Certain facts must be stated in the words of the first-hand authorities :

A.

‘Another welcome sign of East and West drawing closer together is found in the letter from the locum tenens of the Oecumenical Patriarchate at Constantinople unto all the Churches wheresoever they be, which was sent from the Phanar to the Archbishop of Canterbury.

‘Chief in importance, however, has been the visit of a special delegation from the Oecumenical Patriarchate to London for purposes of consultation with Bishops attending the Lambeth Conference on relations between the Orthodox and Anglican Communions.

‘This visit was the result of a formal invitation from the Archbishop of Canterbury to the locum tenens of the Oecumenical Patriarchate at Constantinople. To this visit we have reason to attach the highest importance.

Since the Renaissance, the world has gained many sciences: but it has, in the process, lost not a few arts. All lost arts are to be regretted; but the loss of one of them should be a subject of special sorrow on the part of Catholics. It is the art of compiling Breviary Offices.

All flesh is not the same flesh: star differeth from star in glory. Each of our Breviaries—the Roman, the Monastic, the Dominican, the Ambrosian—contains offices of very varying degrees of beauty. Even the oldest offices, such as most of those in the Proprium de Tempore and the Commune Sanctorum, mark very different stages of the road to perfection; but speaking generally, it is in the Proper of Saints that the differences are most marked, and the modern offices which are the ugliest and least fitting.

The principal elements of the Breviary Office are five : antiphons, responsories, lessons, hymns and collects. The general custom of liturgists has always been to take the antiphons and responsories from Holy Scripture: although many locally-used offices exist in which these elements are rimed compositions of the form familiar to us from a number of the proper offices of saints in the Dominican use. The lessons, of course, are always taken from existing sources, the Bible or the writings of the Fathers. The compiler’s opportunity for free composition, therefore, is normally restricted to the hymns and collects. Equally, bad hymns and collects frequently spoil an office.

Surely of all the hard sayings in the Gospel, the words at the end of the parable of the Good Samaritan are the hardest: ‘Go, and do thou in like manner’ —Vade, et tu fac similiter.

The story itself is plain and simple; none of the parables of Christ is more familiar. The very phrase,

‘a good Samaritan,’ has passed into the language. And yet, is there anything harder for the average man than the concluding injunction, ‘Go, and do thou in like manner’ ? Its very directness leaves no loophole for misunderstanding or evasion. There is no suggestion here of a counsel of perfection. It is just an instruction in neighbourly conduct, and an instruction exceedingly hard to obey.

The Samaritan adopts a complete stranger, whom he finds in distress, and recognizing the wounded man as a neighbour, promptly provides him with hospitality; thereby inventing a home for the homeless, and for one person at least solving the housing problem. ‘Go, and do thou likewise,’ declares the Saviour of the World!

The clergy had passed the injured man by. Perhaps they blamed ‘the system,’ social and economic, that allows wounded persons to lie homeless and destitute by the roadside. Possibly they blamed the authorities, to whom they paid rates and taxes, for not keeping better order and suppressing highway robbery. In any case, the injured man was quite unknown to them. Certainly he was not a regular attendant at church, or they would have identified him. It is impossible to suppose that a sidesman or a seat-holder found lying in the gutter would not be recognised and assisted.

It came to pass on Sunday morn When the Parish Mass was done,

The men of Woodstock all went home,

And the women every one,

But Hugh the Glover set out north By the banks of Glyme alone.

The sun shone hot on stem and stone,

The robin sang on the thorn,

The last mist lifted off the grass Was tree-top high that morn,

When he doffed his shoes by Wootton Church. That stands high on a rocky perch,

Where the Glyme runs into the Dome.

And barefoot still, by vale and hill,

He took his pilgrim’s way,

For the King’s Glover of Woodstock Sought a great grace that day—

To learn of the Anker of Dornford Wherein Devotion lay.

Now Hugh the Glover was a rich burgess of Woodstock, high in the favour of King John and his peers. He had a fair, cheerful wife; six sons and two daughters; and a large, two-storied house with an arched door and a gabled roof. But for all this he had been ill at ease for a long time, because he did not know the meaning of the word ‘Devotion.’ I do not say he could not hazard a guess at it—most of us could do as much—but he did not think that was the right way to approach so noble a word. And every time he heard Mass—which was almost every day of his life—and the priest prayed for Hugh the Glover and all the other bystanders ‘quorum libi fides cognita esl, et nota devotio,’

The records of the Ecclesiastical Court, some of which have recently been available for inspection, and to which special notice has been drawn of late by the very interesting paper read before the Royal Historical Society by Mr. Fincham, are full of interest for students of Catholic history.

These records consist of Books of Acts (including ‘Corrections’ ), Assignations, Books of Depositions, and ‘Libels, Allegations, and Sentences,’ and range from the year 1467 down to 1817. The Book of Acts was a record of the summons of offenders to Court, the charge or ‘libel’ brought against them, the ‘sworn personal answers’ of the accused and of the witnesses for or against them, and the ‘depositions’ on either side.

The Allegations were the replies of the accused to the ‘libel’ ; and the ‘assignation’ was the name given to the result of secret examination of witnesses in a series of ‘Interlocutary Orders.’

The matters dealt with by the Ecclesiastical Court would come under the two heads of Criminal and Civil cases, and of ‘Correction and Instances.’ The latter had to do with matrimonial cases and with questions arising out of wills, and were, in 1857, absorbed into the High Court of Probate, Divorce and Admiralty. The former were concerned with such things as ‘Recusancy,’ i.e. refusal to attend the Parish Church and to receive the Protestant Communion, usury, witchcraft, heresy, keeping of houses of ill-fame, brawling in Church,, defamation of character, and all offences against morals.

Jean Francois Marmontel remotely recalls our Pepys. It is true that his memoirs, from which the following account of his school days are culled, are not a diary, and were written late in life for his children’s benefit. But they give a vivid picture of his times, from his peasant home life (after all, not so wretched as might be expected from Victorian literature), through school, college, a brief and ‘distasteful’ ecclesiastical career as a tonsured abbè, and the intrigues, amorous and otherwise, of Parisian life. He writes charmingly as a man of letters, but his confessions are no less candid than those of our Samuel. The spirit of the times made any watering down for his children’s eyes quite superfluous. He was the friend of Voltaire and Madame de Pompadour, and his office of Perpetual Secretary to the French Academy brought him into contact with all who were worth knowing. He was never in the first rank of literature, but was ‘successful in all styles.’ He attained to European celebrity chiefly through his Belisaire, a work deprecating the use of carnal weapons in spiritual warfare. The book was fortunate enough to incur the wrath of the Doctors of the Sorbonne, who drew up an ‘indiculus’ of twenty-seven condemned propositions. Voltaire christened the list ‘indiculus ridiculus,’ and, in conjunction with others, succeeded in making the learned Doctors appear exceedingly foolish.

In spite of his moral obliquity, Marmontel stands out as a likeable, and in some ways, admirable character.

Catholics generally are reputed to possess a keen interest in literary life and work. They will, therefore, be attracted by the news that a Catholic literary agency has just been opened in London, at 43 Essex Street, Strand, W.C.2, by Mr. Stanhope W. Sprigg, who acted for seven years as reader to Messrs. G. Arthur Pearson, Ltd., and was formerly editor of Cassell's and the Windsor Magazine. He was at one time Hon. Literary Adviser to the Society of Women Journalists.

Those interested who desire further information should apply to Mr. Stanhope W. Sprigg, 43 Essex Street, Strand, London, W.C.2.