The sacred buildings of Lourdes are not good. Lovers of architecture will find little in Lourdes except the rugged castle walls and tower, best seen from the roof of the Rosary Church, and a few houses in the old town such as the humble but truly picturesque dwelling of Bernadette, now buried between a raised causeway on the castle hill and a tall commercial building facing the street and belonging to her living kinsfolk. Few, if any, will dispute Huysmans’ contention that the wanton destruction of Bernadette’s parish church, a most valuable example of very early Romanesque, and the substitution of a blatant modern parody, was a disastrous folly. It is difficult to understand the mind of those who needlessly destroy a tenth-century parish church, yet further endeared by the prayers of the humble child whom Our Blessed Lady chose for her handmaiden. How rich is fair France in these most humble servants of God, so specially fitted to give confidence and kindle hope in our feeble, sinful souls ! St. Genevieve, St. Joan of Arc, St. Margaret Mary, the Blessed Curé of Ars, and now within living memory the meek, shy Bernadette Soubirous ! As St. Bernard said of Our Blessed Lady, there is in these her servants “nothing austere, nothing terrible.” The loss of the building where she received her Maker and made unnumbered visits to the Blessed Sacrament is one of the irreparable losses due to perverse human wilfulness.

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.

Dr. Johnson, like other great men in whose lives the domesticities played but a small part, was after his peculiar fashion a squire of dames. He looked upon himself, he tells us, as “very polite,” and if his most studied elaboration of homage was reserved for an archbishop, he could be very courtier-like with the ladies, and was at times quite eager to show himself a man of gallantry.

His attitude towards the middle-aged, blue-stocking coterie was an attractive mixture of spiritual direction, intellectual coquetry, and tender friendship. But he most completely melted and softened when in the company of one or two younger ladies with claims to intellectual distinction who were admitted into his circle. Of these youthful favourites, not the least was Hannah More—when with her, the tiger in him was quite subdued, and he became positively kittenish.

Hannah More is hardly even a name to-day. We look vaguely at her prim, demure picture in the National Portrait Gallery, and we somehow connect her with the early pioneers of education, and with crude efforts in the field of philanthropy, and that is about all. “Her works are dust, and her words dim with unconquerable rust.” Yet there was a time when the book-shops were filled with battling crowds intent on procuring the four volumes of her memoirs. And but a few years before this, her shrewdly worded, sensible tracts on moral and religious subjects were circulating at the rate of a couple of million copies yearly ; while, earlier still, her tragedy of “Percy” was played by the immortal Garrick to overflowing houses, amid bursts of applause and general approbation and enthusiasm.

Few if any regions in the world can rival in romance the classical Campagna. Not the least of the evils of the Pagan Renaissance was the disastrous attempt to separate what the Church had joined together—poetry and faith, romance and philosophy. The Christian Renaissance acted far otherwise. There is no real break between Dante and Tasso, Giotto and the Della Robbias, or Donatello ; the same Catholic sap nourished these varying tendrils of the same vine.

A true romantic work is also classical, and the classics have far more of the romantic than is commonly admitted, and the most classical of landscapes may well challenge a primacy of romance.

We may admit at the outset, with Digby, that much of Italian scenery is in itself greatly inferior to northern

We take into account the disparaging words that even Ruskin himself once used of the Roman Campagna.

Once upon a time there was a noble knight who led a very merry and graceless life, but at the same time never missed a sermon if he could help it. Of course people jeered at him and said he had better give up sermons if he could not behave himself more suitably. But the knight answered with becoming seriousness, “I trust in time I shall give up my evil ways ; and now although it is true that I do not do all the good I hear about, I am learning what is right against the time when I turn to honest manners in real earnest.”

Well this was an odd way of going to work, and not one I should recommend to anyone I know. But true it is that Heaven notices the little good we do and makes much of it, even though the greater part of our life is evil. The noble knight did mend his ways in time ; and not only gave up his sins, but left the world and all his possessions (which were very great) and became a monk.

