Readers of Wiseman’s Fabiola will remember how when Corvinus tries to provoke Pancratius to a quarrel he calls the Christian boy “a cowardly worshipper of an ass’s head.” The author explains in a footnote that this was one of the many calumnies against the Christians that were current in pagan Rome. Now, most lies have some slight foundation in truth. Even the deliberate inventor of a calumny looks round for some reality that can be distorted into a seeming confirmation of his story. And it will sometimes happen that when there is enough ill-will to make men keenly watchful for something that can be made the basis of an accusation, they more or less honestly make mistakes and unconsciously misrepresent and misapply real facts.

There is some reason for believing that the pagans of the early centuries who circulated this story of the worship of an ass’s head by the Christians were thus maliciously blundering. Strange to say, the cultus of an Egyptian god seems to supply the key to an answer for the puzzling question as to how it was that this calumny ever gained credence, not merely among the ignorant crowd, but also amongst the educated men of the time.

I received an amusing letter from a Catholic Layman recently, in which he said that the Holy See must be regarding with nervous apprehension the series of outspoken Lives which were accumulating round the names of the English Cardinals, Wiseman, Newman, and Manning (bis). Whether the Holy See approves of sincerity or indiscretion or both in the biographies of her favoured sons, she never speaks. She has other things to think of besides books in these days, though needless to say I would submit to the least whisper of her considered judgment, should she think it worth while to lift an eyelash over anything I happened to write.

In the matter of writing the Lives of Cardinals, one cannot be too careful, though so careful are the biographers of Cardinals abroad that their memory as men is forgotten behind a little cloud of fading incense. The tradition of writing frank and human lives of Cardinals must be an English tradition, and let us hope will remain one. Our Cardinals have been and are men of action and men of genius. I think Ward’s Life of Newman is the best Life of a Cardinal in any language, but I think that Cardinal Manning left the finest biographical material. How fine it was perhaps few except myself really know. At any rate Mr. Purcell and myself have both crawled up out of Grubb Street, thanks to piles of that splendid collection, the Manning Papers, and I think that several volumes could yet be written out of what remains.

Perhaps I am the best person to say what a number of friends and critics have hinted lately, that the final and all-comprising Life of Cardinal Manning remains to be written.

Was there ever such a year as 1921 for centenaries—centenaries, that is, of events which loom large in the history of the Christian Church? We have just celebrated in this country the seventh centenary of the Third Order of St. Francis ; we are about to celebrate that of the passing of St. Dominic ; almost simultaneously occurs the sixth centenary of the “Sommo Poeta,” Dante Alighieri, so intimately connected, spiritually and intellectually, with both the great Founders and their Orders. The Dominican Order celebrates this year the seventh centenary of its arrival in England. And attention was recently called to the fact that this same year sees the centenary of the conversion of St. Ignatius Loyola.

These coincidences lend interest to a Conference given by the eminent Italian publicist, the Marchese Crispolti, at Florence, on May 28th, in the Dominican Church of Santa Maria Novella. The distinguished orator pointed out to his hearers that Dante after having in his youth learnt grammar and the art of “composing rhymes in the vulgar tongue” and of writing Latin epistles in the schools of the Friars Minor at Santa Croce—where also he imbibed from the Franciscan surroundings and spirit his admiration for the life of the Poverello and his inclination towards mysticism—went forth at the age of eighteen to enter upon his public life. It was after the death of Beatrice, when already many other influences were partly drawing him aside from the pure influence of her memory, that the Poet, then about twenty-five years of age, felt attracted to more solid and more regular studies.

In the year that Charles the First came to the throne, Richard Crashaw was a lad of thirteen at the Charterhouse School. He had lost his mother in his infancy, and his father—the Rev. William Crashaw, a learned theologian, eloquent preacher, indifferent poet and bitter anti-Catholic— had recently died, leaving him with slender resources, but endowed with uncommon abilities and a rare gift for making friends.

He went to Cambridge in 1631 ; was admitted to Pembroke College ; gained a pensionership, having, as he afterwards wrote to a friend, spent all his patrimony in buying books ; and graduated in 1634 when he was twenty-one. In the same year he published a book of Scripture Epigrams in Latin, memorable for the one immortal line, “Nympha pudica Deum vidit, et erubuit,” upon which the skill of many translators, including William Hayley, has been exercised.

