By the modern non-catholic mind the problem of Our Lord Jesus Christ’s knowledge of His Divinity is stated in terms of Consciousness. In other words, the mass of non-catholic writers on the nature and work of Jesus Christ ask, and in various ways answer, such a question as this : “Was Jesus Christ conscious of His Divinity?” For example, this statement of the great problem of the Jesus Christ of the Gospels was dominant in the recent conference of Modern Churchmen at Cambridge.

The Dean of Carlisle, whose historical scholarship is not necessarily akin to theology, said “that Jesus did not claim divinity for Himself. He may have called Himself, or more probably allowed Himself to be called, the Messiah or Son of God ; but never in any critically, well-attested sayings was there anything suggesting that His conscious relation to God was other than that of a man towards God” (Daily Telegraph, 13 Aug.). Here the phrase “conscious relation to God” seems to mean that Jesus Christ did not know and did not believe Himself to be God. He knew and believed Himself to be merely a man. In Dean Rashdall’s recent explanations he seems to assert that Jesus was God. We await his explanation of how Jesus could be God and not claim Divinity.

It is rather a tragic moment when a man suddenly discovers that he is disliked by all his neighbours, particularly tragic if he happens to have been under the impression that to his own terrible cost and undoing he has gone out of his way to help them. To be denounced as greedy when you have emptied your pockets to finance those who now cry out against you, or accused of being selfish when at the risk of his life you have sent your boy to save your accusers, or to be called a tyrant by the people who have learnt from your teaching all they know of freedom, is heartrendingly tragic. It is the tragedy of England to-day.

There certainly is no good denying it. We are at the present moment the nation most disliked by foreign politicians and the Press, not least among our late allies. Perhaps our enemies alone have any sympathy with us, any respect, any understanding of our difficulties or of our ideals. But this only bewilders us the more. To judge from what is said of us in France and Belgium and the United States and even in Italy, one might suppose we had spent the last seven years in bullying the world. All our sacrifices are forgotten. The pretty compliments paid us when we were rather better off, and, at some loss to our family-circles, were standing by our neighbours in their peril, are shouted back to us now only in derision.

Of Robert Browning, considered purely as poet, in a sense at once technical and virtual, it is not here proposed to dispute.

Although he often rhymed as by brute force, wresting the music though he broke the lyre, there is yet in most of his writing that aptness, vigour and finality of language that are the marks of true poetic literature. In passing, it may be remarked that one other great quality of poetry, Vision, was not often enough the instrument and source of his poems. In place of that power, he had thought, insight and a singular grasp of the complexities of mind. In the main, he rationalized emotions, did not create them. He could conjure them up, by felicitous analysis and portrayal, by sudden turns of the text, but only occasionally do they arise immediately, by the power of an unique concept and expression. For instance the line, “The air broke into a mist with bells,” gives a very perfect mental sensation.

It is then, of Browning in relation to the Catholic Church that I consider a theme sufficiently interesting to warrant an analysis. For it is valuable, illuminative, sometimes to discover the small thoughts of large minds ; to trace out, along the thin lines of little, acetose angers, the effects of misinformation, of blindness, or of bias. To discover a great soul in places curiously “shrivelled like a little pea.”

Giovanni Papini’s “Story of Christ” is, to put it on its lowest level, the literary sensation of the moment in Italy. Within one week after publication ten thousand copies were sold, and very shortly afterwards the whole of the first edition of twenty thousand was exhausted—this with a serious and by no means sensational book of over six hundred pages. The reason may perhaps partly be sought in the fact that the curious wished to see what would be made of the Gospels by a writer who, whatever the intellectual distinction of his other work, had certainly been guilty of uttering defiant anti-Christian sentiments and had, in addition to the legitimate effect produced by his works of imagination, exerted a definite influence against religion among the young intellectuals of Italy. But no one who looks beyond the immediate circumstances will account for all the popularity of Papini’s book in this way. He will add the further important facts—first, that this is a rewriting of the Gospel-story by a poet; secondly, that the act of faith uttered by Papini in this book corresponds to the profoundly Catholic and Christian sentiments of the Italian people, the younger generation not by any means excepted—for the war has driven many a doubter to serious reflection and self-examination, with spiritual results similar to those which were produced in Papini himself. By its literary qualities, then, and by its appropriateness to the prevailing religious emotions of men in Italy and in other countries which passed through the war, Giovanni Papini’s “Story of Christ” bids fair to become one of the most notable books of the century.

“Heavy volumes of commentary and exegesis,” we are told of Lord Melbourne in a fascinating book, “he examined with scrupulous diligence; and at any odd moment he might be found turning over the pages of the Bible. To the ladies whom he most liked he would lend some learned work on the Revelation, crammed with marginal notes in his own hand.” The Revelation of Saint John, with introduction and notes by William Lamb, Viscount Melbourne, would not be lacking in interest; it would at least be curious to see what one whom Mr. Strachey describes as a man of perpetual compromises, an autumn rose, a sceptical believer, ambiguous in everything, could make of a book of such intense faith, flaming certitudes, and crashing decisions. The seeming chaos of the Apocalypse has left many a man floundering for his reason. No book in the world has been more commented on than this last of the books of the Bible, and none has had a greater variety of commentators. And we may add the remark—due, I think, to Mr. Chesterton—that, despite all the wild and weird things John saw in his visions, he saw nothing so wild and weird as some of his own commentators. The insanely fantastic interpretations of Abbot Joachim (1202) and of the Franciscan Nicholas of Lyra (1329) furnished the Reformers with arms in their anti-papal campaign. (It is at least in Calvin’s favour, as some one has remarked, that he had the sense to leave the book alone.)