“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 flint stock. 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.

Of Robert Browning, considered purely as poet, in a sense at once technical and virtual, it is not here proposed to dispute.

Although he often rhymed as by brute force, wresting the music though he broke the lyre, there is yet in most of his writing that aptness, vigour and finality of language that are the marks of true poetic literature. In passing, it may be remarked that one other great quality of poetry, Vision, was not often enough the instrument and source of his poems. In place of that power, he had thought, insight and a singular grasp of the complexities of mind. In the main, he rationalized emotions, did not create them. He could conjure them up, by felicitous analysis and portrayal, by sudden turns of the text, but only occasionally do they arise immediately, by the power of an unique concept and expression. For instance the line, “The air broke into a mist with bells,” gives a very perfect mental sensation.

It is then, of Browning in relation to the Catholic Church that I consider a theme sufficiently interesting to warrant an analysis. For it is valuable, illuminative, sometimes to discover the small thoughts of large minds ; to trace out, along the thin lines of little, acetose angers, the effects of misinformation, of blindness, or of bias. To discover a great soul in places curiously “shrivelled like a little pea.”

We do not know whether the book which has occasioned this article signifies the decay either of ethics or of (what its writer calls) “medicine” ; or of both ethics and medicine, for without a doubt it signifies a decay. A profession such as “medicine,” which deals with the human ultimates of birth, marriage, and death, has an ethical import which might well exercise the genius of a modern Thomas Browne. We must not be taken to indulge in personalities but rather to criticize a state of things and a state of learning if we look upon this work of an Edinburgh Lecturer on Medical Jurisprudence as a pathological specimen which we must patiently diagnose and treat.

It is the sub-title that reveals the unhealthy state of things. The book is entitled Medical Conduct and Practice. This is a sufficiently general title to cover the contents of the book ; and to allow the author to give shrewd advice to his Scottish medical readers on “how to get on in the world.”

But this non-committal title has the sub-title “A Guide to the Ethics of Medicine.” To most of us whom a University has befriended in youth, the word Ethics recalls that highest branch of Philosophy which the Greeks elaborated in order to endow Christian thought. We recall the Ethics of Aristotle, with many regrets that the true wisdom of that book is now a quarry for the philologist rather than for the philosopher. But the word Ethics stirs up such deep emotions in our heart that we are at expectation’s end to see what will be said of it by a modern brother of him who wrote Religio Medici, and especially by one of those accepted few who have sitten in the chair of Medicine near Arthur’s Seat.

Having refrained from verse more or less successfully for twenty years, or it might be only fifteen, I was seized with a certain impulse on re-reading the hymns in The Dream of Gerontius. An impulse is not the same as a well-considered reason for doing things, and so is not easy to define, but as well as I can analyse it, it was to this effect: That theology—that unwrought mine of poetry, as Patmore calls it—is by no means represented in our hymns except by fits and starts, and what we want, says impulse, is the cycle complete. See what Newman has done in his choir of Angelicals in surveying the subject from the nebular hypothesis right away to Purgatory. God wills it! Be a crusader, do one pillar of the temple—no one can do them all, but if you stir, someone else will do so too. Thus I began to find out some of the many, many things which mere critics never suspect: e.g. that a hymn, and a very good one, might be based on, say, the nature of efficacious grace, if only one could keep the subject long enough in solution in the alembic of imaginative experience. But there is the difficulty. It is only by a series of cosmic accidents that such things can arise, like the making of minerals, especially of that very condensed vegetable the diamond. So while we leave these processes to themselves, we must translate, translate, translate. This is the only feasible way of producing anything like a cycle of vernacular hymns. Songs, lyrics, more sacred or less, the vernacular is producing, has produced, but these fill no gaps in the cycle. This was Faber’s failure.

It is reassuring to Christians in Palestine—especially to Englishmen—to see that public opinion in England is being stirred up with regard to the affairs and fate of the Holy Land. It is high time. As you have already had opportunity to learn, we are getting to be in very bad odour ; or, as an English official here at Jerusalem said the other day, we are now thoroughly detested by everybody—French, Arabs, Christians, and Moslems. What love the Jew bears to us is scarcely disinterested.