Now it happened that at the monastery where he dwelt, getting holier and holier every day, there were six old donkeys which were really past work and no use to anyone at all. The abbot wanted to get rid of them ; and hearing that the noble knight was very well versed in the affairs of the world, he sent him to the fair, accompanied by a lay-brother, to sell the six old donkeys and bring back young ones. This task was by no means to the taste of the noble knight; however, he was a noble monk now, he remembered, and his nobility consisted in obedience ; so off he went.

The purpose of this brief article is to show cause why the traditional identification of Pope Celestine V with “him who made through cowardice the great refusal” (Inf. iii, 60) should be abandoned, and Dante’s memory cleared from an act of impiety.

The identification has no authority. It has, apparently, been repeated by commentators without any investigation, the only reason being Dante’s well-known hostility, on political grounds, to Boniface VIII, and the fact that Celestine’s abdication gave Benedetto Gaetano his opportunity.

Dante himself gives us no clue whatsoever. In its absence we can only fall back upon probability. And probability is entirely against it. There is only one certain allusion to Boniface’s predecessor in the whole of his writings. It occurs in the remarkable story told by Count Guido da Montefeltro in Malebolge (Inf. xxvii, 105). Guido had counselled the taking of Penestrino by deceit on the strength of Boniface’s promise to absolve him from it. “Heaven,” said the Pope, “can I both lock and unlock, as you know ; for twain are the keys, which my predecessor held not dear (non ebbe care).” This is Dante’s only allusion to the hermit pope, and it has not a trace of anger or contempt. It was in an uncritical age, too,—an age which preferred Petrarch to Dante—that Alban Butler wrote the extraordinary footnote to his account of St. Peter Celestine (May 19). Petrarch himself, who in his De Vita Solitaria extols the saint as “a soul very perfect and free,” and rebuts the charge of vilitas animi which he supposes Dante to have made against him, confesses that he had not taken much notice of the Commedia.

When Peter the Great built St. Petersburg he said he was opening a window into Europe. Gogol, Turgenief, Tolstoy, and Dostoievsky opened the greatest windows that we have even yet into Russia. The Russia that they described is buried, though perhaps it is not really dead. It may yet stretch its enormous bulk and cast away its foul and bloody grave-clothes.

At all events, the Russia of those four masters has disappeared behind the Red Dark. Their work is not the less interesting, and would not be, even if the disappearance should be final. It would remain a portentous monument four-square ; Gogol’s side the most uncouth, but not the least striking; Turgenief’s the most ornamental and most adorned, but not the most definite—indeed, the least national and the least powerful; Tolstoy’s the most eulogized, perhaps the most renowned, but not the greatest or the strongest; Dostoievsky’s the most passionately truthful, sincere, and pathetic, if also the most terrible. Of these four architects of the great monument, Turgenief was the least Russian : he had lived in the light of common day outside, and he wrote from memory ; into his memories shone gleams of a western sun. His pen was half-civilized, and that gain was a loss to him. One meets in his books characters that one might meet in a French novel—though it would be one of the finest and best of the French novels. He had ideas of beauty less Russian than western, and his absence tempered his pictures ; he desired that they should please, and a certain haze of gentleness softens their definition. They are incomparably less massive, less prepotent, than Gogol’s or Dostoievsky’s, and are weakened by their graciousness. There was nothing gracious about Gogol’s pictures ; he painted brutally and did not shrink from their brutality, or dream of making it please. The truth he saw was vastly ugly, and he was only concerned to show it vast and true. He did not write of civilized persons and did not himself pose as a civilized writer. He stripped himself and his characters to the shirt, and gave the latter no pose and no quarter.

It is not generally known that this is a free country. Englishmen do indeed stand up when the band plays “God save the King,” and feel emotions of pride and benevolence as they see the Union Jack suspended from the balcony of the Mansion House or draped over the Cenotaph. The clock tower at Westminster is photo-engraved upon their hearts as upon their Bradburies. Festooned with Tudor roses and ribs of beef, a cornucopia of Liberty empties itself at the feet of Nelson, Dizzy, John Peel and the Iron Duke as, in scarlet, they follow the hounds and trample our defeated foes! Rule Britannia, the men in blue, S. Paul’s Cathedral, the Derby, the M.C.C., and Aston Villa, not to mention the playing-fields of Eton, awake those emotions of freedom which no coal strike can destroy nor Ireland dim. But, in spite of these telling facts, I fear we English have forgotten that we are free. We complain, at times, that our freedom has, in some measure, been taken from us.

