We have become accustomed to condemn outright those reactionaries who would wish to return to the manners of the Middle Ages. So much apparent good has come to light since those dim and ruthless days that its denial seems almost blasphemy against the Creator who gave man powers capable of continuous development. In the main a condemnation of this sort may be justified, yet there existed at least one fundamental attitude of mind, lost in the debris of the medieval ruin, the absence of which we must deeply lament for it would be capable of setting the modem world in order if it were present to-day. This attitude, crystallized in the word “objectivism,” has been supplanted by its opposite, a disruptive force which is responsible for many of the modem evils, for when modem subjectivism ousted the medieval objectivism at the Reformation a unity in multiplicity gave place to a multitude of units. It is a commonplace that the Reformation with its insistence on the importance of the individual and its implicit denial of the mainstays of human society gave birth to a subjectivism and a concentration upon self which the Christian world has never since been able to master.

This false attitude of mind has become part and parcel of our mental make-up. It has been handed on from father to son until it has become almost connatural in every act of the mind or will. We can to-day think only in terms of reference to ourselves, forming all things to our own image and likeness as though we were at once the begetter and the conclusion of all things. One’s birthday is a great feast, remembered every year, for that was the beginning. In the beginning was myself, and I am my own god.

By capability is meant the physical or psychological power of performing an act.

By responsibility is meant the moral (as distinct from the physical) necessity of performing an act.

Physical or bodily powers incapable of moral necessity are incapable of responsibility.

A power that is incapable of an act may be responsible for an act, if it has (i) physical, (2) psychological, or (3) moral power over another power which is capable of the act.

(1) Physical? The human will is not capable of cutting a human throat. A knife is capable of cutting a human throat. But a human will using a knife is responsible for cutting a human throat. In other words a human will has not the capability but has the responsibility of cutting or not cutting a human throat. .

(2) Psychological. The feet have the capability of walking but not of hearing or of seeing. The ears have the capability of hearing but not of seeing or of walking. The eyes have the capability of seeing but not of walking or of hearing. The human will has the capability neither of walking nor hearing nor seeing.

Now the feet which have the capability of walking are not responsible for walking. The ears which have the capability of hearing are not responsible for hearing. The eyes which have the capability of seeing are not responsible for seeing.

But the human will which cannot walk nor hear nor see can move (or not move) the feet to walk, the ear to hear, the eye to see.

Therefore the human will which has not the capability of walking, hearing seeing, has the responsibility of walking, hearing, seeing.

We keep finding that Catholic enterprises fail because there is no public opinion, and no business-sense, about them. There is a public opinion, for example, about Lourdes and the value of going there on pilgrimage. There is, to a considerable extent, a public opinion about Catholic schooling. There is to some extent a public opinion, now, about SS. John Fisher and Thomas More; but, if I may risk mentioning a personal impression, not all the heroic work of Mgr. Hallett and of others who so long toiled for their canonization, suceeded in creating it: perhaps it was largely due to the determination of the Holy Father that two men, who clearly deserved to be canonized, should be canonized. A kind of “public opinion” in the sense of a Catholic opinion, i.e., not confined to one nation nor universal in any one nation, to the effect that most religious Art is bad, and that the Liturgy is good, seems to be forming itself. An ecclesiastical “general” opinion certainly seems to be growing up, to the effect that Mass should be preached in a different way, that St. Paul should be studied increasingly, and that the doctrines of grace and incorporation with Christ (and all their consequences) should be made more of in and even out of retreats or convent-exhortations. Nuns keep telling one that “retreats are quite different from what they used to be.” Maybe writers like Abbot Marmion, Abbot Vonier, Fr. Prat, Karl Adam, are outstanding figures among those who have helped towards this. Abbot Chapman, Fr. R. Steuart, and others, have alike witnessed to and assisted a somewhat new and “general” appetite in the matter of prayer; and it is quite obvious that Blackfriars from its very beginning has similarly witnessed to and fostered a better conscience in what concerns social justice.

Marsilio Ficino—Savonarola—Machiavelli

Marsilio Ficino was the greatest of the fifteenth century Platonists. His love for Plato was at least equal to his erudition. His influence both as an individual and as head of the Platonic Academy of Florence, extended over the whole of Europe. In an early period of his life he was a humanist and a philosopher of more or less pagan tendency. In maturity of thought and years, he was deeply conscious of the Christian values that many of the learned were too ready to overlook. His ideal was the conciliation of Platonism and Christianity, pagan classicism and Christian thought, the ethics of antiquity and Catholic morals. He was fascinated by St. Augustine, but it seemed to him that the Augustinian synthesis could not appeal to the world of his time. The problems of nature, of ethics, of history were set in other terms. What he sought was to christianize Plato and to platonize the Gospel. This two-fold tendency is to be found in the Theologia platonica, in which he saw a new Summa Theologica, under the aegis of Plato instead of that of Aristotle.

