When the Church pays honour to the remains of the Saints, when, for example, she translates them with pomp and ceremony, she wishes not only to invite us to venerate their relics, but also to draw a lesson from their memory. Even when for mere social or natural reasons we gather round an illustrious tomb, there is not just homage to be paid, but also a lesson to be learnt. On a tombstone we read at a glance the whole story of a life, its chief moral features and its meaning. In this we find one of the many reasons that justify the veneration of relics. At the first translation of the body of St. Dominic, so touchingly described by Blessed Jordan, there took place a wonderful manifestation of the merits of the holy Patriarch's life. The miraculous perfume which clung to the hands of Blessed Jordan was a lesson as well as a testimony. Lesson and testimony—both teaching and attesting his admirable purity. But to seize the full meaning of that lesson, we must connect that heavenly testimony with the last recommendations of St. Dominic on his death-bed.

Just as St. Francis, when dying, desired to be laid naked on the ashes, so St. Dominic on his death-bed, by an act of sublime simplicity, strips his soul before our eyes. It is sad to see modern historians, blind to the beauty of that scene, toning down its most striking features. Père Lacordaire is perhaps among the few who have gauged its true significance.

The death of Gilbert Keith Chesterton—or “ G.K.,” as we called him—allows us to see his life as a complete and unique whole.

Looked at merely as a thing of art, the three score and two crowded years between birth in London and burial in Beaconsfield seem to make a full circle or indeed cycle of doings and happenings. Later on his autobiography will let us listen to the man who made the story telling the story or history he has made. But though every line of it will speak the master-craftsman of words, it will be a masterpiece in the humility of self-effacement. We have no hopes that it will deliberately help us to see his life’s pilgrimage from London to Beaconsfield—from Canterbury to Rome—almost as an Arthurian epic.

For one thing we shall be grateful to the artist’s portrait of himself. It will be a vera effigies. It will leave out nothing that would be a loss to truth. And though it cannot speak of how the artist’s life ended in death, it will leave its readers convinced that death came to Gilbert Chesterton in a certain fulness of time and fulness of intelligence.

For us who are left there is deep consolation in the way he left us. We saw no slackening of his handiwork; nor any lessening of its power. He did not set slowly like our northern sun. He was as a ploughman turning his best and last furrow when the master said, “Call the workers; and give them their wage. ‘’

“IF I had not fallen for G.K. in 1900 I should have been caught by the Webbs in 1910.” I quote this sentence from a letter recently received because it may remind many of a fate they also escaped. The Fabian, as we now know, did not offer an alternative to Capitalism, he offered fetters of security and sufficiency; a better ordered world of which, even before the war, there seemed a need. The slums were awful and the rich corrupt, we did not question the qualities of the Fabian remedy. The young were to be nourished in clinics and educated in schools, the unfit exterminated, the old fed and clothed like the lilies of the field, the dead collected by a municipal Carter Paterson. The people were to control the means of production and distribution, text books on economics were to replace the Bible and everything was to be efficient. Fabian tracts, black with statistics and documented to the nth degree, were found upon the bookstalls, experts became as eloquent as the blue books from which they preached. Sanitation was exalted into a religion and hygiene accepted among the gods. The whole was spiced, for those reaching the more active areas of propaganda, by a certain laxity in morals, an evidence of escape from Victorianism. This looseness was to be discouraged among the poor, who were to be kept sober if not righteous; though not godly they were to be maintained at least in health.

The lugubrious procession of economists, welfare workers, mother Grundies and busy bodies was held up by a circus.

In view of the manifold interests of contemporary psychology and of the searching criticism in regard to the meaning and foundations of psychology to which we called attention in a previous contribution, the question of the possibility of a Catholic psychology arises with a certain amount of urgency.

The Catholic student, whether of psychology in general or other subjects in which psychology may enter, as well as the educated layman interested in such subjects, sometimes asks whether there is any Catholic book on Psychology to which he may turn for guidance. One has had to admit regretfully that, outside the manuals of philosophy written primarily for the use of ecclesiastical students, there do not appear to be any which quite meet the needs of the lay student. It is true that books dealing with various aspects of modern psychology have from time to time been written by Catholic professors of the science. We may mention, for instance, one by Prof. T. V. Moore, O.S.B., of the Catholic University of Washington, D.C., Dynamic Psychology, and another by Prof. John Lindworsky, S.J., of the University of Prague, Experimental Psychology. There are others by continental writers not translated into English, but all of these works deal with scientific psychology, and do not touch upon philosophical problems. When therefore we speak of Catholic psychology we have to ask in what sense the expression is to be understood, and what precisely is to be sought from a Catholic book on Psychology as distinct from any other.

