In this country, democracy is a political article of faith subscribed to by all three parties. It is a political platitude that the whole of the population of a country should bow to the will of the majority. Any attack made on this creed has been purely academic. The ‘rights’ of minorities have been asserted by lukewarm agitation for proportional representation or for the alternative vote, but the mathematical complexities of these methods of voting have left the bulk of the citizens of this country cold. Parliament already possesses three main parties—one with a right and a left wing, capable of splitting into two at any time—besides one representative of the Communists, one of the Prohibitionists, and one or two of the Co-operators. There is no general desire in this country for a multiplicity of parties, on the French model. The Britisher is politically a man of principle. He votes Conservative or Liberal on traditional principle, or Labour on class principle.

In An Enemy of the People Ibsen attempted to preach a sermon from the text ‘the majority is always wrong.’ At first sight his text appears demonstrably true. All the great crimes of the world, all’ the wars, all the executions of the martyrs, have been sanctioned by the majority. History is a record of mass errors of judgment, but its verdict is that the majority is always the tool of an unscrupulous minority. Still, the theory ‘Vox populi, vox Dei’ persists, just as it is popularly supposed that the Press expresses, rather than forms, public opinion.

There is little to be said about Jean Cocteau that he has not said himself—about himself. ‘The last word in modernity, the most brilliant mind of this generation,’ said Clive Bell of him, and to be noticed by the capricious pen of that critic does indeed stamp him as ultra-modern.

As poet, critic, novelist, draughtsman, Jean Cocteau has been known in Paris for the last thirteen years, but owing to our regrettable isolation from movements and ideas beyond our own shores, we in England have hardly realised his many achievements. This year he has published Le Rappel à l’Ordre, a collection of former articles in which he analyses his activities as the leader of a group of young musicians and writers of the very latest modern tendencies, together with the motives and significances of his own writings. Another sign of his great activity was the production of his last play Orphée at the Théatre des Arts during four nights in last July. Two scenes of this attempt to clothe a classical theme in modern dress (he did the same in Andromaque and in the ballet Romeo and Juliet which has Strawinsky’s music) are given in the Revue des Jeunes of July 28th. It is a mere fragment, but in it are found all the ‘Cocteau’ elements, fantasy, mystère, modern implements (such as Death’s india-rubber gloves), symbolising elements in human life, besides much beauty of movement and charm of words. Respectfully criticising the play in The Times of July 14th, the writer speaks of M. Cocteau’s conversion as being ‘amongst the recent phenomena of Paris life.’

In reading these reminiscences we are reminded of Goldsmith’s classical criticism of a third-rate work : ‘This book is easier to write than to read.’ But to enclose Dr. McDonald’s book in an epigram we should have to say : ‘This book is better to read than to write.’ To speak our mind quite frankly, we must be allowed to think that of all forms of literature the Apologia pro vita sua, though sometimes the most literary is seldom the most excusable. No man is at his best when he is seeking to show his moral uprightness or his intellectual consistency. The pharisee reminds us that our best apology before the ultimate tribunal of God is : ‘Lord, be merciful to me a sinner.’ And the wise man was never wiser than when reminding us that our claim to intellectual consistency should be tempered by the conviction that ‘the number of fools is infinite.’

But whilst we should have counselled the Professor of Maynooth not to write his so-called Reminiscences, we cannot counsel his fellow Catholics, and especially his fellow priests, not to read what he has written. It need hardly be said that a book so hot from the heart of a Celt fighting for intellectual freedom must be read with discrimination. Dr. McDonald’s bringing-up was so provincial that he does not recognise how often his sæva indignatio is over little more than the politics of the village pump. Even the O’Hickey case, which might seem to centre round the fate of a dead or a dying language, almost dwindles down to a melodrama on an income of, say, £400 or £500 a year.

As far beyond Venice as Venice is beyond Verona lies the gentle ctiy of Udine, citàt zintil as they call it there, for all the common people and all the scholars and poets speak, or can speak, a language like that of the troubadours. The city lies on the level plain of Friuli like a town held by a patron saint on the palm of his hand; but in the midst of it rises an abrupt hill, and under the hill spreads a tree-planted hollow. This hill, say the Udinese, arose at the bidding of Attila the Hun. Every soldier of the Hunnish army contributed a helmetful of earth. And when the great mound was made, the king stood alone on the top to watch the burning of Aquileia.