Three elements in the work of Marsilio Ficino render it representative of the period—the sovereignty or autonomy of philosophy as the instrument of reason, as against the criterion that made of it the handmaid of theology; secondly, a concrete realism in respect of the object of knowledge, in nature and history, as against the universalizing abstractionism of the Schools; thirdly, a natural animism, the result of the principle of Third Essences, and which formed the substructure of the astrology of the time, as against the Aristotelian conception of Forms.

Seventy years ago a traveller, making an overland journey from Lisbon to Peking, would have traversed throughout the whole of his route the territories of states whose constitutions, however much they might differ, were all monarchical in form: Portugal, Spain, France, the German states, Russia and China. To-day all these countries are republics, as is Poland, the one additional state whose territory would now be crossed on such a journey.

Has the revolt against monarchy such characters as would point to its effecting a permanent change or will the fallen thrones be re-erected? In Asia republicanism is an exotic growth, but in Europe the system under which Athens and Rome grew to maturity is not so. On the eve of the American Revolution, but an insignificant fraction of mankind was living under republican institutions. These survived only in the old maritime Republics of Venice and Genoa, the Swiss cantons and the little republic of Ragusa in Eastern Europe. To these we may add the autonomous Hanse towns. The Netherlands were technically a republic, though in practice a constitutional monarchy, since the Stadtholdership was hereditary in the House of Orange, which intermarried with the reigning families of Europe. Sixteen years after the American Declaration of Independence the French monarchy fell. Animated by the crusading zeal which characterized the Soviets in the first years of their existence, the French republicans desired to impose their system of government on Europe. At one time it looked as though they might do so. Within a few years French arms had created the satellite Batavian, Helvetian, Cisalpine, Roman and Parthenopean Republics. But after a life of twelve years the First French Republic was destroyed by its Chief Magistrate and monarchy under a new dynasty was restored in France.

We usually confine our reading to books upon subjects in which we are interested, but this is a mistake. It is often more repaying to read a good book on a new subject about which one does not care two straws than a poor one on a subject in which our interests are already engaged. One may come to care about the new one. If the proverb L’appetit vient en mangeant is true of the pleasures of the table, it is still more true of the pleasures of reading. We can become interested in almost anything once we begin to know something about it. Teak and hard-wood trees, Roman pottery, the Man in the Iron Mask, the history of the fork, the habits of earwigs, the trade routes of the Phoenicians, are subjects which, though they seem to appeal to different tastes, may end by interesting the same person, once he or she has taken the preliminary plunge. We do not profit half enough by the flexibility of our interests; if we did, we should not so often find ourselves complaining in a library crammed with books that we can find nothing to read.

Should sailors in books talk like sailors or like parrots? (I exclude, of course, parrots that have lived with sailors.) The question may appear frivolous: it comprises, I believe, one of the central problems of criticism. It is not necessary that an author should make his characters talk as they would talk in real life: it is entirely necessary that he should make us believe they are talking as they would talk in real life. Consider the difference in technique, in this matter, between Meredith and Hardy.

So far as concerns his native language, the Scottish Gael of to-day is illiterate. Educational policy has not been too sympathetic with the Gaelic.

This accounts for the fact that, in spite of the tenacity with which Catholics in the Highlands have kept the Faith, there is but one book of devotion, printed in Scottish Gaelic, procurable to-day.

A study of Lochran an Anama, “The Soul's Lantern,” gives us a glimpse into the mind and soul of the Gael. Here we find, in addition to Gaelic translations of Latin and other prayers familiar to all Catholics, devotions peculiar to Celtic temperament. Here we are with Patrick and Columba and the other saints of Gaeldom, praying in the forms they used.

Redolent of the daily life of the inhabitants of the Highlands and Isles in those far-off times, these prayers are still appropriate to the needs of their descendants. In the Outer Hebrides the Gael's manner of life, his hopes and fears, even his natural surroundings, have altered less in 1,200 years than those of his neighbours in the course of a century.

The sea and the mountains still provide the chief perils, whilst tilling the soil, herding the cattle, and fishing from small craft in stormy seas constitute the principal means of existence.

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,

Be the Three-in-One with us by day and night,

In the trough of the sea, or on mountain-side

Be our Mother with us, and her arm about our head.

“The Consecration of the Three Narrows” (Wrists, Waist and Ankles), a prayer to St. Columba for the sanctification of every bodily act, is probably one of the oldest Celtic prayers we have.