On Easter Tuesday a rebuke, which reads amusingly, was administered to Cardinal Bourne by the Anglican Bishop of Durham. In a sermon at York on Easter Sunday, the Cardinal reminded his hearers that only those who are in communion with Rome can claim to be legitimate successors of St. Paulinus, Archbishop of York. The Anglican Bishop, in reply, virtually reprimands His Eminence for neglecting his Easter Duties—as these are understood in Durham nowadays.

He is a bold Bishop who ventures to think that many Anglicans must agree with him upon any question which involves the central verities of the Christian religion. There are, however, occasions when, without being at all rash, even an Anglican Bishop may presume that not many but all Romans must agree with him. One such occasion is when an Anglican Bishop speaks sound common sense; for all Romans are obliged, under pain of ceasing to be Romans, to agree with sound sense whencesoever it comes. Another occasion is when an Anglican Bishop hits upon some deep truth which is beyond the range of commonsense, and finds himself stating something with which all

The world of Canon Streeter is a very different world from that of William Clissold; for one thing, it seems to be based on fuller scientific knowledge, and to have been discovered by a more acute mind. William Clissold, like so many of his family, was born a little too long ago to be worth listening to when he babbles about science; had he been a specialist and kept up with the literature of his stuff, he would have been all very well. But he was too busy with his business to be a specialist. Moreover, he never had a first-class mind. His power of observation is admirable; his power of description is also equally felicitous. He had the makings of a great man.

He had one drawback. He suffered from an inferiority complex. Witness how he talks of ‘Mr. G.’ He has that unhappy mind that disdains what it cannot equal or cannot understand. Disdain ‘is probably the wrong word. He does not disdain it. He pulls snooks at it. He cannot abide anyone who is finer than himself. He and his family are clever at their little personal descriptions; they are clever, but with the cleverness of a gutter-snipe. He has the naughty gifts of the cockney, only he lacks the cockney’s heart.

Compared with his world, Canon Streeter’s world may well be called Reality; it is real in the sense that it seems to correspond with facts. Moreover, Canon Streeter has a very keen, incisive and subtle mind. There is a touch of Newman about him, as a Catholic theological expert has pointed out: he has that almost uncanny gift of analysis which Newman reveals.

The island of Trinidad off the north-eastern coast of South America is considered part of the group of West Indian islands known as the Lesser Antilles, though it is nearer than any other to the coast of Venezuela. It was discovered by Christopher Columbus on July 31st, 1498, when on his third voyage he touched the American Continent. The natives called it Yere, and it belonged to Spain until 1797, when it was seized by the English and definitely ceded to Great Britain by the Treaty of Amiens in 1802. With the adjacent island of Tobago it forms a separate British Colony of about a quarter of a million inhabitants. The climate is tropical, with only a dry and a rainy season, since it is within ten degrees of the Equator.

That valiant Protector of the American aborigines, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, has left us an interesting account of the condition of the island at the time of its discovery, and the cruel treatment of the natives by adventurers of all nations who followed in the wake or Columbus. But it may be well to give first a brief sketch of this intrepid apostle before quoting from his hitherto unpublished manuscript, Historia General de las Indias 1492-1520, in the Royal Library of Madrid.

Cardinal Newman held that modern thought needed reforming in the light of the Christian revelation, not the Christian revelation in the light of modern thought. The opposite and Protestant view prevails with the greater number of our neighbours who profess a theism and do not disdain to be known as Christians.