Up to the present there has been little sign of enthusiasm called forth by the fact that England is mandatory power over a land that stands for so much as does Palestine. In fact the chief impression one receives is that this position is looked on at home rather as a burden than as an honour ; and certainly, if we maintain the position, and go on as we have begun, it promises to prove a very great burden indeed. However, the news we receive of the campaign against the Palestinian policy gives us hope that a change will take place.

At the same time it must be said that recent articles in the home papers on this question have caused great surprise and not a little anger here. There is certainly an attack to be made on Zionist aspirations and plans with regard to Palestine ; but it is not along the lines of these articles. Exaggeration, and what appears in some cases downright untruth, can serve no purpose except to defeat the very end in view. Indeed, one has been tempted to ask what is the end proposed by the writers of certain of these articles against the Jews ; in other words, on which side are they fighting? In the present case they appear to have put good ammunition into the hands of the Zionists.

To-day when, encouraged by the ostensible causes of and excuses for the Great War, the oppressed of centuries raise their heads, it behoves Catholics to look around and abroad, noting how fare their brethren in various parts of the globe. Troubles in foreign as well as adjacent lands are too often dismissed with the comfortable assurance that “these people are always fighting among themselves.” If enquiry reveals that grave wrongs are perpetrated with impunity, but also that interference entails risk of financial loss in great commercial transactions, the subject is laid aside and attention directed elsewhere. Thus only can be explained the indifference of Christian communities who equip missions for the Far East, to the desperate plight of Christians close at hand struggling for the right to live under the powerful pressure of ever-triumphant Mohammed.

Constantinople is popularly supposed to be the last stronghold of the Turk in Europe. In reality he is ensconced nearer home amid the impregnable fastnesses of Albania, whence he harries the Christians within reach, imposing his will on these fated slaves who still resist the shining lure of the Crescent. Among the recalcitrants are the Miridite, Malissori, and other Catholic tribes who mistakenly took it for granted that Turkey shared the defeat of her allies in the late war, and that they need no longer submit to the rule of Mohammed but could govern themselves on Christian lines.

The two words Art and Scholasticism, set down thus side by side, look at first sight somewhat oddly paired. A little book with this title, which is useful out of all proportion to its size, shows that Scholastic philosophy offers a very sound and far-reaching theory of art, and for anyone interested in such questions will well repay careful reading. And who is not so interested? Who but has thought and talked more or less vaguely, and perhaps all the more ardently, about Art for Art’s sake, about the antagonism of Art and Morality, or the identification of Art with Morality, or the dissociation of Art from Morality? At least, after assimilating this statement of the scholastic notion of Art, vagueness will be out of the question ; and when arguments arise they will spring from the very root of the matter, from first principles and metaphysical presuppositions.

Chapters I to V give a detailed analysis of ideas and words ; the rest of the book is a series of deductions from and a synthesis of the clear notions so obtained. If we may for a moment compare artistic production to some marvellous machine, the parts are taken asunder before our eyes and cleaned of dust and cobwebs ; when they are put together again we have the joy of understanding their functions and following their interplay.

Giovanni Papini’s “Story of Christ” is, to put it on its lowest level, the literary sensation of the moment in Italy. Within one week after publication ten thousand copies were sold, and very shortly afterwards the whole of the first edition of twenty thousand was exhausted—this with a serious and by no means sensational book of over six hundred pages. The reason may perhaps partly be sought in the fact that the curious wished to see what would be made of the Gospels by a writer who, whatever the intellectual distinction of his other work, had certainly been guilty of uttering defiant anti-Christian sentiments and had, in addition to the legitimate effect produced by his works of imagination, exerted a definite influence against religion among the young intellectuals of Italy. But no one who looks beyond the immediate circumstances will account for all the popularity of Papini’s book in this way. He will add the further important facts—first, that this is a rewriting of the Gospel-story by a poet; secondly, that the act of faith uttered by Papini in this book corresponds to the profoundly Catholic and Christian sentiments of the Italian people, the younger generation not by any means excepted—for the war has driven many a doubter to serious reflection and self-examination, with spiritual results similar to those which were produced in Papini himself. By its literary qualities, then, and by its appropriateness to the prevailing religious emotions of men in Italy and in other countries which passed through the war, Giovanni Papini’s “Story of Christ” bids fair to become one of the most notable books of the century.