Forty kilometres of country road lie between Aquileia and Udine to-day; and a vast, silent basilica, a vast silent museum, a scattering of poor farms among vast, silent fields of tall corn and small vines are all that is left of Aquileia when you reach it. The Guide Bleu gives the names of two inns. Personally I saw no sign of them, but then my visit was a short one. Yet when our Lord was born under Augustus in the middle of the great peace, Aquileia was the second town in Italy. It boasted two hundred thousand ‘Roman’ citizens, besides Roman legionaries and a unique con course of foreign merchants; it possessed enormous markets of wine and corn; its palaces, baths, circuses, temples, tombs and triumphal arches were like nothing outside Rome;

About twenty years ago I set down for publication what I now feel I must publish. The heroine of the story has been dead some years. If there is any poignancy in what I write, it comes from my having written down the martyr’s words with scrupulous accuracy a few minutes after hearing them.

Heard May 6th, 19—, in a slum bed-sitting room, scrupulously clean.

‘It was the time when there were meetings against Catholics.’ (By this she meant the No Popery agitation of 1850.)

‘I went to some, and was very angry that they would not let Catholics speak.

‘I told the Vicar what I thought. He said : “You are half a Roman Catholic.”

‘“No,” I said, “but I like fair play. I like to hear the other side. You won’t let Catholics tell their side of the question.”

‘I read Catholic books; read them in bed—read by night. They had been saying dreadful things against the Confessional. I knew a Catholic woman. So I went to her, and said : “Would you be so kind as to let me see one of your prayer books?” She looked at me for some time. Then she said : “ I could not let you take it back with you. But if you like to look at it here, you can do so.” She took me to another room, and handed me the Prayer-book. I found the Examination of Conscience, but could not come across any of the dreadful things I had heard about it.

‘Then I said to Mrs. X—: “Your priest” (who lodged across the road) “seems to me a good man. Could I see him? I should like to convert him—”

In Memoriam

The dead Cardinal of Malines has stood so publicly and undauntedly for all the principles to which BLACKFRIARS is dedicated that his death should not find us silent. Yet to be silent would be easier than to speak fittingly of so great a mind and soul.

For us, children of the thought of Aquinas, there is a special pride in remembering that our teacher was also the teacher of the great prelate from whose lips not Belgium only, but the civilised world learned lessons in years of intellectual upheaval.

When Leo XIII asked the thinkers of the civilised world to go back to Aquinas there were some, even amongst the children of the Church, who heard the Pope’s invitation with dismay. To them it was as if the Commander-in-Chief of a modern army should ask his soldiers to exchange their service rifles and machine guns for bows and arrows. Incidentally we might remark that a modern war waged with bows and arrows would probably not equal the Great War in loss of men, or in deciding the main issue of truth and justice. But the bow and arrow attitude towards the papal revival of St. Thomas left the Abbé Désiré Mercier unmoved. Already his sound Belgian brain had been abroad in the fields of English and German philosophy. He could appreciate the dogged quest of ultimate truth which lifted the lives of Kant and Spencer to the heroic. There are pages of sympathetic criticism of these fruitless thinkers which accredit this Lion of Flanders, a kinsman of the Dumb Ox of Aquino.

In an important work just published Mr. R. H. Tawney quotes this passage from Locke to illustrate the conception of itself by which society in England has lived and developed since the seventeenth century. This conception, he points out, is fundamentally opposed to the Catholic conception of society which it displaced. Revelation was displaced by reason; and the criterion of political institutions became expediency, instead of religious authority. The Church of the Middle Ages was a vast commonwealth, including the whole religious, political, social and economic life of its subjects under a single organic system of law—the moral law of Christianity. Already in Tudor times, the State in England had usurped all the functions of a Church, with expediency for its primary law. ‘By the end of the seventeenth century the secular State, separated from the Churches, which are subordinate to it, has emerged from the theory which regarded both as dual aspects of a single society. The former pays a shadowy deference to religion; the latter do not meddle with the external fabric of the political and social system, which is the concern of the former. . . . The State, first in England, then in France and America, finds its sanction, not in religion, but in nature, in a presumed contract to establish it, in the necessity for mutual protection and the convenience of mutual assistance.

