Vulgarity is an elusive nuisance, insinuating itself into the strongholds of propriety, so as to undermine the decencies. There is the kind that debases high things—the Sairey Gamp type. There is the over-valuation of low things—for example, in the eroticism of poor poets; while a no less offensive variety displays itself in superfluous ornamentation: ‘To gild refined gold, to paint the lily ... is wasteful and ridiculous excess.’ In thought, speech and act we incline to indulge in this error of overdoing it.

Now, love of extravagance is a sign of half-trained taste. People so afflicted like everything ‘laid on thick’ : glaring colours, startling contrasts, strident notes, over-stated cases. They are impressed by the arrogance of the bounder, defer to self-assertive ignorance, and squander money on a coloured daub, seeing nothing in the good black and white drawing.

Epochs of Romanticism, periods of exhausted invention : at such times the ailment claims most victims. Why ? Because, like a convivial party having its final fling, it seems the only way to challenge attention.

In the last six cantos of the Purgatorio, Dante describes the Earthly Paradise upon the summit of the Mountain of Purgatory. It is the most allegorical, and therefore the most difficult and fascinating, part of the Commedia. A. F. Ozanam called it the ‘apex’ of the Commedia.

Six times in the course of it the poet tells us that this was the ancient Garden of Eden, the ‘nest’ of the human race. And the emphasis he thus lays upon this identity of place must give us the right key to the interpretation of the wonderful scenes he there witnesses and takes part in. We propose, therefore, to follow the example of the older commentators who saw their theological and spiritual, rather than their political, signification. Here as elsewhere it is necessary to remember that the poet was, primarily, not a politician but a theologian.

In the closing lines of the twenty-seventh canto, Virgil has addressed to Dante his famous last words, ‘Now is thy will free, upright and whole; therefore with crown and mitre I make thee sovereign over thyself.’ And the twenty-eighth canto opens with that most bewitching description of the loveliness of the ‘divine forest,’ its foliage and its birds, which Ruskin quotes in Modern Painters, where he points out the significance of the contrast between its freedom and joyousness and the ‘wild and gloomy wood’ of the Inferno, which even in remembrance, said the poet, still dismayed him.

Again the great day particularly assigned to Bobby comes round with its wealth of honours, gifts, and carefully-chosen distractions—a picnic, if in summer, a matinée, if in winter—the day of days, his own especial feast, the most notable day of the year for him, the birthday of Bobby.

The cultivation of children’s birthdays is of evident importance for their development as self-assertive citizens. It entertains in their juvenile minds a proper sense of individual merit, the necessity of their existence to the rest of the world, and the right which is theirs to pleasures and luxuries. True, the event commemorated, the benefit conferred upon mankind, is not of Bobby’s own volition; but as men are born to glory, as men have, often unwittingly, greatness thrust upon them, so is Bobby made cognisant of his part in the great scheme of things by distinguishing the auspicious day on which he first saw the light. On that day he became the centre of interest in the family circle, an object of complacency to relatives and parents, and a hypothetical cause of joy to the universe. Bobby realises that on his anniversary he is entitled to the fulfilment of all his wishes. Not only does he expect and exact treats and presents of varied description; but his whims may not be thwarted. Everybody yields to him; his brothers and sisters play the games of his predilection, wait on him, court favour with him, admit his claim to be the hero, for this is the day on which Bobby, noble Bobby, has been born into the world. The magnification of self gives to Bobby a poise which will stand him well in the battle of life, and preserve him from an altruism detrimental to his material interests.

A certain man of the world lately astonished his friends by making a pilgrimage to Lisieux. When he was asked what possible interest he had in the ‘Little Flower, he replied with a quotation from Scripture : ‘If I find but ten just souls, surely I will spare the wicked for their sake.’

The thought that lies behind these words was a singularly familiar one in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The world and the cloister were then strangely linked together. In reading the memoirs and biographies of pre-Revolution France, one is struck by the fact that almost everyone, courtier, statesman, financier, soldier, man of letters, man of fashion, had some relation or friend in ‘Religion,’ with whom he corresponded, whom he very occasionally visited, and on whose prayers and penances and vicarious satisfactions he constantly and confidently relied. Those who prayed little for themselves were unaffectedly rejoiced at the thought that there were those who would pray (and suffer) for them, and in their stead. They had little or no religious heroism of their own, but they knew others were heroically offering their lives that they themselves might be saved. And because of this, they hoped to make a good end and climb up into heaven after all. There was not a little presumption in their attitude, and yet somehow it was generally justified by the result. In the brilliant, luxurious, pleasure-loving, inexpressibly-dissolute circles of Versailles, how very worldly and irreligious were often the lives, but how edifying and devout almost always the death-beds! And if this was true of the courtiers, it was pre-eminently true of the sovereigns round whom they revolved. The explanation thereof was perhaps to be found within the walls of Carmel.