The Catholic Social Guild is distinguished by one feature which marks it off from every other of the many Catholic societies which flourish in this country. It seeks to promote its objects not by action so much as by thought. Personal investigation and common discussion are the characteristics of its life. The student and the study-circle are its essential elements. I can go further and boldly assert that the Catholic Social Guild is a University—a Catholic University—the most democratic of all universities if it is judged by its members, and the most aristocratic of all if it is judged by its aspirations. This University of rich and poor, young and old, wise and simple, is naturally growing up everywhere in these our islands, because it has in itself that spontaneous creative spirit of every true University—the love of learning.

It is that same spirit which manifests itself at this very meeting. I have been accorded, not the duty of giving an instruction, but the privilege of initiating a discussion. For the former task I hold no expert qualifications ; but for the latter favour I hold those which belong to every man.

It is now eleven years since the publication of the first volume of the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, literally translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. The contemporary book-market hardly noticed the arrival of the stranger who modestly took his place amidst the “recent books.” Few of the buyers and sellers in the market suspected the toil and hope that had prepared this translation for its place on the already overcrowded mart of books in English. Still fewer, even of those, whose toil was thus realized, could have foreseen the success which welcomed the translation almost from the first.

Daring, so great as to be akin to foolhardiness, had inspired the makers of the translation. Although the audience who might reasonably be expected to read and buy the translation was, if fit, yet few, the translators printed an edition of two thousand. The edition proved, not too great, but too small. In some three years a new edition was needed ; and was delayed only by the stress of the Great War. Since then three other volumes have been exhausted. Upwards of 20,000 copies have been sold. When it is remembered that this great sale is of a classic of the deepest philosophy and theology, our readers will see how the success of the venture has astonished even its most daring promoters.

Swing thy slow circles, Thurible, before His Face,

Nor let there one grain fall Of incense . . . for the thurible is Space,

Unstarréd Space : and this revolving ball One grain of incense in the dust of all,

That in the solemn silence no winds stir.

. . . Planets and constellations , . . these are votive myrrh And frankincense, to give sweet-scented praise And prayer, before the Stall Where lies the Lord of All.

. . . Swing thy slow circles, Thurible, before His Face.

Swing thy slow circles, Thurible, before His Feet ...

O Planets, nought save earth,

Dust shall you burn before His judgment throne

As now you burn to celebrate His birth

When all the Sons of God exult and sing for mirth.

. . . Pale streams of stars, you smoke in sacrifice Perpetually slow-rising up to Paradise Still as unwavering flame and faintly sweet,

To praise the Eternal One,

Incarnate Word, the Son. -

. . . Swing thy slow circles, Thurible, before His Feet.

Swing thy slow circles, Thurible, for Him, thy Lord,

Within Whose Hand, heaped light

The Cosmos lies : and through Whose Fingers poured

Run like fine sand the planets . . . they that write

High in black Space the message of His might

Who sleeps, half-hearing through His dreams, the Song

Rise as a tide, triumphantly and strong—

“ Stars as tall altar-tapers light With steady flame the deeps of Night,

But low in the heavens a greater shines.

Kings have found the key

Of this Mystery

In the last of all the Signs.”

To have been a student in Paris in the early thirteenth century, to have seen the foundation of the Dominican Order, to have been present at the coronation of St. Louis and to have assisted at the Council of Lyons ; to have spent one’s early manhood in missionary journeys and one’s riper years as an Inquisitor, knowing France from end to end and acquainted with all the important people of one’s time ; surely such fullness of life as this would justify a man, if ever anything could, in writing his autobiography.