Catholic Newspapers.

In The Tablet (October 24th, 1925) we read the following:

‘Bad luck has once more spoilt a good idea. Father Bede Jarrett, our English Dominican Provincial, lately had the bright plan of “taking ten Catholics at haphazard and asking them two questions,” namely :—>

1. Do you buy a Catholic weekly paper?

2. What chiefly do you buy it to read?

Bows drawn at a venture are often drawn in vain, and many a bullet finds a wrong billett. This has been the Dominican Provincial’s fate. His “haphazard” brought him ten pairs of replies, which are mostly so poor that it has required all Father Bede Jarrett’s well-known literary skill to work them up into even a moderately readable article for Blackfriars, the Dominican monthly. Indeed, his luck has been so bad that most of the respondents to his questionnaire seem to be minors. “The usual answer given to Question was ‘No, I don’t buy it myself, but they usually take it at home.’” Here we have the minor’s characteristic mixture of disdain and reverence for the Domestic Powers—for the mysterious “they.” To Question 2 Father Bede Jarrett gives us four or five pages of answers. To be candid, they are hardly worth so many lines. As the whole article is composed on the bad principle of alluding vaguely and generally to the various Catholic papers and their contents instead of giving verifiable references, we cannot say how far the comments are just or unjust, in the main. There is, however, one allusion which we can identify, namely, some words about The Tablet’s article “Of Lenten Pastorals” which appeared on March 1, 1924. The minor who has obliged the Dominican Provincial with his views upon this article turns out to be a man or woman who cannot even read; and therefore we will only say that we sympathise deeply with Father Bede Jarrett on the miscarriage of a happy thought. Perhaps he will try again. It would be useful if “they”—the Philistine plutocrats who put down their tuppences for the sprightly Universe and their sixpences for the ponderous Tablet—’Would give us their views.’

It has been reserved for our own age—the age of wireless telegraphy, of ships like floating towns, of monopoly, of millionaires and of mammoth beauty-choruses, the age in which four out of every five get it and in which no man may afford the handicap of unattractive teeth—it has been reserved, I say, for this age of ours to produce a heresy which eclipses all heresies.

We have seen the savage Puritanism of the Commonwealth, when men denied that the worship and service of God could be other than things of gloom and horror. We have seen the cold, dispassionate rationalism of the age of Voltaire, when faith was contemptuously dismissed as mere superstition and when the continued presence of Our Lord upon earth was spurned as a childish fable. We have seen a revival of Manichaeism, though nowadays they call it Christian Science. A new Puritanism has initiated and directed the Prohibition movement in America; and has made it illegal to sell cigarettes in the state of Kansas and elsewhere. We have seen, at one time or another, every article of the Christian Faith denied by men who called themselves Christians. We have seen God’s Vicar on Earth locked up like a dangerous criminal, ridiculed, insulted and despised. And now the crowning horror is upon us; I have seen it blatant and unashamed in America, though I believe it has not yet crossed the Atlantic. But it will come. For it has behind it the power of American finance.

Few things are more nauseating nowadays than all the modern cant about the Ideals of Big Business, Efficient Salesmanship, Truth in Advertising and all the rest of the nonsense.

Pakt II.

In a previous article an account was given of the five years’ exploration work carried out by the Rev. John MacEnery, F.G.S., a Catholic priest of Torquay, in the extensive series of limestone caves, known as Kent’s Cavern. Beneath the thick stalagmite floor, he found the bones of mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, cave hyena, bear, lion, etc., and in association with them, worked flints which were clearly the tools, or weapons of war, of some prehistoric race of men. As these investigations were carried out a century ago, when scientific opinion was not prepared to accept the possibility of such a fact, it is of interest to relate MacEnery’s attempts to publish an account of his cavern researches. Of this intention we have ample evidence.

Writing to Sir W. C. Trevelyan, June 19th, 1826, MacEnery says :

On December 6th of the same year, Dr. Beeke (later the Bishop of Bath and Wells), in a letter to Sir W. C. Trevelyan, says:

I.

The art of music has a very important place in Dante’s Commedia, and there are several reasons which make it a matter for no surprise that this should be the case. Firstly, music has always been associated with worship, and it is natural that the prayers of the Church Suffering in Purgatory and the Glorias of the Church Triumphant in Paradise should be expressed in song. Secondly, music was very extensively studied in Dante’s time, and certain branches of the art had been brought to a high pitch of perfection. Thirdly, Dante himself had, besides a considerable knowledge, a very real and intimate love of music, as is attested by his biographers Boccaccio and Bruni and also by many allusions in his own works.

Owing, no doubt, to the high stage of development which music has reached in the present epoch, there is a tendency nowadays to underrate the importance of mediaeval music, to overlook the fact that music of great artistic merit was composed, and that it was studied not only as an abstruse science but also as a living art.

It is true that instrumental music was, if judged by the standards of to-day, of a most elementary description. A great variety of instruments existed, but—as far as we can tell—their quality was very poor, and they appear only to have been used to accompany singing, dancing and marching, never independently. The orchestra as we know it, or even as it was known in the seventeenth century, was non-existent.

‘ON a gloomy and foggy day, one of the worst and foggiest which even London can produce,’ James Elroy Flecker was born in Gilmore Road, Lewisham. The date was November 5th 1884, and his father, the Rev. W. H. Flecker, was the first headmaster of the City of London College School. The future poet

As a child he was obstinate, very observant, and sensitive, with a nervousness which ‘rendered him liable to all kinds of fears,’ and a passionate temper which often’ culminated in outbursts of almost uncontrollable screaming.’ He had an early terror and dread of water, and ‘he screamed until he was taken out of sight and sound of the sea.’ When he was older, having been forced at the age of five to accept the drastic remedy of being taught to swim, he found his great delight in bathing, whether in sea, lake, or river, and,

I suppose it is foolish to read Assyriology all day, especially when you have a cold. However, I did it, and my brain was a seething mass of Tiglath-Pilesers, Assurbanipals, and Sennacheribs by the time I went to bed. Sleep was impossible, so I took my never-failing recipe. I turned on the light and got down a book descriptive of glorious days on Irish rivers and lakes in pursuit of glorious fish. Fish began to rise, lines to cut through the water and reels to sing, and then drowsiness came. Out went the light and I slept.

‘So that is the Tigris,’ I said, as I peered at the muddy stream flowing between its low banks. ‘Yes, and those, I suppose, are Nebi Yunus, Nimroud and the other mounds I have heard of.’ They looked very uninteresting somehow, and I turned and gazed at the flowing stream.

Why, bless my soul! That was a fish rising ! Look at his broad tail! By jove, it is a salmon !’

How I longed for a rod ! And just then I realised that I had one, a familiar old 16 ft. Castle-Connel. I slapped my pocket, and there was my fly-case, and yes, wonderful to relate, there was my pocket gaff in its place! Was there a cast on? Yes, with a ‘Green Parson’ and a ‘Silver Doctor.’ Deftly I began to get out line, ten yards, fifteen, twenty; that’s all I can safely do, though experts will sneer. The favourite old ‘Green Parson’ was just getting over him when a voice at my elbow said in raucous tones, ‘By Istar of Arbela, what are you doing to my river?’

I turned with a jump, and then my knees gave in and I trembled from head to foot. Not a doubt as to who it was.