By Economics we mean the conclusions arrived at by man in his study of the production and distribution of material wealth.

These conclusions are often called, with much solemnity, “laws” ; and if by “law” is meant something that has been observed to happen every time a certain set of conditions are present the word may pass.

For instance, the economic “law of diminishing returns” is the simple conclusion that there is a limit to the amount of labour that may be applied profitably to any given area. Half an hour spent daily on the plants in flower-pots or window-boxes should produce a profitable return, and another quarter of an hour may produce an increased return. But two hours would bring a diminishing return, that is, something certainly less than four times the good result of the half-hour’s attention. So with an allotment. Double crops may be obtained by the additional labour of a second person, but six people working on the same allotment will not produce six times as much harvest. A point is always reached by the “law of diminishing returns” when no more labour can be expended profitably on any given piece of work.

The recent Conference of Church of England Modernists has drawn attention to the Fourth Gospel. In calling it the Fourth Gospel we are not minded to deny that it is the Gospel of St. John, the beloved disciple. Indeed, we should be doing violence to our reason, or our reasons, if we did otherwise than believe it to be the eye-witness and ear-witness of him who leaned on the bosom of the Master. But our chief aim is to denote the historic value of this Gospel which, if it is not the eye-witness of the last years of Jesus was assuredly the eye-witness of the first years of His Church. In both cases it is of supreme value as a witness to that consciousness which has been the unique claim of the Catholic Church.

Two preliminaries will clear a way to the centre of our thesis.

The Fourth Gospel is a product of Eastern, not Western Christianity. It is a delicate point of history to decide whether it came from Jerusalem or from Ephesus. In either case its witness to the historic development of the Church can hardly be overrated. If it sprang from Ephesus, it arose out of a Christian consciousness which was definitely the work of St. Paul. If it sprang from Jerusalem, it arose from a Christian consciousness which, at the time of writing, owed little or nothing to St. Peter.

The oral instruction which Jesus had given His apostles had its limitations ; although it may well be doubted whether it had the limitations of written instruction. It is clear that human intelligences could not retain in a state of active consciousness all the sayings and doings of some three years, so filled with activity as to leave little time even for foodtaking.

The Cambridge Conference has created a new crisis in the Church of England. Bishop Gore has publicly complained that a large and important and learned body of men, many of them officials in that Church, hold views which are fundamentally subversive of the whole fabric of Christian belief. To those of the “Catholic party” who ask him what is to be done in this emergency, he confesses he has no short and easy answer to give, but he makes a few suggestions.

These suggestions resolve themselves into a strong argument against defections to the Church of Rome. Dr. Gore declares himself incapable of being a Roman Catholic, on the grounds of his certainty that the Roman Catholic Church requires of its members adhesion to propositions which are unauthorized, untrue, and unhistorical.

It is impossible not to feel for Dr. Gore some of that enthusiastic admiration which his hearers testified on the occasion of this declaration. He is consistent, loyal, and sincere. Though his loyalty is to principles which are not ours, and his consistency achieved by a logic from which we dissent, we cannot, and we would not, refuse him the honour due to his intelligence, his integrity, and his unflinching courage.

It is a custom with that venerable institution, the Aristotelian Society, to elect each year a new President whose duty it is to open proceedings with a Presidential Address. Dr. F. C. S. Schiller, our President for this year, chose as his subject “Novelty,” and endeavoured to prove first and foremost that novelty exists, “or rather occurs.” One wonders whether this was quite necessary, novelty is so very obvious everywhere. But we suppose that it must have been ; and there are at any rate people, known as Eleatics, who are supposed to have denied its existence, though illustrating it by their own. In any case, Dr. Schiller did prove it; if in no other way, by the very fact that a President of the venerable Aristotelian Society should have talked to us about milliners and tailors and the fashion of dressing one’s hair.

He was not quite so successful, however, it seems to me, in establishing his second point, namely, that hatred of novelty exists and is man’s normal attitude. Our President, at any rate, is an exception here again ; and in his philosophic studies has nobly resisted the “inertia, laziness, custom, timidity, stupidity, the whole brood of Habit and Ignorance” which “combine their forces to repulse the new.” He admits that there are exceptions, however ; and mentions as instances the love of novelty in fashion, and the craving for news. Science also has “looked with favour upon novelty in the last century or two.” But this is not enough. Science has not only favoured novelty in the last century or two : it lives upon novelty and always has done so.