In our previous article we discussed the ninth chapter of Fr. Joyce’s book. Another chapter, which in our opinion spoils an otherwise most excellent work, is chapter xvi on ‘Conservation and Concurrence.’ In this chapter Fr. Joyce again abandons the teaching of the Angelic Doctor for a modern theory which is wholly inconsistent with the teaching of Augustine and Thomas and indeed of the Holy Scripture. The problem here concerned has to do with the Divine Causality and the freewill. If God is the cause of all being and all modes of being, how comes it that the will is free in its choices? St. Thomas has a very definite doctrine on this point: God premoves the will to its choice, yet so supereminent and so transcendent is the Divine motion that the will is not necessitated in its act, for the Divine motion, so efficacious, premoves the will to determine itself (by deliberation) to this rather than to that. Hence the determination of the will comes not only from God but also from the will.

Both Molina and Suarez refuse to subscribe to this doctrine : for them predetermination is wholly destructive of freewill. Briefly, their doctrine comes to this : ‘The Divine motion is not prior to the action of the freewill; the motion therefore is not received into the will; on the contrary it is received into the will’s effect or action in order to effect what is proper to God alone, namely the being of the action; hence, it is said, God simultaneously concurs with the will as a partial cause to produce the will’s action: this partial causality is to be understood on the part of the cause (ex farte causæ) and not on the part of the effect (ex parte effectus), because the effect is wholly produced by God as the First Cause and wholly by the will as secondary cause.

Every Christmas as it returns brings with it as an inseparable adjunct the Adeste Fideles. To a Catholic, as to an Anglican, Christmas would not be Christmas without it. Yet it can claim no great antiquity: it finds no place in Missal or Breviary, nor has it any liturgical association.

Its origin—whether as to words or tune—is ‘wropt in mistery,’ nor has any definite light been thrown upon either. Both have been discussed at intervals for at least fifty years, with little result—I was surprised, on looking up some of the references in Notes and Queries, extending over fifty years, to discover from one of them that in 1879 I knew almost as much about the hymn as I do now. That the mystery as to origin should apply equally to the words and the music is hardly surprising, for both are, and have always been, so inseparably associated that it is difficult to imagine an independent source for either, although, as will be seen, this has been suggested.

It will probably come as a surprise to many, considering the various periods to which the hymn has been assigned, that our first definite knowledge of both words and music dates from the middle of the eighteenth century and comes from an English source. This is supplied by John Francis Wade, a church student who did not go on to the priesthood, though he is referred to as a priest: he compiled collections of church music, the words and notes being beautifully written, of which four copies are extant—the earliest at Clongowes Wood College, Co. Kildare, Ireland, dated 17491; the others in the Ewing Library, Glasgow, at Stonyhurst College, and at St. Edmund’s College, Ware, dated respectively, 1750, 1751, and 1760.

It was Mr. G. K. Chesterton, I believe, who once defended misquotation on the ground that it was proof of a far greater and more affectionate intimacy with the writer quoted than the meticulousness which verified all references. What he had in mind was clearly the verbal slips of which even the most deeply-read scholar or most tenacious memory can be guilty. It takes a real lover of Dickens—the author to whom Mr. Chesterton particularly referred—to misquote him, precisely because it takes a real lover of Dickens to quote him spontaneously and at random at all.

But there is another sort of misquotation which, although it is not wholly bad, cannot be defended so easily—the misquoted epigram or catchword. It is true, not only of to-day, but of all ages, that men’s minds are largely influenced, their minds made up, by catchwords. Every hoarding says, ‘Billson’s tea is the best,’ and the world believes it; every popular history says, or used to say, forgetting that the saying was first mentioned in 1789, ‘Galileo’s immortal words, “And yet it moves,”’ and the whole world conjures up an heroic picture of a martyr to the Inquisition. The process is the same in both cases, and it is a question whether the second kind of iteration is not the more powerful in its effect and sinister in its results. In any case one of the most useful services the newspapers could perform would be the revision of popular historical sayings, the scrutiny of their credentials, just as the credentials of commercial advertisers are scrutinised. It is not often nowadays that a reputable newspaper can, without protest at least, talk of ‘Jesuitical’ as synonymous with ‘cunning,’ or refer to ‘doing evil that good may come’ as characteristic of members of the Society of Jesus.