“Protection of savings! ‘’ seems to be the guiding slogan of new financial regulations lately introduced in Belgium; according to the new C.S.G. Year-book. In the United States, also, the New Deal legislation in regard of banking and Stock Exchange professes to aim at “protecting the investor,” which sounds much the same thing. This is well enough as far as it goes, but a truly Catholic sociology must needs point out that there are other objectives, even more urgent, to which Governments should direct their monetary policy. If we need protection of savings, we also need protection from savings. It is right that people who save money should be protected from their own over-eager avarice and from the financial sharks who take advantage of it; and it is equally necessary that the community in general should be protected from accumulations of money, large or small, which are used in ways injurious to the common good.

Nineteenth century philosophy took for granted that thrift and saving was always a good and meritorious habit. Nowadays we are not so sure. We can see that this business of saving is at the bottom of the whole money muddle. If there had been no savings there would have been no banks to look after them, no lending of them at interest, no invention of credit-creation, no national debts. The old Christian and Catholic teaching, of course, condemned saving (in effect) as sinful. Everybody was supposed to give away his surplus income to those who hadn’t enough; money saved was money that ought to have been spent on the poor.

Habit is one of those things that everyone knows about, but few can correctly define. The common notion of it as the getting used to a thing, finding it easier to do, acquiring a taste for it, or permitting it to get a hold on one, is all very well as far as it goes, but it does not bring us very far after all. Can we hope to make things any better by invoking the aid of psychology and philosophy? Well, of course it is possible in this way to throw some light on the subject, and especially to render it more interesting by linking it up with the more attractive problems of these sciences; but when all is said and done, our ignorance of important aspects of the question will, from the very nature of the case, still largely outweigh our knowledge.

St. Thomas, following Aristotle, has defined habit as “A quality, not easily admitting of change, which modifies its subject, either in the sense of improving or impairing it, in its inner constitution or in the exercise of its activities.” Like all the definitions of Aristotle, this one, for all that it has a rather commonplace air, possesses a really vast depth of meaning.

A habit must not, however, be regarded merely as the sum total of a series of impressions, but rather as the unique and indivisible resultant of them all. It bears an analogy, not so much to a cinema film, with its graduated series of distinct though almost similar photographs, which, when flashed rapidly across the screen, produce the illusion of a continuous motion, as to a composite photograph, the distilled essence of several exposures combined.

Recently the Dominicans of Blackfriars, Oxford, have become possessors, through the munificence of Miss Jean Smith, of a most valuable liturgical manuscript, a Dominican Gradual, which on examination proves to be contemporary with the establishment of the Order’s special rite by Humbert de Romans between 1254 and 1260. Hitherto only four examples have been known to exist, two of which, including the Codex Humbertinus, are in Dominican hands. Now this newly discovered Codex has been returned to the Order that produced it, but whereas the Codex Humbertinus was recovered, during the French Revolution, only at a great price, the Blackfriars MS. was most munificently restored, as a free gift, by one to whom the English Dominican Province thus owes a tremendous debt of gratitude.

The volume was undoubtedly written between 1254 and 1263, seeing that it contains the Mass of St. Peter Martyr but lacks those of St. Anthony of Padua and St. Edward the Confessor, whose feasts respectively were ordered to be celebrated throughout the Order by the General Chapters of Barcelona in 1261 and of London in 1263; whilst the Mass of Corpus Christi, with its famous sequence Lauda Sion, granted to the Order in 1264 has been inserted by a later hand between the de Tempore and the Proprium Sanctorum. The book throughout is written in extremely well-executed lettering, each minuscule letter being 5 cm. high, and there is an abundance of ornamented capitals done exclusively in blue and red, all of exquisite workmanship. The whole consists of 235 folios on vellum, each folio measuring 35.5 x 25 cm.