The sacred buildings of Lourdes are not good. Lovers of architecture will find little in Lourdes except the rugged castle walls and tower, best seen from the roof of the Rosary Church, and a few houses in the old town such as the humble but truly picturesque dwelling of Bernadette, now buried between a raised causeway on the castle hill and a tall commercial building facing the street and belonging to her living kinsfolk. Few, if any, will dispute Huysmans’ contention that the wanton destruction of Bernadette’s parish church, a most valuable example of very early Romanesque, and the substitution of a blatant modern parody, was a disastrous folly. It is difficult to understand the mind of those who needlessly destroy a tenth-century parish church, yet further endeared by the prayers of the humble child whom Our Blessed Lady chose for her handmaiden. How rich is fair France in these most humble servants of God, so specially fitted to give confidence and kindle hope in our feeble, sinful souls ! St. Genevieve, St. Joan of Arc, St. Margaret Mary, the Blessed Curé of Ars, and now within living memory the meek, shy Bernadette Soubirous ! As St. Bernard said of Our Blessed Lady, there is in these her servants “nothing austere, nothing terrible.” The loss of the building where she received her Maker and made unnumbered visits to the Blessed Sacrament is one of the irreparable losses due to perverse human wilfulness.

I have just been reading—rather late in the day—A Spiritual Æneid, a fascinating book ‘in which Father Ronald Knox tells the story of his conversion from Anglicanism to the Catholic faith. To me these accounts of conversion are always interesting, whether they relate the process that led the convert from unbelief to belief or whether they describe that other style of conversion, I mean that awakening from a dead faith and no works to a keen and enthusiastic practice of the virtue of religion.

But although conversions do not fascinate everyone, few who notice them can remain indifferent. The strongest emotions are aroused, anger and repulsion, wonder and scepticism. It sometimes happens that the witness of a conversion is moved to “go and do likewise.” That is to say conversion can become a motive of credibility, a reason for believing. Yet it is curious to notice that, if we except some very recent books, conversion has never before been reckoned among those facta divina of secondary value which, like prophecy and miracles, are the external motives for our accepting revelation as from God.

It is one of the paradoxes of St. Bernard’s life that he, contemplative monk consecrated to silence, has left us more of his reported speech than most of his contemporaries. In his case speech was more golden than silence because he spoke the word of God. He was, if not a man of the world, at least a man of his century who saw clearly that men were drifting from God through ignorance. At a time when preaching was considered the peculiar duty of bishops and not the business of mere monks and priests, Bernard, monk and recluse, became a foremost preacher. It is true the bulk of his sermons that have survived the lapse of time were preached within the walls of his monastery, but we know that he was one of the first monks to bring preaching out of the cloister—witness his campaign in France and the Rhineland when he preached the Second Crusade. He was, indeed, a true precursor of the age that ushered in the Preaching Friar.

If the arduous and too often ungrateful task of translation be one of the sincerest tributes which can be paid to a great literary artist, the supreme poet of Catholic Christendom has no cause to complain of his treatment in this country, at any rate during the last century. With the exception of Homer, no poet has been so often and so painstakingly interpreted in English as Dante. Curiously enough, however, all the English versions of the Divina Commedia in its entirety, or of any one of the Canticles, have appeared in comparatively recent times. Until the close of the eighteenth century Dante was unduly neglected by most Englishmen, though Chaucer, Milton, and Gray were notable exceptions. However, his first translator worthy of the name, Henry Francis Cary, was, though virtually a pioneer, a very late one, born (in 1772) more than five centuries later than his “master and author.” Cary was the contemporary of Scott and Wordsworth and the friend of Charles Lamb and Coleridge; he was a quiet, scholarly clergyman, whom Lamb compared to Goldsmith’s Parson Primrose and honoured with his affection to the extent of getting harmlessly tipsy at his table.