I have just been reading—rather late in the day—A Spiritual Æneid, a fascinating book ‘in which Father Ronald Knox tells the story of his conversion from Anglicanism to the Catholic faith. To me these accounts of conversion are always interesting, whether they relate the process that led the convert from unbelief to belief or whether they describe that other style of conversion, I mean that awakening from a dead faith and no works to a keen and enthusiastic practice of the virtue of religion.

But although conversions do not fascinate everyone, few who notice them can remain indifferent. The strongest emotions are aroused, anger and repulsion, wonder and scepticism. It sometimes happens that the witness of a conversion is moved to “go and do likewise.” That is to say conversion can become a motive of credibility, a reason for believing. Yet it is curious to notice that, if we except some very recent books, conversion has never before been reckoned among those facta divina of secondary value which, like prophecy and miracles, are the external motives for our accepting revelation as from God.

In the first number of Blackfriars I promised, with the permission of the Editor, to follow a paper upon “The Author’s Tool” with another on the effect of printing on Letters. We think that we know too well the extent of our debt to Caxton to reflect, as a rule, upon the remoter consequences of the invention of printing. The advantages of a multiplication of manuscripts are obvious. The disadvantages are also worth a moment’s thought. To begin with, the multiplication of anything leads us into the realm of arithmetic, a mystic science, not because certain numbers have a peculiar significance whereby we call three and seven “mystic numbers,” but because the mere multiplication of anything changes its character. For example, a fine house is a fine thing, but a row of similarly designed fine houses is detestable. In repetition itself there seems to be something ominous. This is a fact which everyone knows, and no one can explain. All we can say is that quantity and quality seem to be by nature hostile to each other. Perhaps the advantages and disadvantages of the invention of printing can be summarized fairly in the statement, that printing has made the best books more accessible and multiplied indefinitely the worse. But before we consider whether a general accessibility of the best books is free from disadvantage, and whether the multiplication of bad books is something gained, we must remember that the influence of numbers has been apparent, not only in the increase of books printed, but also in the increase of readers. Multiplication of population soon followed multiplication of books.

Nationality as an isolating force is new in the world, an artificial, after-Christian growth, dating from the break-up of Christendom at the so-called Reformation in the sixteenth century. Mutual hostility between races—as opposed to conflicts between a prince and his followers of one State, and a prince of another State and his followers—is not new, but a relapse into fore-Christian barbarism, when the cult of local deities, little knowledge of each other, and total inexperience of political union, led men to regard differences of race as natural and insurmountable barriers, when to be a stranger, a man of another race and creed, was—as it has since become—to be necessarily an enemy, so that the same word—hostis—once did for both. This idea of war between races as natural— , says Plato in Book I of his Laws—was gradually checked politically by the rise of the Roman Empire and the permanence of the Imperial idea, and, on the religious side, by Christianity with its doctrine of the unity of God and of the unity of man made to His Image and equal before Him. Thus with the of Plato we may contrast St. Paul’s ‘.There is neither Jew nor Greek : there is neither bond nor free. . . . For you are all one in Christ Jesus’ (Gal. iii. 28).”

Is this a wholly wild and quite untrue presentation of history? Such measure of truth as it may be found to contain will perhaps emerge as we proceed with our enquiry.

