The late Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford has published what we must call a scholarly and painful book. Only a scholar brought up in the atmosphere of a modern University could have written as Bishop Headlam has written on ‘Jesus the Christ.’ Even the ‘Map,’ which is duly heralded on the title-page, has that note of scholarship which the older Universities, with their dogged craftsmanship, keep amidst a machine-mad world.

It goes without saying that there is a long, well-documented account of ‘Modern Criticism,’ which the Bishop chivalrously calls ‘learned criticism.’ As his Lordship does not altogether agree with the findings of the learned criticism, he therefore saves us from the charge of paradox in our having suggested that a work can be at once scholarly and painful;

i.e. the fruit of research, yet wide of the truth, or, in other words, learned but wrong.

Everywhere is seen the scholarly hand of the Biblical archeologist. We have most fascinating accounts of the road-system, which indeed has a place of honour in the Appendix. In a book of some 340 pages, more than a half are given over to that geographical, political and ecclesiastical learning which naturally springs up in an atmosphere of modern books. The student, therefore, who is seeking an almost cinematically vivid picture of the times of Jesus Christ will be grateful to the Bishop of Gloucester for his book. We have said much in saying that there are pages in it as thrilling as a work of fiction.

In his new study of The Problem of Population, Mr. Harold Cox presents the popular case for birth-control with his customary lucidity and with that command of statistics that can compel conviction for any argument. But one rubs one’s eyes with amazement to find so stalwart a champion of individual liberty carried, by his enthusiasm for what he regards as the moral duty of birth-control, into advocating the most intolerable of all forms of State interference with personal rights. Can it indeed be Mr. Harold Cox who declares emphatically (p. 153) for the compulsory sterilisation by State-appointed practitioners, of large classes of mankind? ‘To sum up,’ he concludes roundly, ‘those persons who, as the result of physical or mental defects, are unfitted to produce children should be sterilised, with their consent or with the consent of their guardians, at the expense of the State.’ One wonders whether Mr. Cox himself, or any one of his friends whom he might name at random, would be able to satisfy a Government medical board that they possess that ‘freedom from any heritable taint’ which he postulates as being the essential condition of the right to have children. If words have any meaning at all, Mr. Cox expressly asserts that anyone in whose family there is hereditary disease— be it blindness or consumption or mental instability— must be ruthlessly forced to undergo a sterilising operation.

Mr. Cox bases his case upon the sordid conditions that over-population has produced in all countries ancient and modern—in the west of Ireland before the famine of the forties, or in the teeming villages of China, as much as in the slums of Glasgow or Liverpool.

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 book before me opens with the following words: ‘In the year of the Incarnation of our Lord 1879, and of the Hegira of the Prophet 1296, and on the Eve of the Feast of St. Patrick, an only child was born to Sir Tatton Sykes, Baronet, of Sled-mere, in the county of York, and to Jessica Christina his lawful wife. Mark Sykes was this only son, and he always remained the original child of original parents.’ It may be added that he ended by securing an original biographer. When a biography begins with a sentence like that, we know, long before such guesses are commonly possible in more conventional cases, that the author is not a hack or a humdrum eulogist, but a man with a sense of history as a background to biography. We know that the author is as interesting as the subject. And we could distinguish this quality of distinction, even if we had not seen on the title page the name of Shane Leslie. The first sentence, recording nothing but a fact such as is found in a directory or a genealogical tree, yet gathers round it a crystallisation of creeds and influences, like the conjunction of stars in some horoscope of a happier and more Christian astrology. We have foreshadowed, as in a dissolving view of historic visions, the influences inspiring the subject and his biographer; beginning with the greatest of all influences, the mystery and majesty of their common creed. The date is stated not only as a date, but as a dogma.

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.

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/

Twenty years ago there passed away in Italy one of the greatest exponents of Roman Law, whose researches won him a foremost place in the world of science, wresting for his native land the laurels which had hitherto been held by Germany, in the domain of Jurisprudence. The name of Contardo Ferrini, well-known as it is to present day jurists, bids fair to become familiar before long to every Catholic, inasmuch as the beatification process of its erudite bearer has already been introduced at Rome. The present Holy Father, intimately acquainted with the life and merits of Ferrini, was a warm supporter of his cause in 1905. It is therefore confidently hoped that good progress will be made during his pontificate. Pius X had already intimated the consolation it would give him to raise a university professor to the Altar.

The life of the modest, retiring scientist is a fresh proof that there is no contradiction between F aith and Science. The man for whom his teachers, the historian Mommsen, and the Byzantinist, Karl Zacharia von Lingenthal, prophesied a brilliant part in the restoration of a branch of learning then neglected in Italy, was a daily communicant, and spent every spare moment in converse with his Divine Master. ‘I pray God/ wrote Ferrini to an intimate friend,’ that prayer may never expire on my lips as long as I live, for that would be the end of my supernatural existence.’ Contardo Ferrini was born at Milan in 1859.

I

I found the clue I sought not in the night, While wandering in a pathless maze of gloom; The sky was hidden behind shapes of doom; There was no moon, nor any star in sight.

My hopes, my dreams and my beliefs were slain; Like corpses on a battlefield they lay;

The world was but a graveyard dark with clay; The stiffling cloud denied one drop of rain;

When from the giddy marge of the abyss I cried aloud in agony and fear,

When suddenly it seemed my single tear Stretched and became a shining bridge to bliss.

I stood before a topless gate. Within I guessed the light, I dared not enter in.

II

One day I heard a whisper: ‘Wherefore wait? Why linger in a separated porch?

Why nurse the flicker of a severed torch?

The fire is there, ablaze beyond the gate.

Why tremble, foolish soul? Why hesitate? However faint the knock it will be heard.’

I knocked, and swiftly came the answering word, Which bade me enter to my own estate.

I found myself in a familiar place;

And there my broken soul began to mend;

I knew the smile of every long-lost face— They whom I had forgot remembered me;

I knelt, I knew—it was too bright to see— The welcome of a King who was my friend.

Ill

My treasure and my resting-place are found,

My mother-land, my immemorial home;

Beyond the reefs of treasonable foam,

I know the lights are flashing on the sound. Lightning may strike, and hurricane may blow, Whatever shall befall I cannot fear:

Whether the hour be faraway or near,

That tranquil harbour shines and waits, I know.

Though starless is the sky to-night And clouds are sailing free,

A thousand fairy points of light Go dancing to the sea.

Reflections from the river-side Of lights both meek and bold,

They fall along the outward tide In silver, red, and gold.

They ripple on each tiny crest And tremble on the foam,

The river will not let them rest Or shine for us at home.

But onward from the magic town,

If men would look with me,

Its argosy it carries down From London to the sea.

Edwin Essex, O.P.