Is it too soon to write on a country after having been in it only a fortnight? Or should we not rather say, if one stayed in a country longer than a fortnight, one would not have enough courage to write about it at all. You see, a fortnight just gives one time to take the most superficial view of things. Later on, mere knowledge brings disconcertment. You might learn too many details, too many contrary instances, to fit in with the generalizations you had first made. Yet after all it is our first impressions that are nearly always truer. Instinct, the illative sense, the intellectus of the Scholastics, the “morning knowledge of the Angels” in the fantastic Africanism of St. Augustine, these are finer than reason, aren’t they? at least more to be trusted? Why it is the very age of instinct! “We feel that we are greater than we know.” So here I shall set down my account of the condition of Ireland after a fortnight in Cork.

Yes, but whom did I see and talk to? Well, there you are. That does, of course, make a great difference. The class, the temperament, the political outlook, must each give a twist to the expression of opinions and help one to know how much to accept and how much to discount. By your leave, however, I shall give no names, for a third-class railway ticket, the conversation of priests and undergraduates, oh, and nuns, why there you have the most perfect instruments whence to hear the music of real public opinion.

The problem of the just pagan has haunted the imagination of Christendom. It troubled Dante. It raises for us the question—What is the relation of all that is noble in the pagan world to the Christian faith? How far was the mind of that world prepared by its past to receive that faith ; how far was that preparative element the outcome of chance or of Divine purpose? And as we regard history in the light of a mere record of human activity or of the unfolding of that purpose, so will our answer be.

In the De Civitate Dei, Saint Augustine gathers together the history and the faculties of man and relates them to the Will of God. Eusebius entitled one of his books the Prœparatio Evangelica. Clement of Alexandria wrote in the second century, “To the Jews was given the Law, to the heathens Philosophy, to guide them to Christ.” And later in the same book, “Greek philosophy prepares the soul for receiving faith on which the truth builds knowledge” ( ). And Augustine himself asserts in his Retractations that “what we now call the Christian religion existed among the ancients and was from the beginning of the human race until Christ Himself came in the flesh ; from which time the already existing true religion began to be styled Christian.”

By the design of Divine Providence vanity has been from the beginning the virtue of male creatures. That he should take a pride in his physical condition and appearance is a necessity of the male, and vanity is designed for his advancement. This fact is sufficiently obvious throughout the whole of the animal creation, and the peacock, though a flagrant exemplar of the principle, is by no means an exceptionally fine bird. On the other hand, we are not aware of the existence of any female creature which so much as vies with her male, and certainly of none that rivals him. And this fact is as remarkable as it is obvious. There is more in it than meets the eye ! Surely it is of Divine origin, and surely a female peacock would be a monstrosity.

But however it may be among the animals, among human beings the case is to-day reversed. Drab clothing is so generally the apparel of the male that the vision of the peacock in his finery suggests to us a female thing and, were it not for his name, we should actually suppose him to be a she.

Mr. G. K. CHESTERTON, in what is really a brilliant essay on the part played by the Church in the history of England, has an illuminating illustration of the influence of Christianity on slavery. He points out that the Church did not agitate for abolition by legislation, but created an atmosphere in which slavery simply could not exist. As for the slave, an interesting process resulted. He had been the stick of his master, to be used for any purpose and broken at will, but under this influence he was first rooted in the ground and became a serf, and then threw out branches upward and roots downward and became a citizen.

That atmosphere has taken some time to dissipate. When, in the sixteenth century, the spiritual concept of one Empire under the tutelage of one Church broke down, there emerged from the resulting confusion National States which have increasingly tended to repudiate all direct concern for religion. In the new political entities, the spiritual functions of the Church were first strictly limited but officially recognized ; they have increasingly come to be regarded, however, as in no wise within the sphere of politics. The Catholic Church has long since predicted the result. In our own day we are beginning to see it.

Changing somewhat the meaning, we may apply to Père Lagrange what St. Paul says of himself: “To the Greeks and to the Barbarians I am a debtor.” In his work Le Sens du Christianisme d'après l'Exégèse Allemande now translated into English under the title The Meaning of Christianity according to Luther and his Followers in Germany, he is concerned to show how the effort to create a distinctively German religion, which should be imposed upon the rest of the world by the ascendancy of the German peoples and of their culture, was doomed to failure ; but at the same time he does not forget to discharge a simple debt of justice.

Rome, the heiress of the ancient civilization and the teacher of the Christian faith, he reminds us in his Preface, educated the German barbarians; and Germany brought new forces to Rome. In the great body of Christendom, Germany represented a distinct civilization—distinct, indeed, but one which was not isolated. Even after Luther, Germany, for a long time, seemed as careful to maintain her place in the concert of European nations as she was to show independence of Rome. Even when, at the end of the eighteenth century, she made up her mind to keep more to herself, she yet sheltered her own renaissance under the genius of Shakespeare, and Goethe urged her to draw from Greek sources a sense of proportion and of form, to borrow from the French Theatre its nobility and its beauty.

A Number of artists practising the art of wood engraving, have formed themselves into a Society for the purpose of holding Exhibitions from time to time.

Membership of the Society is confined to those who use the European method of wood engraving. This method, distinguished from the Japanese or Eastern method by the fact that prints are obtained by means of the printing-press, is more suitable to the tradition and temperament of European artists, and is of greater utility in connection with book production and decoration.

Decoration (a word formerly always prefixed by the word “mere”) is now returning to its right place at the head of artistic activities. In a decoration the artist is forced to consider the actual beauty of his work, and only secondly the beauty of the story or scene depicted. And as the bootmaker, however useful he may be as a voter, is as a workman primarily a maker of footwear, so the artist, however useful he may be as a story-teller is, as an artist, primarily a maker of things of beauty and not things of sentiment.