The Silesian Angel, or the Cherubic Wanderer. Under these quaint titles is hidden and forgotten the personal name of one of the most significant, and in manner most original of the seventeenth-century mystics. About the time that a Welsh doctor—the Silurist, Henry Vaughan— published a volume of devotional poetry, of which the thought and feeling are steeped in mysticism, the expression of quaintest beauty, a German doctor newly converted from Lutheranism to the Church, John Scheffler, also published a volume of poetry, more directly mystical in substance and whose style, though of another manner, possesses equal charm and quaintness. In the old-world herb garden of seventeenth-century mystical literature with the rosemary of “Silex Scintillans” we may gather the thyme of the Cherubinischer Wandersman. This latter work consists not of poems but of rhymed couplets, in all 1675, divided into six books. Each couplet (occasionally there are quatrains and two or three longer pieces) sums up with a concision, which rivals the Latin collect, a maxim of mystical theology, of Catholic dogma viewed from the mystical standpoint, or some ascetical rule preparatory to mystical experience. Certainly the doctrine is not original. But we can hardly look for substantial originality in the description of man’s experience of eternal truth. Nor even is the standpoint original. Every utterance can be paralleled from previous mystical writers, either of the German-Flemish or the later Spanish school. Indeed the writer is eager to insist on this in his preface. But the teachings gathered from books explain and confirm the content of a living personal experience. The poet relates what his own eyes have seen of the Word of Life.

This question most men to-day would answer with a prompt and confident “Yes.” It will be the conclusion offered in this paper that, in this affirmative answer, fashionably put forward and passively accepted, most men to-day are making an ethical and radical mistake.

At the outset be it noted the question propounded is : “Should money make money?” We are not concerned directly or primarily with the question : “Does money make money?” To that query all your bankers, stockbrokers, politicians and dividend hunters would no doubt reply with a ready affirmative. That query is for the moment beside the mark, though it may be pointed out in passing that even there the commonly accepted view may be anything but the truth. Our question, “Should money make money?” is one of ethics or morals: in other words it is a question of right and wrong.

Now, the problem is really one of exchange, for it is quite patent that of itself money does not beget money. A half-crown, however warmly placed and in whatever well-lined pocket, cannot produce a litter of sixpences or threepenny-bits.

“Après l’invention du blé, ils voulaient encore vivre A du gland.”

There is a prejudice against primitive survivals. Few men to-day persist in kindling their fires with the flintstock. The devotee who, in the twentieth century, invoked Apollo or prayed to Juno need expect scant sympathy. Manuscripts are no longer copied by hand, now that the printing press is everywhere available. The electric light has put out the feebler glimmers of thousands of tallow candles sufficient for our great-grandparents.

It had to be. We are being shoved along—willy-nilly. It is hard to kick against the pricks. The inventions of to-day leave behind the makeshift contrivances of yesterday. And to-morrow, the something newer that will be offered—at which we shall eagerly snatch—will find us as conceited and as unsatisfied as ever ! Hence the diffidence of many.

Men squatted on the ground until the bright genius arose to whom we owe chairs and sofas. Food was taken up with the fingers before seemliness suggested knives and forks. The strongest male carried off by force his mate until customs of wooing introduced refinements and sentiment into courtship and marriage. Grunts, scowls, nods and imitative gestures were the means of communicating ideas ere the wonders of language revealed a better way. And so forth.

For years before the war the falling birth-rate in France was recognized as the most serious social and economic problem that threatened the future of the country. The war, with its death-roll of nearly a million and a quarter young Frenchmen, to say nothing of the tens of thousands of others who are maimed for life and rendered incapable of providing for the maintenance of families, has enormously increased the gravity of the problem. But apart from these obvious and well-known factors, the years of war and those which have intervened since the armistice have produced a further decline in the population which only a revolution in the prevailing standards of family life in France can remedy.

The statistics of the French birth-rate and death-rate, apart altogether from the awful roll of honour of the French armies in the war, are so terribly eloquent that no juggling with figures could obscure their meaning. It was not to be hoped that even in the year after the armistice, the normal birth-rate would have been restored. But in the year 1919 alone, which surely deserves to count as one of the most glorious in the history of France, there were only three out of her ninety departments in which the population did not actually decline. In all the other eighty-seven the number of deaths during the year was in excess of the number of births, and in no less than twelve—not even counting in the departments devastated by the war—the births did not equal even half the total of deaths.