the department of literature in which France excels and best gives expression to her national genius, an increasing number of young writers have appeared, full of promise. Among those who unhappily did not survive to fulfil their promise, or rather, we should say in this connection, extend it, the most remarkable was Louis Hemon. His novel of French-Canadian life, Maria Chapdelaine, really belongs to 1921 and, as it was translated into English not long ago, little need be said of it here.
Candlemass
Authors: Baring Maurice 
Published: July 2007

The town is half awake; the nave, the choir,Are dark, and all is dim within, without,But every chapel fringed with the devout,Is bright with. February flowers of fire.At Mass, a thousand years ago in Rome,Thus Priest, thus Server at the altar bowed;Thus knelt, thus blessed itself the kneeling crowd,At Dawn, within the secret catacomb.Thus shall they meet for Mass, until the day The glory of the world shall pass away.And beauty far above all human reach.And power, and wealth beyond all mortal price,And glory that outsoars all thought, all speech,Speak in the whispered words of sacrifice.Maurice Baring.
Dr. Johnson's Catholic Friends
Authors: Bracey Robert 
Published: July 2007

Thomas Carlyle never could pass by the church of St. Clement Danes without thinking with admiration and awe of Samuel Johnson ‘in the era of Voltaire’ purifying his soul within its walls, full of genuine devotion, sometimes in fear and darkness, at others in patience and quiet hope, but ever with intense and burning conviction. ‘Religion,’ says Mr. Birrell, ‘was to Johnson an awful thing; he never learned to take his ease on Zion. Yet is his trembling piety and utter sincerity a true haven of refuge for the student of the heartless scepticism of the eighteenth century.’It is a singular fact that for more than forty years Samuel Johnson dwelt within a stone’s throw of the most venerated and conspicuous English Catholic of his day. They must inevitably often have passed each other in the street. But they lived in totally distinct worlds, and we can hardly presume that Dr. Johnson and Bishop Challoner ever exchanged a single word. Yet had they very many acquaintances in common.Pages, volumes almost, have been written regarding Johnson’s sympathy with Catholic doctrine and practice. He frequently stood up for Catholics : he would refute objections, brush aside prejudices, weigh everything in the scales of his sturdy common-sense. His attitude in this respect was far in advance of that of his contemporaries, and this is doubtless the secret of the reverence with which so many children of the Church have regarded him in later generations.But we question if it has ever quite been realised how very many Catholics he personally knew. Considering how Catholics in those days of the Penal Laws shrank from observation, kept
The Tree of Knowledge
Authors: Le Huray C. P. 
Published: July 2007

The farmer, who expressed contempt for our national system of education because a lad of school-leaving age in his employ did not know the dental formula of a yearling sheep, was merely giving expression to the thought in the minds of many.For there are two schools of thought in matters educational. One regards education as the means to an end; the other regards it as an end in itself. To the former school of thought belong most teachers and education officials; to the latter most practical business men. The effect of this conflict between the practical and the ideal is the crowding of the curriculum in both elementary and secondary schools, so that boys and girls leave those institutions with a superficial smattering of knowledge, unrelated to the occupations they intend to follow and not making, in any large degree, for any ethical advance in society.Fashions in methods of education are as frequent in their changes as are those in ladies’ attire. Pestalozzi, Froebel and Montessori have had their day. They still linger on, when they do not give place to Margaret McMillan and the Dalton Plan. It appears to be an established law that any new idea in education, although excellent in its results in the hands of its discoverer, comes to naught when practised by his disciples.The Dalton Plan, however, which marks the latest phase in the development of educational theory, is a triumph for the practical school. Assuming the pupil to have a good grounding in the three R’s, it makes of him a pseudo-research-student, and allows him to draw up his own programme of study.
A Note on A. E. Housman
Authors: Essex Edwin 
Published: July 2007

I.After an interval of sixteen years, Mr. A. E. Housman has given us a sequel to A Shropshire Lad. During that time one might naturally have expected the Lad of 1896 to have arrived at manhood’s estate; expected, perhaps, from the poet a hero with a different philosophy of life, and an experience ripened by almost a score of years. Mr. Housman could so easily have made his character grow up, see with new eyes, and speak with a new tongue. That is what would have happened in the case of any other poet who was not the supreme artist Mr. Housman has proved himself to be. For in Last Poems (absit omen !) he is still in the same mood as in A Shropshire Lad, and has thus demonstrated the artistic unity of his work.That is the crowning triumph of his poetry. The hundred and five poems that make up these two volumes, and that represent, say, twenty years work, are really just one poem looked at and presented in one hundred and five different ways. Just as one person may have a hundred striking experiences in two decades of life without losing his individuality, or breaking up his personality into little pieces; or an air may have a hundred variations; so one rich mood of imagination has sufficed for Mr. Housman to enrich our literature with a hundred poems. He struck one precious seam of gold and worked it faithfully to the end.How he worked it we are told with a charming (and pathetic ?) simplicity at the beginning of Last Poems. 41 can no longer expect to be re-visited by the continuous excitement under which in the early months of 1895 I wrote the greater part of my other book, nor indeed could I well sustain it if it came . . . About a quarter of this matter {Last Poems) belongs to the April of the present year, but most of it to dates between 1895 and 1910/