It cannot be truly said that my case has been what people call a flash in the pan. No boyish enthusiasm was it that carried me away, no feeling that I should hardly scruple to qualify as ‘sentimental.’ It was something absolutely serious, an absorbing interest. I wanted to ease my mind, I wanted to know where He was going. For His part, when He called me, I am fairly compelled to suppose that He distinctly knew what He was about. To follow Him without hesitation, I sacrificed my family, my friends, my fortune, my position. There has always been in me a kind of scientific or psychological curiosity, call it what you will, at the same time with a relish for adventure and speculation. All those stories of the pearl of price, of mysterious estates no one knows where, yielding fruit an hundred fold, I must confess them all calculated to fire a young man’s heart with the noblest ambitions. I swallowed the hook. Besides, I was not the only one to get caught. There were all those worthy fish-scrapers. But on the other hand, I saw well-to-do and well-thought-of persons like Lazarus, women of the world, masters in Israel like Joseph and Nico-demus, falling at His feet. You never know. After all, since the Romans came, a man may say he has seen all sorts. I wanted to know just all there was to know, and follow the thing from start to finish.

I was speaking to a crowd on Parliament Hill Fields. In answer to a persistent questioner whom I admired for his youth I said somewhat testily: ‘Freewill is not omnipotent; it is not the power of doing what we like, but of willing what we like.’ He replied at once, and as I thought, not without a certain nimbleness of wit ‘In other words, freewill is only the power of willing what we will.’ He laughed and I think the crowd laughed as if I had happened upon an absurdity.

For a moment I was numbed by the nimbleness of the reply and the spontaneity of the laughter. Then suddenly I saw how the youth’s paradoxical form of words had thrown light, where I had long wished light to be thrown, upon the essential action of freedom. I therefore looked my questioner in the face as I said: ‘Yes, free-will is essentially the power to will what we will. Other animals can will this or that, can will to run or to lie down—-can will to chase their quarry or to flee danger. But no animal wills to will. You can control a man’s body, and sometimes by controlling his body you can control his intelligence, but you cannot control his will. You may throw him to death over a cliff; but you cannot control him to will or not to will to be thrown.’

We are glad to begin these notes with the work of the Institute of Mediaeval Studies established at Ottawa. The two volumes under review are the real primitiae of a new series and, with the exception of one contribution, deal with doctrinal and literary problems of the thirteenth century. As one may expect in such a publication, not all the essays have the same value and importance; but all of them deserve praise for their accuracy and rigorous historical method, which prove the efficiency and activity of the Institute.

The eminent mediaevalist, Père Chenu, O.P , director of the Institute, opens these studies by publishing from a MS. of the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris most interesting and valuable information on some of the leading professors at the University of Paris about the year 1240. The MS., in a very difficult script, is a reportatio, or as we should say, a note-book, of a diligent student of the University of Paris who, day by day following the classes of several professors, carefully reported their lectures. By the aid of this MS. we may reconstruct the intellectual life of the great University in the years immediately preceding the period of St. Albert the Great, St. Bonaventure, and St. Thomas Aquinas. Several Baccalaurei and Magistri not elsewhere mentioned are here rediscovered. Thus we have the introitus, or inaugural lecture, of four baccalaurei sententiarii, Peter the Archbishop, Stephen de Poliniaco, John Pagus, and Odon Rigaud. They reappear in the following year, with the exception of Odon, whose place is taken by a certain Adam. The lectura on the Sentences or on the Bible follows in the MS. according as the professor was Bachelor or Master. Père Chenu has succeeded in his historical notes in gathering from scattered elements data which enable us to settle more than one historical problem, as, for instance, the chronology of the Dominican Albert the Great and of the Franciscan Odon Rigaud.

That misconception which interpreted the moderative virtues as habitual repressions only, seems to be vanishing in many signihcant quarters from the modern mind; and it will now be perhaps very largely conceded that chastity and temperance may possess other vital elements than an automatic negation ot corporal pleasures. It is in proportion as these vital elements are understood that Gerard Hopkins will be appreciated, tor they are the integrating factors of his great sensitive and poetic powers.

Castitas dupliciter sumitur: . ... et metaphorice . . . . pro moderatione delectationis quae oritur ex conjunctione mentis ad objectum. Moderation, here, as always, is the operative word, and it is significant of the times we live in that it should at once suggest, not conformity to order and right reason, a vital use informed by the intelligence, but a less than full use. But rightly a use conformable to reason is a full use par excellence, not only on the part of the intelligence which vindicates its proper activity, but also on the part of the thing used, be that the erotic faculty or the poetic sensibility, which, by direction towards its proper end, gains power and does not lose it, gains joy also and does not lose it; because the intelligence alone can use it according to the true nature of its being. It is arguable that a man unchaste and disbelieving in the principles by which chastity is a true virtue may be wider and more vehement in his pleasures than a chaste man, but he is denied the joy of the chaste man, to which pleasure is but fuel, because he has set his senses to war against the real nature both of his mind and of the pleasures involved.

Somewhat over three years ago, the Catholic Church was rejoiced by the conversion of Mar Ivanios, the schismatic Metropolitan of Trivandrum on the Malabar Coast of India, together with his suffragan bishop, Mar Theophilus, and many of their followers, both clerical and lay. The body to which these distinguished converts belonged is the Jacobite Church, and the details of these events are still fresh in the minds of most Catholics by reason of the steady stream of conversions from the Jacobite ranks that has gone on ever since the submission to Rome of Mar Ivanios and Mar Theophilus. But it seems to the writer of this article that there is a considerable lack of clarity on the part of those who have chronicled these happenings as to the exact nature and position of the Jacobites in India—one is told, for example, that the particular branch to which Mar Ivanios belonged split off from some other body, but what that parent body is or was is not made clear. It would seem, therefore, that it is not out of place to endeavour to trace the history and character of the church which formerly numbered Mar Ivanios as its most distinguished member.