To draw a true portrait of Richard Crashaw he must be presented in this University setting. For he was, pre-eminently, in modern phrase, a “‘Varsity man.” The advantage of life at the older universities, it has often been said, has always been found to lie as much in the friendships that common studies foster as in the studies themselves. Crashaw enjoyed both to the full. Clearly, he was a student, and lived austere, laborious days, for he became proficient in the classics, as well as in Hebrew, Italian, and Spanish, besides in acquiring some skill in music and art. And the finest minds at the University were his friends. Of these latter we learn something from the numerous elegies he composed, according to the custom of the day.

Charles Dickens must be seen clearly as a representative Englishman, a spokesman of the so largely inarticulate English people, discerned towering above contemporaries as Sir Thomas More or Doctor Johnson is discerned. How, otherwise, can we explain the hatred of Dickens for Puritanism, and his distrust of all professions of Protestantism?

The immediate recognition of his genius is evidence that Dickens’s standpoint was understood and approved by the mass of his fellow-countrymen, and this standpoint is very definitely Christian. Of all our great novelists none is more definitely Christian.

Throughout his writings Dickens insists on the fundamental beliefs of Christendom. That God rules and orders the whole universe ; that mankind has an Eternal Father, and a Divine Redeemer and Saviour, His Son—these are facts that Dickens takes for granted in all his books. With all his zest for social reforms Dickens never assumes, after the fashion of certain of our latter-day novelists, that God being absent from the universe it is the business of the writer of popular fiction to order a new heaven and a new earth and prescribe a new religion for the children of men.

The medieval mind was always fertile in experiment. It had all the freshness of a new age that was ceaselessly driven by new circumstances to adapt the fashions of Christendom to conditions violently alien. The restless constitution-making in England, the long experiment in liberty that marks the line of Plantagenet, is part of the same effort; and it is no less visible in the disorderly histories of Florence and Venice. The Cathedrals are one expression of it, the Guilds another, and the Crusades flung valiantly abroad the same temper of adventure, the same daring that would risk defeat or even face certain failure.

As the central force of Christendom the Papacy was peculiarly subject to the same romantic influence, as the stories of Hildebrand and of Innocent III abundantly prove. John XXII with his curious career as theologian, as politician, as apostle, is another instance. The greatest foreign missioner of the line of Pontiffs since the days of Peter, he bears witness in the magnificence of his ideals and his unconquerable hopefulness to the same indomitable spirit. To his hand the Orders of Friars, particularly the Dominicans and the Franciscans, were the most fitted and best used instruments. It will be sufficient to quote the opening words of his Bull of 1318 to the Dominican Order, to show how tremendously alive the Church had become, both in head and members, to the need of Catholic propaganda. The Bull is addressed to “our beloved sons, the Friar Preachers in the lands of the Saracens, Pagans, Greeks, Bulgars, Tartars, Alani, Gazaenes, Goths, Ruthenians, Jacobites, Nubians, Nestorians, Georgians, Armenians, Indians, Macolites, and other unbelieving nations in the East and North.”

What is wrong with modern marriage? A somewhat interesting correspondence upon this question appeared during the summer in a London morning paper, and hundreds of people took part in it, eager to give an answer in the light of their own experiences. It was obviously a popular, and certainly a timely, subject for discussion : popular, since almost every conceivable and inconceivable school of thought (or what passes for thought) was represented in that curious series of letters. It was, too, a timely subject, since something must be very wrong with modern marriage when so many thousands of men and women are hastening to the divorce courts to get their marriages dissolved. Still, it was not, nor was it intended to be, a serious or a useful discussion ; its headlines were meant to provide something catchy and piquant for the holiday-making public, and if they prevented the newspaper sales from going all to pieces during the dead season, the correspondence amply fulfilled its purpose.

Yet the whole matter of modern marriage is far more serious than those light-hearted inquisitors killing time by the summer sea suppose. Marriage is no longer the grave, deliberate, and stable settlement it used to be, and, outside the Catholic Church, there are few marriages to-day in which, from the first, divorce is not contemplated as a possible eventuality. Divorce has, in fact, now assumed the proportions of a scandal and of a portent unique in the annals of Christianity. True, it has been a commonplace in America for many years, but nothing American ever seems to surprise us over much : we look upon her as a young and irresponsible country, and it is the acknowledged privilege of youth and irresponsibility to shock its elders with impunity.

