Mr. Purcell’s Life of Cardinal Manning has so long held the field and the market that it may be questioned whether it can be ever supplanted or at most supplemented, for its claim was certainly to be exclusive and inclusive. A quarter of a century has elapsed since Mr. Gladstone congratulated the author on writing “the history of a soul, a dividing of marrow and bone,” and leaving so little for disclosure on the Day of Judgment. And few critics have questioned the finality of that utterance.

It is well known that Mr. Purcell differed from most biographers by committing no sins of omission with the signal exception of an autobiographical note on the corporate action of the Society of Jesus in England. Mystery veils this as well as the memory of Mr. Purcell himself. As an orthodox and humble journalist his name sometimes occurs in the papers of ecclesiastics. Mr. Purcell had for a time conducted an ultramontane but unsuccessful venture in journalism, for he later confided to Archbishop Ullathorne of Birmingham (November 2, 1881), “Since giving up the Westminster Gazette I have been exclusively engaged in writing for non-Catholic papers.” His Life of Manning was presumably written for the same public. By the year 1887 the Cardinal, being anxious to recoup him for his losses, allowed him to begin to write a brief Memoir of himself, to be published and scrutinized in his own lifetime. He lent him one of his diaries on condition that it should not be quoted, but he had already suggested that Mr. J. E. C. Bodley should write the final Life, and had given leave to Mr. Bodley to remove his notebooks and diaries.

What causes most despair to anyone who tries to persuade people in England of the real state of affairs in Ireland is the answer that invariably follows every attempt to overcome a deep-rooted incredulity, that “we can do nothing until you Irishmen agree among yourselves.” One of the impressions that affected me most strongly on returning to Ireland after an absence of four years, was that of a unanimity among all classes such as has never existed in Ireland before. In a sense, it is the unity that is to be found among the passengers of a ship which has been set on fire. But the present unity of political feeling in Ireland is far more deep than any transient emotion of that kind. It is much more genuine and more remarkable than was the unity which prevailed in this country during the war. It is no mere suspension of party strife, but the real and lasting discovery of common interests and a common outlook upon life.

Go where you please in Ireland, outside the four eastern counties of Ulster, and you will find only one attitude and one aspiration from Donegal to Wexford, or from Galway to Dublin. In what follows, I do not speak of Unionist Ulster. The gulf between the four Unionist counties and the rest of Ireland is more open and more difficult to bridge over than it has ever been. Those whose deliberate policy it has been to frustrate the national movement in Ireland by setting North against South have achieved their purpose as fully as they could ever have wished.

The strongest human emotion being love, it is not surprising that art should so commonly have been prompted and sustained by this emotion. And since the highest love that a creature can receive is that of his Maker for himself, and the highest he can give is that of himself for his. Maker, it is not surprising that religion should have inspired and controlled so many art works.

I am not forgetting the contributions of Paganism. But may it not be said that they were great in so far as they sprang from the human emotion of love, or were informed by great ethical ideals and aspirations towards the worship of an Infinite Being?

In an essay, “Paganism, Old and New,” Francis Thompson shows that the poetry and beauty of Paganism arise merely from an “idealising retrospective.” “Pagan Paganism,” he says, “was not poetical . . . the poetry of Paganism is chiefly a modern creation.” And as to beauty, he says, “When Heine, addressing the Venus of Melos called her ‘Our Lady of Beauty’ the idea no less than the expression, was centrally modern. I will go further— it was centrally Christian.”

We write no longer as we did in pre-war days. We express ourselves more drastically, go straighter to the point than before. If art has lost something in the process, truth has, on the whole, gained. Flung in lean years upon reality, we ourselves nave grown in some ways harder and more brutal, in others, simpler and more sincere. The moving spirit of the times has made us impatient of devious ways in life, of compromise. We take short cuts to our meaning when we have a meaning at all. Weak work, “pretty” work, mawkish work, is frankly disregarded by all but the most incompetent or immature critic. The price of paper, the expense of transport and the increased rates of library subscriptions make us chary of accumulating purely ephemeral stuff. There is, I suppose, in the hearts of most of us, some sense of shortened time, of lessened opportunity, to make us instinctively value what seems powerful and strong in these uncertain hours which Bolshevism or some other power may lay waste when we know not.

Writers who once held us through cheap means, or whose work had nothing to recommend it but some trick of graceful phrasing, have either learned to think, or dropped out of the widened literary circle altogether, because they could not meet the demands it made upon them. The writers of the past who still move us to-day are men who always had something to say that was worth hearing, and said it with a certain virility and strength.

In this very full and trustworthy account by an Anglican clergyman of the notable doings of a group of Church of England men in the nineteenth century two things, in especial, are of interest to Catholics to-day : (i) The movement called Christian Socialist. (2) The self-governing workshop.

(1) It was at the time of the first stirrings of the Second Spring in England—a time when Protestant “society” felt its very foundations shaken by the conversion of Newman and by “Roman aggression,” and believed all law and order about to be overturned by revolutionary Chartists—that the Christian Socialists, whose antecedents may be traced to Carlyle, Coleridge, and Southey, came to the front. Shocked at the horrors perpetrated on men, women, and children by triumphant and unrestrained capitalism, at the sweating, the insanitary dwellings of the poor, at the widespread misery in a land where vast riches were conspicuous, the Christian Socialists, of whom F. D. Maurice, Charles Kingsley, and J. M. Ludlow were the chiefs, declared that the social question must not be left to freethinkers for its solution, and that the Christian people of God must take their part against “the unsocial Christians and the unchristian socialists.” The word Socialism has always been used loosely in this country, and the inability to agree upon a common and exact definition has provoked a vast amount of irrelevant controversy.

There is probably no name better known in the realm of psychology than Dr. McDougall’s, and that he should have deserted Oxford and England for Harvard and America will be a matter of continual regret to all who know him and have had the pleasure of listening to his lectures. The fact that his book on Social Psychology should have reached its fifteenth edition in twelve years is eloquent testimony at once to the growing popularity of the subject and to the skill and erudition of the author. Dr. McDougall has rendered us more than one service of inestimable moment. He has put an end at once to the crude materialism which would explain mind in terms of body, and to the atomic associationism which would reduce it to a conglomeration of simple ideas. Whether his arguments prove that the human soul is the evolutionary product of animal mind is open to question, but they at any rate prove that there is a human soul—which is something to be thankful for in days such as ours. They also show clearly that, whether all mental functions are developments of instinct or not, they at any rate play a much more important part in human life than is commonly supposed.