This anti-papal prejudice crops up over and over again in the history of our own and earlier times. Hardly is it to be eradicated, for the roots of the disease’ are in many lands a national inheritance, and Catholics share with non-Catholics the responsibility for keeping the prejudice alive. (How much alive it is affairs in Malta have manifested.) Father Thurston, patiently investigating the falsehoods of the enemy, exposes masonic libels, the foul pornography of popular writers on Vatican scandals, the mistakes and misrepresentations of our incorrigible Dr. G. G. Coulton, the queer perversions of fact offered to the public by Dean Inge and other Anglicans. It is all done very thoroughly, this investigation, and a vast amount of research has been involved. A noble anxiety for historic truth and a willingness to expand to the uttermost a large capacity for taking pains have always distinguished Father Thurston’s work, and these things are, in this examination of the significance of the ‘No Popery !’ cry, as conspicuous as ever.

Has this prejudice its mainspring—as Father Thurston suggests, quoting from John Galsworthy in support of the suggestion—in the readiness of many to believe anything discreditable of public men?

If we make anything, it seems that we cannot avoid making it in our own image and likeness; to this fact I attribute the note of autobiography which creeps into any ‘life’ written by one man of another. We cannot see in another qualities of which we are ourselves deficient; a man that is colour-blind cannot introduce accurate tones into his picture, be his line ever so perfect. It follows that we cannot expect a good life of St. Dominic except from a Saint. Nevertheless, as no one is without some elements of sanctity, each one, according to his measure, will be able to appreciate St. Dominic, in whom these are pressed down and running over. We must not discount his virtues because they appear as perfections of our own, for it is through these virtues that we shall reach him. The philosopher will see St. Dominic as a philosopher, the contemplative as a contemplative, the organiser as a Master General; indeed, each man sees his hero as himself, generously bereft of the frailties and indecisions flesh is heir to. This limitation of our vision is, in a way, a reflection of the mystery of the Incarnation, and, as such, a source of comfort. Man can make or reproduce only what he has seen, but the vision takes form in his own image; the maker is revealed in the thing made. It is not only ‘Dawn’ which, Eblis-like, sits upon the portals of the Underground, but Epstein; it is not Spring arising from the shell, but Botticelli; it is not only the mystery of Father Brown, but the life of Mr. Chesterton in which we are intrigued.

The fortunes of Blaise Pascal, that brilliant genius and highly-gifted soul, would now seem to be in the ascendant. Ever since his death he has suffered at the hands of editors and critics, beginning with the Pensées of Port Royal, going on to the calumnies of Voltaire, ending with his adoption by the nineteenth century sceptics. It is only in recent years that Pascal has received his due, and M. Chevalier’s book is the final stage in this rehabilitation. Nor is it merely that the charges against him have been proved to be false, for there is a positive growth in his fame; he is coming to be recognised as a Christian apologist of an original and persuasive quality. It is to France that we naturally look for an interpretation of this great Frenchman, and much has been written there about him in recent years; but there is no book, we believe, which is equal to M. Chevalier’s in its masterly account of Pascal’s life and in its just and sympathetic exposition of his religious philosophy.

For a long time, unquestionably, Pascal’s reputation has suffered among Catholics from his association with Jansenism and from his unfortunate quarrel with the Society of Jesus. In the partisan dust raised by those controversies his chief work and true significance were almost completely obscured. We shall say very little about them, except this that in the matter of the Provinciates M. Chevalier seems to us rather lenient to Pascal.

Not many of us are favoured with visions, usually through our own fault: for the best of all visions is the right appreciation of the inner significance of all these everyday things we have looked at for so long with unseeing eyes. That, we are sure, is the real character of the visions of the mystics. And these are visions which do not come suddenly and as suddenly fade away, leaving nothing but a memory behind them; they remain for ever.

It was a vision of this kind that came to a certain brother as he stood one night chanting matins in the choir along with the others. Humanly speaking, he did not deserve to have a vision, for he was not in the dispositions which are piously supposed to lead to such favours. His lips were mumbling the psalms, but his mind was far away, and he looked to be bored. To speak the truth, he was tired, and longed for nothing so much as the end, so that he might go to bed. And if you could have seen into his mind and heart, you would have found that the attitude of his soul was no better than that of his body. He was in a mood of dejection and disappointment, for he was young in religious life, and religious life had not come up to his expectations. All his young life he had been a romantic dreamer, for ever lending himself to an imaginative exaltation of the past.

It began in the Clos-Poulet, it may be said to have ended in the Pacific—and yet I think that its true ending is at home where long ago it began; for it is written in grey, the colour of Brittany skies, the colour of tears—there is no heat or brilliance in it as of southern seas. Surely here or there, this is a breton tale, strayed but returning home at last; so that the record of it has to be pieced together, as it were, on two sides of the world.

It is not difficult to picture the beginning, though Clémentine will tell little of that. But there was a day some fifty odd years ago when there lay in the bay of St. Malo a little ship straining at her cables and shaking out her sails to catch the wind; a ship home-built and home-manned, launched in the harbour yonder and christened, like so many of her crew, by the curé from the grey cathedral that lifts its single spire above the close-walled little city. It is easy to picture her, to know her very make and shape and rig; for year by year her sister goélettes are still built and equipped and sent out from St. Malo to the Iceland and Newfoundland fishings. Year by year in the first days of spring they steal out into the bay from the harbour where they have lain during the winter; year by year they pass out, unchanging, familiar, with the same lines of paint fresh on graceful sides, the same gilding at the bow, the same well-remembered Marie-Joseph, it may be, or the Sainte-Anne, or the Etoile-de-Mer.

In a quite common and considered estimation, it is at once the strength and weakness of a scientific philosophy in general and of the Scholastic in particular to be considered abstract, universal, and necessary. A settled and valuable mood of the intellectual is satisfied when the mind is imagined as living its proper life in the timeless world of essences, forced only by the needs of its present state to shifting and momentary accommodations with a welter of contingent concrete individual things. But our deepest desire is to know the real, and the whole real. Now the real, if it is anything, is concrete, while for us the concrete is unique, inexpressible, and fugitive; antithetical to a scientific philosophy. Hence the feeling that the cost of a system is the sacrifice of the real.

While the structure of Thomism, as it appears in the text-books or even from a superficial reading of St. Thomas, cannot fail to strike the imagination with the vastness of its conception, the coherence of its parts, and the impregnability of its logic, there is to some a haunting air of unreality about it, which is none the less felt because well-nigh incapable of formulation in the face of such an impressive, or what I might even call crushing, perfection.

Towards the end of June appeared a little work entitled Some Notes on the Petrine Claims by Friedrich von Hügel. An intimate friend of von Hügel’s was, apparently, thinking of becoming a Catholic, and had received from a High Anglican a letter containing ‘a reasoned attack on the Roman position.’ Von Hügel set down these notes in answer to this attack. Though written in 1893, they had not hitherto been published. A warm welcome has been given to the book in the Catholic press. In the July Month Fr. Vassall-Phillips, in the course of a long notice, writes : ‘The publication of such an answer from such a pen, coming, after so many years, from beyond the tomb, constitutes an event of outstanding religious importance.’ A reviewer in the July Blackfriars expresses himself thus : ‘Friedrich von Hügel the resolute thinker, is in every line of this precious little book ... . It is to be hoped that in the circles where Friedrich von Hügel is honoured almost as a prophet this little masterpiece of the prophet may direct tired eyes and feet towards the consolations of the Rock,’