Lady Sykes in her paper on The Deadlock in Ireland, in the April issue of Blackfriars, said that the Government, in its Irish policy, is treading a path that “will inevitably, if continued, end in the breaking-up of our great Empire.” A patriotic Irishman, faced with the present attitude of the Government towards Ireland cannot reasonably be expected to grow sentimental about the break-up of the Empire. Any Irishman who cares for the welfare of his own country would gladly assist in the disruption of the Empire if that were the condition of freeing his own land from the present regime of organized violence and persecution. The preservation of the Empire should be the concern of Englishmen : and it is well for Englishmen who are concerned about the Empire to remember that, all over the world, in the Dominions and in the United States, there are Irishmen, not only influential but numerous, who are being provoked by England’s present treatment of Ireland into the desire for active revenge. Englishmen may declare that Ireland is a purely domestic question, but they must realize that, if Irishmen scattered over the face of the globe refuse to stand silently by, it may easily become a world problem that men may try to solve by working for the disruption of the Empire.

At the approach of the happy day, when seven hundred years ago, that light of holiness, Dominic, passed from this world’s sorrows to the home of the blessed, it is a joy to Us who have so long been amongst his most devout clients, more especially since the day when We began to govern the Church of Bologna which religiously guards the Saint’s remains, it is a great joy to Us, We say, to be able to call upon the faithful from this Apostolic See to keep the memory of so great a saint. And in doing so we are not only yielding to feelings of personal piety, but also performing a duty of gratitude to the Founder and lawgiver and to his renowned family.

Dominic was wholly and thoroughly a man of God : so too was he perfectly a man of the Church, and the Church has ever found him an unconquered champion of the Faith and his Order a stout bulwark of defence. Wherefore not only did Dominic in his days fortify the temple but he took thought for its lasting defence, according to the prophetic words of Honorius III, uttered when he confirmed the Order, “the Brethren of thy Order are to be the champions of the Faith and the true lights of the world.”

The Persians are the “race-lumière” of the East, just as France is the torch-bearer of the West; Persian ideas, Persian philosophy, Persian poetry and mysticism have tinged and penetrated all religious thought in the Near and in the Middle East. The charm of the roses of Shiráz, of dervishes and Sufis and the Rubáiyát, has not failed to reach even these remote, misty fastnesses of the work-a-day West. Some Fate seems to have been at work, pushing the Persians into the foreground of the world’s thought, ever since—shall we say the Babylonian captivity ?— at any rate since the day when those three royal magicians followed the star, and, in its limelight stood around the manger-throne of the Child Jesus in Bethlehem.

It is not within the scope of this slight paper to do more than hint at the religious history of Persia. Its ancient borders on the west were the Araxes, one of the four rivers of the Earthly Paradise, and the Tigris and Euphrates, from whose banks Abram set out, at the call of God, for a strange land in the West. The tradition of the four streams of Paradise lived on in the primitive religion of Irán, and with it, no doubt, no inconsiderable share of the early wisdom of our race. The captivity of the Jews in Babylon and the residence of the prophet Daniel at the court of the Persian Emperor must certainly have had their influence on Jewish thought. In fact the books of Daniel and of Tobias—to mention only two—are full of the traces of this influence, linguistic or metaphysical.

A good deal of water has flowed under the bridges since the world laughed at the “table-turnings” of the Count de Gasparin in Paris in 1854, or thought that Spiritualism was down and out for good with the exposure of Eusapia Paladino. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is no doubt justified when he claims that vastly more evidence has been collected for the genuineness of certain spiritual phenomena than is required to prove very many other scientific matters which cannot be tested by the majority of us. An investigation like that conducted by Dr. W. J. Crawford with the medium Miss Kathleen Goligher, carried on during three years in Belfast under the most exact and rigid conditions excluding the least possibility of fraud, has demonstrated scientifically the existence of a psychic material in the human body which can be weighed, felt, and photographed, and which takes as real a place in the outfit of the human machine as that of the hand with which I write this article. The census conducted by Mr. Gurney, or that by Prof. Henry and Mrs. Sidgwick, with the fifty odd weighty volumes of evidence collected by the Society for Psychical Research, completely lifts apparitions of the dead out of the world of chance and mere imagination. Lastly, the investigation of such cases as those well set out by Sir William Barrett in his book, On the Threshold of the Unseen, and the work that has been done by such men as Bennett, Crooks, Maxwell, Flammarion, Hyslop, Lodge, Wallace, and scores more, together with those we have already mentioned, simply compels belief in the existence and operation of dis-carnate spiritual powers. Catholics have Mr. J. G. Raupert to confirm them.

