In reading these reminiscences we are reminded of Goldsmith’s classical criticism of a third-rate work : ‘This book is easier to write than to read.’ But to enclose Dr. McDonald’s book in an epigram we should have to say : ‘This book is better to read than to write.’ To speak our mind quite frankly, we must be allowed to think that of all forms of literature the Apologia pro vita sua, though sometimes the most literary is seldom the most excusable. No man is at his best when he is seeking to show his moral uprightness or his intellectual consistency. The pharisee reminds us that our best apology before the ultimate tribunal of God is : ‘Lord, be merciful to me a sinner.’ And the wise man was never wiser than when reminding us that our claim to intellectual consistency should be tempered by the conviction that ‘the number of fools is infinite.’

But whilst we should have counselled the Professor of Maynooth not to write his so-called Reminiscences, we cannot counsel his fellow Catholics, and especially his fellow priests, not to read what he has written. It need hardly be said that a book so hot from the heart of a Celt fighting for intellectual freedom must be read with discrimination. Dr. McDonald’s bringing-up was so provincial that he does not recognise how often his sæva indignatio is over little more than the politics of the village pump. Even the O’Hickey case, which might seem to centre round the fate of a dead or a dying language, almost dwindles down to a melodrama on an income of, say, £400 or £500 a year.

The political movement which dominates Italy has found in Carlo Delcroix a literary genius whose fame may live with that of Mussolini. Delcroix is not simply a fascista: but his books in their terrible eloquence and beauty are the evangel of that new enthusiasm which gave to Italy an impulse from victorious war that contrasts with the disillusionment that has touched France and made much of England pro-German. Through fascismo Italy found in the war an inspiration, and Delcroix is the prophet of the salvation she has won from ardours and endurances. The People’s War and The Sacrifice of the Word are the titles of his two earlier books, and such words as ‘Holy Sacrifice’ would do as a title for any of them. But the others are Dialogues with the Crowd and Seven Uncanonized Saints.

The theme which Delcroix repeats with variations, and with an increase of mastery and power, is the praise of suffering. In the modern age, and most of all among the admirers of Mrs. Eddy, suffering, against which human nature revolts in any case, has been treated either as cowardice or a delusion. But, as many know, it is not a delusion. To lose one’s hand and one’s eye in one sudden ghastly explosion is, when all is said by Christian Scientists and done by medical Scientists, still a calamity. Faith cannot restore the loss. The agony is acute. That was the discovery of Carlo Delcroix, and the war which brought such a disaster to all the fervours and activities of youth cannot simply be accepted or dismissed.

A popular journal, with pretentions to literature and learning, lately held a symposium of well-known novelists. They were set to say whom they considered to be the most tragic figure in history. Says one of the convivials—a lady novelist:

It has been said, and it is Catholic doctrine, that man is a bridge connecting the material and the spiritual. Both are real, both are good. God is spirit, man is matter and spirit. Man is therefore able to see, to present in material terms things spiritual and, conversely, though he cannot represent it, he is able to comprehend, though not fully, the spiritual significance of the material. He can show the spiritual in terms of matter, but he cannot show the material in terms of spirit.

The art of man, though ultimately unimportant, for, like all material things, works of art will return to dust, has therefore two claims to attention. In the first place it is the only activity of which man is capable which is in itself worth pursuing, and in the second it is man’s sole abiding solace in this vale of tears. In this age, an age noted for every sort of material achievement but such as can be called works of art, these are very controversial statements. Let us proceed to their demonstration. The essence of Religion is the affirmation of absolute values. Religions may be good or bad, values may be true or false, but the affirmation of an absolute value is a religious affirmation. Without such affirmations there would be sciences, moralities, and—Royal Academies of Art, but there would be no religion. To affirm that such and such is true because it is true and for no other reason, or that such and such is good because it is good and for no other reason are religious affirmations.

The Editor has courteously asked me to reply, and I do so with great pleasure, though in unavoidable haste, since it is almost all I can do to clear up the term’s work before a necessary holiday. Again, I welcome his request that my reply should aim rather at construction than at destruction, if only I may be permitted first to deal very plainly with the two cases which Mr. Clayton quotes as reflecting discredit upon a University which has chosen me for its Lectureship in English. I know the requirements for a Fellowship of the Royal Historical Society, having more than once been asked to stand sponsor to young pupils for that distinction; and even if I had imagined beforehand that these would necessarily include a mastery of the niceties of our language, Mr. Clayton’s article would have disabused me. In my first incriminated sentence, he has been puzzled by a very ordinary construction; after mentioning ‘the serf’ (singular) and ‘the negro’ (singular) I proceed to sum them up in the plural as ‘those simple minds.’ His second point is, that I blunder by speaking of a current as running and as creeping in the same sentence. It is plain that he has forgotten the proverb ‘Still waters run deep,’ and that he is not sufficiently familiar with our standard writers to realize that run, of liquids, does not necessarily imply rapidity. But he might at least have consulted a good dictionary before jumping to the conclusion that my University has blundered in appointing a man whose limitations do not exactly coincide with his own.

In the March BLACKFRIARS I reviewed Dr. Coulton’s Medieval Village and pointed out that the title of the book was ‘misleading and inaccurate,’ that neither the middle ages nor its village was the subject of Dr. Coulton’s study, and that ‘a false view of village life’ was presented. Dr. Coulton in his reply does not question the truth of my statements.

I also picked out no less than seventeen sentences from the book (giving in each case the page on which the sentence could be found) for evidence that Dr. Coulton is untrustworthy as a historian.

Four of these sentences were badly phrased. Dr. Coulton thinks otherwise. The reader can decide. But the blunders and errors in the other thirteen sentences Dr. Coulton leaves unanswered. They were not trivial or unimportant mistakes; they were serious misrepresentations. I could have made the list of mistakes longer, for the Medieval Village is disgraced by inaccuracies.

Not long ago I was telling a story to a little five-year-old friend of mine. She listened with great delight till we came to the inevitable fairy, who helps the distracted heroine through her troubles, when she interrupted with ‘Please let the fairy be an angel!’ I thought of this instinctive desire of a child for angelic comradeship, when looking through a number of modern children’s books in a large bookshop lately. I was struck with the entire absence of a reference to any form of religion in the charming and artistic productions which are published by the hundred to amuse and instruct the younger children of to-day. There are fairies in abundance, talking flowers, singing pigs, intelligent carrots, but no saints, or angels, and never a reference, however remote, to Almighty God.

I am not, of course, referring to the numberless story books by well-intentioned writers of all denominations, which are written with a definite religious purpose, to convey a definite religious lesson; many of these are excellent, if some are a trifle tedious; but of the many beautifully illustrated and charming little tales which find their way into any house where there is a child.