But what is this modern thought,’ which daily with the steady destructiveness of an encroaching sea wears and crumbles the faith of Anglicans and free-church-men, and from time to time detaches Catholics from the household of faith? Whence comes it? A new impression of the Hibbert Lectures on the Reformation, delivered by Dr. Beard—a nonconformist divine—rather more than forty years ago, prefaced by Dr. Ernest Barker, the distinguished Principal of King’s College, London, bids us place the beginnings of modern thought in the break up of Christendom in the sixteenth century—in ‘the specifically religious revolution which we call the Reformation.’ Dr. Beard, with the persuasive reasonableness of a good Victorian, is content to let modern thought whittle away all Christian dogma, believing that mankind will thereby ‘penetrate more and more deeply into the glory and the wonder of God.’ Dr. Ernest Barker, maintaining that ‘the fundamental meaning of the Reformation is a new theology; and the new theology ‘a purer revelation of God direct to each Christian soul,’ hopes, with Dr. Beard, for ‘a new kindling and a further brightening of its light.’

Engineers know where folk need to go, and provide according to their knowledge. They like long valleys in which to place their sweetest lines at the service of men. Seldom do they desire to meddle with tracks made by sheep and the weather to destinations which have now lost much of their significance, with Kirkgates and Howgates. Here is one of the latter; take it. As to the gate, it is easy; men gang their ain gate in older speech; so let us, in both senses. But the How? It was not nothing once, whatever it be to-day, or the road to it would not have been tramped smooth, notwithstanding its other linear peculiarities. A shrine of sorts, to which innumerable feet tended, before people had the Mass, and a priestcraft, less rich in prophetic utterance, but more able in counsels of expiation.

Out and upward it drives, the Howgate, with the undecided obstination of the stream it often counters. Under its guidance cultivation deteriorates by small degrees from opulence to the derisory, even to piteous vestiges of abandoned effort. The rough; tenuous pasture; grouse and the curlew. For us the quality is improved with every mile; for our meditations are in a key which does not admit commiseration. Ancient images gather in us; there is no discord among them, and the spirit is stronger for this.

At the outset it must be said that there can be no such thing as a Catholic Philosophy any more than there can be a Catholic Science. But there are philosophers who in the matter of religion profess certain dogmatic beliefs, just as there are chemists or medical doctors who are at the same time Catholics, or Protestants, or Jews.

Yet Draper, in his Conflict between Religion and Science, written in 1874, makes the following statement : ‘Then it has come to this, that Roman Christianity and Science are recognized by their respective adherents as being absolutely incompatible; they cannot exist together; one must yield to the other; mankind must make its choice—it cannot have both

Again, Huxley, in one of his Lay Sermons, writes of ‘our great antagonist—I speak as a man of Science —the Roman Catholic Church, the one spiritual organisation which is able to resist, and must as a matter of life and death, resist, the progress of science and modern civilisation.’ It is such statements as these that have provoked Dr. Windle to write his valuable little book, The Catholic Church and its Reactions with Science.

A French Portrait

Mlle. Marie and Mlle. Jeanne de Grandet were the last of a distinguished family of the Midi. I have often visited their little town, and I knew them and their ancient dwelling well. It was approached by way of a cobbled street, running close to the foot of the citadel.

It was a charming place, rambling round a courtyard spaced and shaded with bay-trees and oleanders. To the world its aspect was grave and reticent; but giving on the paved and formal garden were galleries flecked with sun between the twisted branches of vine and wisteria, and purple to the spring and autumn skies. Old grey roofs were set with dormer-windows, from which you might watch the changes of light and colour on Pyrenean snows, or the flag flapping against the blue on the top of the Château Fort.

Within, the house was dark. People of the Midi fear the sun, knowing him in his might; and so, at high noon of brightest midsummer, the house was full of mystery and shade. Such light as filtered through the shuttered windows fell faintly in the sombre rooms, lay still on the panelled walls, the aged tapestries, the ancestral furniture. Perhaps, after all, it was airless. One felt at first a little breathless, restrained, enclosed, as in a narrow valley among high mountains where the air is still and no flower stirs in the grass. But slowly the restraint became safety; the lack of movement, rest; the noiselessness, peace. Slowly there was distilled of ancient perfumes, of forgotten airs, the meditative voice of the race and family, enunciating eternal and Catholic verities to the grave and tranquil measure of the great French grandfather clock.