The region with which our story deals is the undulating stretch of country which lies along the south-western coast of India between the sea and the Anamullay mountains. It stretches for about two hundred miles from Mangalore on the north to Cape Comorin, and includes British Malabar and the native states of Travancore and Cochin.

To understand who the Jacobites are and what their name means we must go back several centuries. The story is a complicated one, and as a beginning we must say something about a schismatical body which stands doctrinally at the opposite pole to the Jacobites.

Anna de Noailles has died recently in Paris

To anyone with a rudimentary interest in French currents of thought or literature the fact signalizes at once a loss and a liberation. The loss is to a pul'He of readers, the liberation has come, one hopes, to herself. Madame de Noailles, in a generation of poets obsessed to an unprecedented extent by the fear of death, was pre-eminent in that fear. Two motives may be said exclusively to inspire her poems and, of the two, the horror of death predominated.

Although by birth a Princess de Brancovan, of the Bibescos who so long ago as in 1300 were prince-rulers of Valachia, Anna de Noailles was born, in 1876, in Paris where her family possessed, in the Avenue Hoche, a strange eastern palace straight from the Thousand and One Nights. Her mother was a Greek and also a princess, of the house of Musurus. ‘I am of that country,’ wrote her daughter, ‘which begins in Asia and stretches as far as Sicily.’

The centenary of the Oxford Movement brings to mind Robert Stephen Hawker, the High Church clergyman and poet who lived right through the hey-day of the Movement entirely unaffected by it, and was received into the Catholic Church on his death-bed. He is the subject of one of the most entertaining of biographies, The Vicar of Morwenstow, by the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould, which was published in 1876, the year after Hawker’s death. Baring-Gould was a Devonshire High Church parson and squire. He wrote the hymn ‘Onward Christian Soldiers,’ three or four good novels, and a number of books on West Country traditions and antiquities. He had a huge appreciation of unusual characters and was the ideal biographer for so altogether striking a character as Mr. Hawker.

Robert Stephen Hawker was born at Plymouth in 1804. In his boyhood and youth he had a reputation as a dangerous practical joker. Baring-Gould relates several of the tricks that he played which are classics of their kind. Along with this exuberance he had a religious and poetical mind. At the age of seventeen he issued his first poems in a little book called ‘Tendrils by Reuben.’ He proceeded to the University of Oxford and was destined for the Anglican ministry. When he was twenty the family finances were involved in some misfortune and his career was almost wrecked for lack of means. As soon as he heard what had happened, Robert, who was at home, rushed off and proposed to an old friend of his, a Miss I’Ans, who was forty years old and who had a considerable income. She accepted him. He was able to continue his studies and the marriage was happy and successful.

‘The desire for order is a primary need of our nature, of our minds and bodies .... In the sphere of society man desires primarily a clear order, the deep satisfaction of knowing himself bound up with that which is moving to some defined end.’

There is nowadays no dearth of writers whose theme is the condemnation of our modern chaos. They fall, usually, into one of two distinct classes: there is the pure satirist, mildly mocking or disgustedly slashing but with no positive advice as to how our Humpty Dumpty should be put together again; there is the perhaps more placid person whose solution is ready to hand and whose only difficulty lies in the apparent hopelessness of getting the world to accept that solution. Miss Storm Jameson belongs to neither camp. She does not mock, and though she hits hard it is, one feels, in real sorrow and not in righteous anger; and, on the other hand, while she sees in what direction the solution must lie, it is by no means cut and dried for her. Our trouble is that ‘there is no end solution, no Good, no value greater than all the others, to which we can relate and subordinate our separate lesser values’; we know the evil of that disruption, that ‘division between man’s outer and inner life, which starts with the Renaissance.’ But the modern world cannot ‘turn back .... to the medieval supremacy of the Church’; ‘formal religion’ has collapsed. And meanwhile, we bow the knee to the ‘bitch-goddess, Success,’ and at the same time seem all too likely to turn renegade even to that religion by suicidally plunging into another war.

AN ASPECT OF RUSSIAN COMMUNISM

Sir,

A correct understanding of Communism, both in theory and in practice, is perhaps at this moment the most important of all questions facing the civilised world. Therefore at the risk of tiring your readers I revert to it again. In a letter published two months ago your contributor, Fr. J. F. T. Prince, expressed the opinion that only personal knowledge of the situation could discredit the views expressed by him in a series of articles. As personal knowledge may always be questioned, whatever the qualifications of the writer, I prefer to give the translation of an official document, reference to which has already appeared in the daily Press. It is the report of Comrade Steinhart, head of the Politsector mtc (political section?), North Caucasus, to the Central Committee of the (Communist) Party, published in the official daily Pravda, Moscow, August 8th. A copy of this paper has been secured at the Soviet Bookshop, Bush House, and can be produced, if necessary. I believe it is now unobtainable. The translator has aimed at preserving the style and language of the original, though a few paragraphs have been curtailed.

‘REPORT

of Comrade Steinhart to the C.C. of the R.C.P. upon the safeguarding of the collective crops.

‘According to the initiative of the Political Section of North Caucasus a number of measures have been taken for the enlisting of the children of the collective farms (Kolkhosy) for the safeguarding of the harvest. On July 2nd the Kraikom (Regional Committee) of the Russian Communist Party agreed with the suggestion of the Political Section upon this question. Units of “light cavalry” formed from children of the collective farms and “pioneers” (soviet scouts) have already been organized.