It really is tyranny when a colonial Governor endeavours to push through his Legislative Assembly or even otherwise make statutory legal measures which deprive his subjects of certain commonly admitted rights. This is precisely what happened in Trinidad at the end of last year and at the beginning of this. The Governor, through his educational policy, decided to close the Assisted Training Schools for teachers, and compel the students, who intended to make teaching their profession, to be trained at the Government Training College. That is to say, he closed the Catholic Training College, and insisted that the Catholics who wished to become teachers should be trained only in the Government Training College.

There are three preliminary statements to be made about this proceeding before we deal with the matter itself of the Governor’s enactment:—

(1) The Catholic population of the islands of Trinidad and Tobago is at least one third of the whole population of these islands.

(2) The Government College has as its headmaster, and has had for many years, an admirable gentleman from Cambridge who has publicly and privately denounced the system of denominational schools.

(3) The curriculum of the College as printed by the Government under the date August, 1925, and with the specified approval of the Acting Director of Education, gives as the subject of the first year’s history lectures :

I have just finished reading Father Vincent McNabb’s inspiring book The Church and the Land, aptly described by the author as a ‘bugle-call,’ and in die May number of BLACKFRIARS the Editor asks the question, ‘Wherefore sound the bugle if there be none to answer the call?’

I believe that there are many only too anxious to answer, not only amongst the unemployed, but amongst those also who are ill-employed, working at any sort of a job in the cities because a living must be made somehow for men and wives and children. Since the war, how many men have been forced by sheer want into taking on work of this sort, quite apart from the fact that they, no more than the ‘practical objector’s’ unemployed, are fitted for it neither by temperament, training nor inclination?

Amongst these city workers in uncongenial jobs in factories and offices, there are many who suffer acutely from the pangs of land-hunger, men and women who have the love of the earth in their very blood, whose ancestors—in many cases not more than two or three generations back—were farmers, and whose keenest desire is to get back to the soil and toil to which they feel themselves called almost as powerfully as a priest to his vocation—for surely, save that of the priest, there can be no labour nearer to God than that of the land worker.

By reason of these, then, the bugle does not sound to deaf ears, but to hearts to whom it comes as the call of hope and life itself.

A French Catholic who holds a very influential position in the Catholic movement expressed to me a few weeks ago such strong views on the recent condemnation of the Action Française by Cardinal Andrieu, and subsequently by the Pope himself, that the gist of his argument is worth placing on record. He attached so much importance to the crisis which has been precipitated by the Cardinal’s condemnation that he believed it to mark the beginning of a phase which would lead, after a short period of acute crisis in France, to an immense consolidation of all the Catholic forces in this country, which have hitherto been divided hopelessly by the tendencies towards violent anti-constitutional action on the part of the neo-royalist movement.

The origin of the trouble may be briefly stated. It has been well known to everyone familiar with the various factors of the Catholic movement in France. Broadly speaking, the older generation of Catholics were, at the beginning of the present century, still largely royalist in their sympathies. The tradition of plunder and spoliation under the Republic still carried with it vivid memories for many people; and most of the older clergy and nearly all the Catholic aristocracy were still profoundly hostile to the Republic, which they regarded as being only the latest phase in the series of political crises through which France had passed since the Revolution, with alternating republics and monarchies. But by the beginning of the century it had become quite clear to those who viewed the situation without traditional and personal feelings that the restoration of the monarchy in France had become an impossibility.

Sir John Marriott has suggested that to cut out of of an English history book all the pages that concerned the relation of Church and State would leave but a few pages in the book. That the problem is no dead one is testified by the present conflict in Mexico. In its widest, most universal form, the problem arises in the relations of the Empire and the Papacy—a problem which, I think, can be shown to continue long after the break up of the mediaeval system, and, recently, to have received a fresh emphasis.

In a side group from the Lateran Mosaic (appropriately reproduced by the Temple Edition of Dante’s Latin Works) are shown Peter and Constantine receiving the symbols of their authority from Christ, while Peter alone gives these symbols to Leo and Charlemagne—an apt summary of European history from the start of the Christian era to the Reformation. But it represents even more than that. Napoleon was content to refer to ‘Charlemagne, my august predecessor, Emperor of the French’! This statement (however false historically) was used as a bludgeon against the Pope.

