In 1098, Robert, Abbot of Citeaux introduced into his monastery an adaptation of the Rule of St. Benedict and thus grave rise to what is popularly known as the Cistercian Order. From this proceeded such houses as Fountains, Tintern, Melrose, Buckfast and Furness, the last two descending from the Cistercian house of Savigny, as also did La Trappe in France, founded in 1122. In 1664, the ‘Thundering Abbot,’ whom a recent biography has made more familiar if not too attractive amongst us, re-reformed his monastery, not least along the lines of manual labour : hence the ‘Trappists.’ It was these whom Bishop Ricards, vicar-apostolic of the Eastern Province of Cape Colony, begged, in 1879, to come to his assistance in South Africa; and in July 1880, a contingent of fifty arrived at Port Elizabeth. A start was made at Dunbrody. The locality proved too obdurate, and in 1882 the community removed to Durban and thence went inland to what is now Mariannhill. It seems difficult for religious congregations in South Africa to survive satisfactorily as branches of their original group : in 1909 the Mariannhill Traopists separated them selves from the Traopists, and became the ‘Religious Missionaries of Mariannhill,’ a congregation devoted entirely to South African work. Numbering at prespnt about two hundred and fifty, of whom more than half are lay brothers, and predominantly German in nationality, the Fathers work in a very great number of mission stations, not only in Natal, but in the Cape Province and in Rhodesia, confining their work (save quite incidentally to the native population.

That ‘an Englishman is never so happy as when he is miserable’ is true up to a certain point, but we nave got far beyond that point; hence there is none to the paradox.

Englishmen just now are very miserable indeed, for there is no misery quite so poignant as that which comes from the lowest depths of pessimism. What we need in these days is fervent and true patriotism, and there is a great gulf fixed between patriotism and pessimism.

Patriotism is derided and scoffed at in England, though, curiously enough, not in ireiand, Scotland or even wales. Yet there never was a time when we Englishmen more needed true patriots, a rallying cry and a cause. The trouble is that whilst glorying in our history, we are coming to believe that we have no first-class possibility for the future. We are accepting as a first axiom that we are doomed to become a second-rate country. The peril is not so much our politics as our pessimism; not so much the Dole as the Dumps.

As a country our hopes are deteriorating, our ideals are drooping, our enthusiasms are withering. We are not moving through the desert, we are settling down there. Over England there spreads the pale cast of cynicism. We are losing heart, and when a nation loses heart, it loses everything. It is not that we are making bricks with a shortage of straw, rather that we are building without a plan. We do not know what to build. We quake and whine in the daily press and in the monthly magazines as though we were for ever vanquished.

The worst enemies of an art are those of its own household, the people with natural talent but no aesthetic education, and whose technical training too often merely gives them greater facility in expressing and more show of authority in propagating their own bad taste. For how many art schools, even among the best, teach anything of the general and fundamental principles on which all craftsmanship should be based? In an age of classic art instinctive good taste might be looked for as part of natural talent, but in these days the critical faculty is warped before it has time to develop, by low standards in music, literature, architecture and art in the narrower sense of the word, whether domestic, decorative or pictorial. Even Rubens, for all his genius, did not escape the coarsening influences which the later Renaissance left behind it; and his pictures could never be universally loved for their beauty as are those of a Fra Angelico who, although his drawing is not always accurate, had lived in fourteenth century Florence. How many potential musicians might be found in a jazz band, writers among journalists who have never read an English classic, and artists in the perpetrators of the so-called devotional art displayed in ‘Catholic repositories.’

L'ouvroir liturgique, quoted in Vestments and Vesture (pp. 220-221) on the subject of professional workshops, says:

Of social panaceas there is no end, and after G. K. C.’s Distributism comes Mr. J. R. Bellerby’s Contributism. As the author of A Contributive Society promises us a criticism of the idea contained in that book during the present year, it would seem unfair for a mere layman in the economic world to enter the lists of criticism before the appearance of that second work. But it may be shrewdly suspected that it is only the latter part of the book, containing the reconstructive ideas, which will be submitted to this self criticism, and an examination of the premises on which the scheme of social reconstruction is based may not come amiss. In any case, the critical volume may be anticipated with unmixed feelings, for how rarely do authors develop into critics of themselves.

Mr. Bellerby’s description of what he is pleased to call the ‘economic system’ gives the impression that he has been shown round by someone who regards that system with complacency. It has weak points, he admits, but it is a good machine which only requires better oiling and one or two minor replacements to function perfectly.

Throughout his analysis of what he calls the economic system (although many of us are inclined to regard it as the economic scramble), he makes use of terms which, like the words used by Humpty-Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland, mean just what he intends them to mean. He speaks of ‘goods’ not ‘commodities’ —a vital distinction.

Among the many treasures of St. Edmund’s College, Ware, are a number of old Catholic Prayer-Books. Their preservation is mainly due to the zeal and insight of Father Raymund Stanfield. Amongst them is a copy of the famous old Manual: A Manual of Prayers and Litanies: Distributed according to the Days of the Week. With other Excellent Devotions fitted for all Persons and Occasions. Last Edition much corrected. Permissu Superiorum, 1688. It is a 12mo. volume, singularly compact though actually containing no less than 564 beautifully printed pages. From the foreword ‘To the Pious Reader’ we learn that the present edition is ‘purg’d from many, both gross Errata’s in the Print, and improprieties in the Translations’; the Hymns are ‘rendered according to the Corrected Latin of P. Urban VIII (now generally used in the Church), and those too in far more Musical Numbers.’

The Calendar which follows is peculiarly interesting. In January alone twenty British Saints are commemorated or their feasts kept; in February twenty-two; in March twenty-seven; in April twenty-six, and so on.

There is a tendency to set up mathematics, in its frigid detachment and unreality, as the very pattern of a science, and even of philosophy. Here St. Thomas’s terse Aristotelianism in mathematicis non est bonum is appropriate to show the indifference of our deepest desires to such an abstraction. For they are attracted by the real which is primarily concrete; by a thing and not by a type; by what the scholastics would call the quod, in opposition to the quo.

Yet you should hear some of the people most inclined to regiment a variable and highly individual reality into the uniformity of a system speaking on the Rationalisation of Industry! ‘Ne voyons nous,’ says M. Blondel, ‘se constituer sous nos yeux deux Thomismes, l'un qui est un instrument de verité, de recherche, de haute conduite, l’autre dont plusieurs voudraient faire un procédé administratif et une sorte de caporalisme intellectuel?’

The Greeks were aware of the danger of sacrificing the real to the reason, which is almost forced on us by the nature of both, for knowledge must be general to be rational, and things must be individual to be real. Even the poets reflect this unhappy necessity of fixing the fleeting in the cold pastoral; of a Grecian urn. Small blame, then, to the scholastic who seems at times, perhaps unconsciously, to lapse into a Wolfian mood, and to confine his metaphysics to the eternal possible. The intellect is imagined to live its life in the world of essences, while the world of facts is just the haphazard outcropping of certain types; and just as number is neutral to anything from the unit upwards, so are essences with regard to fact-determinations which are, in consequence, almost destitute of intellectual value. Santanyana can be capped by the scholastic manual.