At the approach of the happy day, when seven hundred years ago, that light of holiness, Dominic, passed from this world’s sorrows to the home of the blessed, it is a joy to Us who have so long been amongst his most devout clients, more especially since the day when We began to govern the Church of Bologna which religiously guards the Saint’s remains, it is a great joy to Us, We say, to be able to call upon the faithful from this Apostolic See to keep the memory of so great a saint. And in doing so we are not only yielding to feelings of personal piety, but also performing a duty of gratitude to the Founder and lawgiver and to his renowned family.

Dominic was wholly and thoroughly a man of God : so too was he perfectly a man of the Church, and the Church has ever found him an unconquered champion of the Faith and his Order a stout bulwark of defence. Wherefore not only did Dominic in his days fortify the temple but he took thought for its lasting defence, according to the prophetic words of Honorius III, uttered when he confirmed the Order, “the Brethren of thy Order are to be the champions of the Faith and the true lights of the world.”

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.”

Dr. Johnson, like other great men in whose lives the domesticities played but a small part, was after his peculiar fashion a squire of dames. He looked upon himself, he tells us, as “very polite,” and if his most studied elaboration of homage was reserved for an archbishop, he could be very courtier-like with the ladies, and was at times quite eager to show himself a man of gallantry.

His attitude towards the middle-aged, blue-stocking coterie was an attractive mixture of spiritual direction, intellectual coquetry, and tender friendship. But he most completely melted and softened when in the company of one or two younger ladies with claims to intellectual distinction who were admitted into his circle. Of these youthful favourites, not the least was Hannah More—when with her, the tiger in him was quite subdued, and he became positively kittenish.

Hannah More is hardly even a name to-day. We look vaguely at her prim, demure picture in the National Portrait Gallery, and we somehow connect her with the early pioneers of education, and with crude efforts in the field of philanthropy, and that is about all. “Her works are dust, and her words dim with unconquerable rust.” Yet there was a time when the book-shops were filled with battling crowds intent on procuring the four volumes of her memoirs. And but a few years before this, her shrewdly worded, sensible tracts on moral and religious subjects were circulating at the rate of a couple of million copies yearly ; while, earlier still, her tragedy of “Percy” was played by the immortal Garrick to overflowing houses, amid bursts of applause and general approbation and enthusiasm.

We do not know whether the book which has occasioned this article signifies the decay either of ethics or of (what its writer calls) “medicine” ; or of both ethics and medicine, for without a doubt it signifies a decay. A profession such as “medicine,” which deals with the human ultimates of birth, marriage, and death, has an ethical import which might well exercise the genius of a modern Thomas Browne. We must not be taken to indulge in personalities but rather to criticize a state of things and a state of learning if we look upon this work of an Edinburgh Lecturer on Medical Jurisprudence as a pathological specimen which we must patiently diagnose and treat.

It is the sub-title that reveals the unhealthy state of things. The book is entitled Medical Conduct and Practice. This is a sufficiently general title to cover the contents of the book ; and to allow the author to give shrewd advice to his Scottish medical readers on “how to get on in the world.”

But this non-committal title has the sub-title “A Guide to the Ethics of Medicine.” To most of us whom a University has befriended in youth, the word Ethics recalls that highest branch of Philosophy which the Greeks elaborated in order to endow Christian thought. We recall the Ethics of Aristotle, with many regrets that the true wisdom of that book is now a quarry for the philologist rather than for the philosopher. But the word Ethics stirs up such deep emotions in our heart that we are at expectation’s end to see what will be said of it by a modern brother of him who wrote Religio Medici, and especially by one of those accepted few who have sitten in the chair of Medicine near Arthur’s Seat.

It is reassuring to Christians in Palestine—especially to Englishmen—to see that public opinion in England is being stirred up with regard to the affairs and fate of the Holy Land. It is high time. As you have already had opportunity to learn, we are getting to be in very bad odour ; or, as an English official here at Jerusalem said the other day, we are now thoroughly detested by everybody—French, Arabs, Christians, and Moslems. What love the Jew bears to us is scarcely disinterested.

Up to the present there has been little sign of enthusiasm called forth by the fact that England is mandatory power over a land that stands for so much as does Palestine. In fact the chief impression one receives is that this position is looked on at home rather as a burden than as an honour ; and certainly, if we maintain the position, and go on as we have begun, it promises to prove a very great burden indeed. However, the news we receive of the campaign against the Palestinian policy gives us hope that a change will take place.

At the same time it must be said that recent articles in the home papers on this question have caused great surprise and not a little anger here. There is certainly an attack to be made on Zionist aspirations and plans with regard to Palestine ; but it is not along the lines of these articles. Exaggeration, and what appears in some cases downright untruth, can serve no purpose except to defeat the very end in view. Indeed, one has been tempted to ask what is the end proposed by the writers of certain of these articles against the Jews ; in other words, on which side are they fighting? In the present case they appear to have put good ammunition into the hands of the Zionists.

Two notable centenaries fall in the present year. On August 6th, 1221, passed to his reward Dominic Guzman. Almost exactly one hundred years later, in July or September, 1321, the world’s greatest poet since ancient times left a world which had treated him hardly in order to make trial of the justice of a world he had hymned in almost inspired numbers.

Perhaps to a Catholic it is not fanciful to trace a connection between the two, yet few indeed outside the Church consider what the poet owed to the famigliar di Christo and his sons, whose praises are written in the greatest of his works. Dante Aligheri was born in 1265 ; he was a child of nine when Thomas Aquinas died, a boy of fifteen when the Doctor Universal, Albertus Magnus, passed to join his great pupil. His days were passed in wild times. The year of his birth saw the long strife in England between king and baronage culminate in the battle of Evesham, saw Manfred, king of Naples and Sicily, defeated and slain by Charles of Anjou. He was seventeen years old when the bad blood between Frenchman and Neapolitan found outlet in the Sicilian Vespers and the weary reign of anarchy which followed. In 1310, he saw the suppression of the Order of Knights Templars (so typical a product of the age of faith and chivalry), and in the prime of his years he lived amid the wars and rumours of wars, the intrigues, the treacheries in which his native Florence was involved, the long-drawn-out strife of Guelph and Ghibelline.

On all sides the old order was passing and many of the mediæval theories becoming empty of meaning. The glory which had surrounded the Holy Roman Empire seemed waning, while powerful nation-states arose to dispute its supremacy.