Always has there been a conflict between Caesar and Peter. And yet, always, Caesar has been forced to confess his indebtedness to Peter. Charlemagne was crowned at Rome by the Pope : Charles V as near Rome as possible, at Bologna: and Napoleon— though he brought the Pope to Paris, kept him waiting in the Church, and snatched the crown from his hands—was unable to bend him to do his will. Even Bismarck had to go half-way to Canossa.

The contrast between the two saints is as obvious as the likeness; indeed, such likeness as there was sprang more from their background, environment, and common century than from personal resemblance in story or work or ideals. Besides the common century there was, of course, the common faith; but apart from these things that are the settings and not the gems, the gems themselves, though equally precious, were singularly unlike. The two succeeded to the long winter of the Dark Ages and the illumination of the twelfth century, and they were caught up in the creative movement of the thirteenth; there was, therefore, a certain community of spirit which their age naturally begot in them. They both started orders of Friars.

But remove the age and look at the men. What a perfect contrast! Dominic is of noble Spanish origin, born in bleak and desolate lands, growing up in a feudal tower; his early years are years of study, in the house of a priest, at the University, and as one of a community of Canons. Quietness throws its veil over him, and his companion is learning, and wisdom is his star.

Francis comes of the trading stock of Assisi, a city of commerce, but also of rich colouring and crowded wealth, and ripens to manhood in the service of his father’s trade. In the little city, amongst his young companions, he is the leader, gay, joyous, light of heart, a singer of songs with his fingers nimble on the viol and his feet beating time in the dance.

The purpose of this article is to call the attention of lovers of the Imitation to James Merlo Horstius’s edition of it, the Viator Christianus.

An old copy of this rare, and exceedingly interesting, book—to which a reference is made on page 745 of the lovely English translation (Burns and Oates, 1912) of the Paradisus Animae—came into the present writer’s possession a few years ago. It was published at Cologne in 1643. Its full title is ‘Viator Christianus recta ac regia in caelum via tendens, ductu Thomae de Kempis.’ It is a Latin edition of the Imitation, with quaint marginal notes and curious allegorical prints, and a picture representing Thomas a Kempis himself offering his book to Our Lady. At the top of the picture is the legend ‘In omnibus requiem quaesivi, et nusquam inveni nisi in angello cum libello,’ and at the foot ‘Thomas a Kempis canonicus regularis Obijt A° 1471, 25 Iulij. Ætat 92.’

James Merlo, called Horstius from the place of his birth, was born at Horst, a German village, in 1597, and died in 1644 at Cologne, where he was parish priest of the Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Pasculo. He was the author, or compiler, of several devotional books besides that unrivalled collection, which every wise Catholic knows well, The Paradise of the Christian Soul. He tells us there that he has surveyed ‘the gardens and pleasure-grounds of every author,’ and culled thence ‘the most notable plants, flowers and shrubs,’ and planted with them ‘a new kind of Paradise.’

Time was when English judges could say, without apparent insincerity, that the Christian religion was part of the Law of the Land. That was how the judges put it; what they meant was that at least theoretical acquiescence in Christian principles was assumed in those for whom the Law was framed and administered. In fact, that England was ‘a Christian country.’

The beatitudes were always, and perhaps necessarily, outside the Law’s purview. But there used to be some attempt to enforce the Ten Commandments. To-day, the blasphemy laws, though never repealed, have long been a dead letter. And the London traffic may, it seems, be held up for a triumphal procession of any idol—whether it be the symbolical figure of ‘Big Business’ or the living person of Rudolph Valentino. But not, of course, for one of the True Incarnate God in His own Corporeal Presence. The offer of such a spectacle being, one must suppose, too blatantly like wearing one’s heart on one’s sleeve to accord with the ‘grand old English Public School tradition’ of ‘what’s done.’

A father used to be held responsible for his child’s welfare. And a child was presumed to be under parental control. Now-a-days the Law looks daily with greater favour on the interference of the ‘health visitor’ and the school teacher (non-sectarian). And magistrates listen gravely to stories of how Tommy, aged ten, is ‘beyond control’ and unbirched youngsters file off in the full tide of impudence to the industrial school.