Nowhere in the world has industrialism achieved such a complete victory as in England. Here alone do we see a Society which exists entirely by and for a cosmopolitan market, and which has lost the last remnants of economic self-sufficiency. And the disturbance of social equilibrium is the more profound because the England of the past was, more perhaps than any other country in Western Europe, an essentially agrarian State. The changes which have made English society and civilization so entirely different in type to anything that exists on the other side of the Channel, in so far as they are not attributable to religion, are mainly due to the peculiar course of English agrarian history.

During the Middle Ages the English countryside, with its open fields cultivated in strips and its wide stretches of common and forest, must have presented very much the same appearance as the neighbouring districts of the Continent, and at the same time England was socially a province of Christendom, sharing in a common civilization, a common art, and common political institutions. The Reformation, however, and the rise of the new landlord class, which had no real parallel in any of the continental countries, launched England on a new path.

The Cambridge Conference has created a new crisis in the Church of England. Bishop Gore has publicly complained that a large and important and learned body of men, many of them officials in that Church, hold views which are fundamentally subversive of the whole fabric of Christian belief. To those of the “Catholic party” who ask him what is to be done in this emergency, he confesses he has no short and easy answer to give, but he makes a few suggestions.

These suggestions resolve themselves into a strong argument against defections to the Church of Rome. Dr. Gore declares himself incapable of being a Roman Catholic, on the grounds of his certainty that the Roman Catholic Church requires of its members adhesion to propositions which are unauthorized, untrue, and unhistorical.

It is impossible not to feel for Dr. Gore some of that enthusiastic admiration which his hearers testified on the occasion of this declaration. He is consistent, loyal, and sincere. Though his loyalty is to principles which are not ours, and his consistency achieved by a logic from which we dissent, we cannot, and we would not, refuse him the honour due to his intelligence, his integrity, and his unflinching courage.

Everyone who read Purcell’s Life of Manning must have felt that, however fascinating its pages, much remained to be written before a true estimate of the Cardinal’s character could be formed. His biographer was so anxious to expose every weak spot in Manning’s complex character that in spite of the splendid material in his hands the result was a painfully one-sided portrait of a really great man. Unfortunately, Mr. Leslie’s book appears so long after the publication of Purcell’s Life that very few people are still alive who knew Manning during the last decades of his life, and can make a just comparison between the first and the second biographer. Still, there can be no doubt Purcell’s volumes have been widely read, and Mr. Leslie’s work will do much to remove some of the uncomfortable impressions made by several of its chapters. He has been singularly fortunate in obtaining much fresh and rich material for his book, so much that one could have wished he had written two volumes instead of one. Manning must always be an enigma to many people. Conscious of great powers, and filled with a desire to use them to the utmost, in public life he inevitably incurs the hostility of those who resent ability and dub it ambition. In any career with his fine gifts of manner, of speech, of writing, with his comprehensive grasp of human affairs, with his power of managing men, in a word with his practical ability, he was bound to outstrip other competitors in the race for success. In politics, in diplomacy, in the higher walks of business, he would have come to the top, spite of every obstacle smaller men might have put in his way.

It is generally acknowledged that throughout the history of mediaeval art the Church was not only the most generous protectress of the artist, but also the most fruitful source of his inspiration. This is true in a special sense of the art of music. The Church, of course, has always had her own music, namely, the plainsong, which, as Dom Shebbeare wrote in a recent number of Blackfriars, she evolved in the process of evolving a liturgy. Plainsong had been brought to its highest stage of perfection by the beginning of the seventh century, under Saint Gregory I, the great classifier and arranger of the music of the liturgy, but it remained a living musical language for many centuries after the time of the great Pope. As new Feasts were instituted, new music was composed for them, and fresh melodies for the Ordinary Chants of the Mass were written throughout the Middle Ages. All this new liturgical music was written according to the rules of a long-established tradition, but side by side with the unchanging music of the Church, there has existed in Europe for a thousand years another branch of the art, derived from plainsong, yet differing profoundly from it, chiefly by reason of the fact that it has undergone an unending series of changes and developments.