The recent Exposition of the Holy Shroud at Turin, after an interval of a third of a century, has attracted a great deal of attention and discussion. Something like two millions of pilgrims passed before the Relic in the course of the twenty days during which it was exposed for veneration. Before the interest thus aroused once more dies away it may be well to try to put on record what it is that we have learnt.

The Holy Shroud differs from all other Relics, with the exception perhaps of the Title of the Cross, in being the principal witness to its own authenticity. It consists of a long sheet of linen, some fourteen feet long by three and a half in width, on which can be seen two imprints, back and front, of a human figure, placed head to head with a space of about six inches between.

Now there are only two ways, as a moment’s thought will show us, in which such a double imprint can be formed on a single sheet. It may be the result of human artistic work, each image being separately painted by a human hand. On the other hand it may have been produced by a human body which has been laid upon the sheet and covered over with the other half, the imprinted image being thus produced by the body itself. There is no third way conceivable in which a double image can have been formed, or at any rate no third way has ever yet been suggested by anyone.

It is probable that many students of liturgy and plainsong shared the scepticism of the present writer on hearing that successful gramophone records had been taken of the chant of the Benedictine Fathers at Solesmes. The gramophone. Yes, we knew it had been vastly improved in recent years, and even before the war, on account of the accuracy of its tempo, we remembered welcoming the day when it superseded the unfortunate pianist thumping in his corner after the carpet had been rolled back for an impromptu dance in the long dining room at home. On those and other occasions, however, considerations of tone and timbre were secondary. Then we thought of later records of orchestral pieces—very successful except for a certain hardness which mattered nothing to the brass but lost a good deal to the strings—and lastly, we recalled less successful vocal items in which the human touch was sorely sacrificed to mechanical accuracy.

And this latest announcement led to reflection on the chant as the monks sing it. We listened again in imagination to the fine diction of the syllabic recitative, the subdued yet thunderous might of the unison, and felt the rhythm as a tenuous pervading atmosphere, which the singers did not create, but rather glided into, as swimmers might into a moving tide. The prayer-spirit which brooded and hovered and soared and sang, could one conceive of it caged up in a machine, however marvellous? Emphatically no.

One of the chief characteristics of our time is the growing supremacy of quantity over quality. The latter is being ousted by the former in politics, in culture, in all departments of our civilisation. This struggle can, of course, have various disguises, and it can take place on several planes. Even the most conspicuous mass-movement may not necessarily be directed by quantitative valuations; or it may be first prompted by higher impulses and only later adopt a purely quantitative tendency. And a growing tendency of this kind is noticeable in the whole of modern ‘egalitarian’ democracy. This does not mean that democracy is altogether devoid of ideals, but that its ideals—provided there still be any—are on the wrong plane : on the plane of mere economic factors and of class-struggle, which not only conceal but invariably distort all deeper (ethical and spiritual) considerations. Its ultimate vision is not so much a dignified but a comfortable life : not the complete Christian Man, but the standardised Universal Bourgeois ruthlessly controlled by his equally standardised ‘comrades.’

There is, of course, nothing easier or more seductive than reducing everything to ‘economic factors.’ Moreover it has the virtue of simplifying all problems to such an extent as to explain the whole mystery of life in a sixpenny pamphlet which everyone can carry in his pocket. But a valuation of life as a whole under the auspices of economic factors alone puts the cart before the horse : it makes both life and mankind only an appendage to economics.

Charlotte Bronte’s father, the Rev. Patrick Bronte, was born in Ireland on Saint Patrick’s Day, 1777, at Emdale, near Rathfriland, in the County Down. His father, Charlotte’s grandfather, Hugh Prunty—his Scotch Presbyterian neighbours called him Brunty—came from somewhere in the south of Ireland, but where exactly his paternal home was he could never ascertain. When he was twenty-two he made a runaway match with Alice McClorey of Ballynaskeagh, a neighbouring townland. Alice McClorey was a Catholic, and her brother, with whom she lived, and her relatives were much opposed to the marriage, which took place secretly in the Protestant church of Magherally. After a brief honeymoon the young people returned to live in a two-roomed thatched cottage at Emdale, near Rathfriland, where ten children were subsequently born to them, and all of them were brought up Protestants.

The eldest son, Patrick, shortly after entering Cambridge in the year 1802, changed his name from Branty, the name signed in the Register of the University, to Bronte. Prior to that time there were no Brontes in Ireland. Being an Ulsterman, although born of a Catholic mother, the Rev. Patrick Bronte was of the ultra-Protestant type so peculiar to the North-East corner of Ireland. A speech against Catholic Emancipation was his one venture into the arena of the politics of his time. To the members of his family he passed on a legacy of intolerance, but, of the three sisters, to judge from their writings, Charlotte seems to have inherited more than her share of it.

Such is the unity of all history that anyone who endeavours to tell a piece of it must feel that his first sentence tears a seamless web.’

These memorable words of Maitland naturally recur to the mind as one reads the direct and lucid story of the life and death of Roger Casement that Denis Gwynn has given to the world. In the course of his life—so abruptly ended—Roger Casement seemed to be the meeting-place of many strange forces; of the living and of the dead. Some of these forces reflect themselves or are reflected in the titles Mr. Gwynn has chosen for his contents page. The Congo; Putamayo; Ireland; Germany (The Great War); the Traitor’s Gate. The mere repetition of the names gives more than a hint of the strange cycle through which the life of Casement moved. In the beginning of his public career he was a figure of international power and reputation. Later, he declined (or ought I to say, developed?) into a person of some importance in Irish national politics. He ended as a lonely man upon the scaffold. He was so lonely at the end as to be out of touch and in a large measure out of sympathy with the counsel who defended him and with the arguments they used in his defence. And yet, just at the end, in the Divine Mercy, Roger Casement was reconciled to the Church of his Baptism, of which he had forgotten (if indeed he had ever realised) he was once a member. In truth he had received Catholic baptism as a small child at Rhyl while on holiday with his mother, who had been born a Catholic but who had ceased after marriage to practise her religion.

The town of Saint-Malo is well known to the tourists who land there on their way to Paramé or Dinard or the remoter summer haunts of Lower Brittany. Well known at least externally, and as to its more obvious features—the old walls, the single pointing spire, the great castle of the Duchess Anne, the beautiful surrounding waters—but scarcely at all beyond these. And yet there is much to know for those who care to look for it; a whole world, as it were, of history, of tradition, of by-ways that lead into a rather wonderful past.

There is, for instance, a very ancient and picturesque quarter not far from the Cathedral, yet only to be reached by twisting alleys and narrow lanes, where you will pass by the Cour La Houssaye; this is no more than a widening of the way, a little airier than its surroundings, perhaps, but not so important as its name would convey. Yet here stands the House of the Duchess Anne, where she lodged before she carried the white Ermines of Brittany into the shield of France; a haunted place, as the old grandmothers will tell you, with its ancient walls, its turret stair and the window whence she saw the Rider on the White Horse .... but that is another story and not the one that I wish to tell you to-day. So we will pass on and, threading these tortuous ways, come presently to a narrow quiet street at the end of which stands the House of the Dames-de-Saint-Aaron and behind it the little chapel—very rarely open to visitors—which is the real core and heart of the city, and to every Malouin, doubly, trebly, sacred ground.