It is an arguable thesis that the Protestantism which broke off from catholic unity in the sixteenth century is now most authentically represented by the group calling itself ‘The Modern Churchmen’s Union for the advancement of Liberal Religious Thought.’ Not that these modern ecclesiastical Liberals have fewer inconsistencies in doctrine and practice than have the other insurgents against the de facto and de jure Catholic Church. Thus even the authentic ‘aims of the Modern Churchmen’s Union’ as authentically stated in the Report (p. xvii) contain the following :

(a) For the moment we are at a loss to know how the President of the Union, Dean Inge, has allowed the category of Progress to find a place in the aims. His broadside attack on the modern idea of Progress is remembered by us as one of the most refreshing draughts in modern English letters.

There was romance in old-time smuggling, if the story-books speak true. There is precious Tittle in that present-day form of it called ‘rum-running,’ if James Barbican’s account is to be considered authoritative. It is a cold, hard business proposition, with abundant possibilities of trickery, fraud, bribery, and murder, as a background. That the ethics of rumfunning are, therefore, a somewhat complicated issue will not be surprising.

Why the general title of ‘rum-running’ has been adopted is a mystery. In point of fact, rum is seldom carried. The normal stock-in-trade is whiskey, with ‘brandy and wines for a side-line. It is probably ‘one of the many words used by the American journalist in his love of alliteration.’ The men engaged in the business are titled according to the part they play, and if there are heroes in the game at all they are the ‘rum-runners’ properly so-called. These are they who command the whiskey-ships which lie anchored twenty miles or so off land, contending with storms, pirates and mutiny; they who own the Seabright dories, those small cockle-shell speed-boats by means of which the cargo is landed, and play a lone hand against storms, fogs, revenue cutters, prohibition agents, police and ‘hijackers’; they who drive motor lorries at breakneck speeds for hundreds of miles at a stretch and who are, as often as not, shot down (‘bumped off’ in the slang phrase) either by police or hijackers.

The April to which I look forward is a thing of more marvels than the April the colts snuff up on the March winds, with such promises of life ahead that in sheer joy they suddenly send the mud splashing behind them in the paddock, rearing and chasing in the ecstasy of that beckoning festival.

The Easter to which I, as a Christian, look forward, comes after long Lent of February and March with their penance of pruning knife and scourging rain and skies grey-white as wood-ash in that long fast of bare black trees and beaten turf. But all through the forty days, Easter has been in the air; sometimes we have received the promise afar off, even before the immaculate conception of the first snowdrop in its humility. Certainly in March, when the sun is so veiled and weak that only the larks find it, when only jessamine and winter wallflowers give alms of gold, you may know the stir of sap under the dead bracken as you go to early Mass. England begins her preparations in good time, because she has always kept Easter with great liturgical splendour in her orchards and gardens, in field and farmhouse. She brings out the trinity cups of woodspurge and crocuses like gold, frankincense and myrrh, and St. Joseph’s violets, one by one. Then her gold and silver willow, white violets and wild daffodils, anemones under the old pear-tree, bracken fronds like a bishop’s pastoral staff, her yellow chickens and ducklings. In rain or sun, we hear the numes of bird-song, unconsciously obedient to the Motu proprio.

Thirty-Five years ago, the Holy See, in a letter to the Sacred Congregation of Propaganda, declared it would tolerate the presence of Catholic students at non-Catholic Universities in England. (April 2nd, 1895).

A few weeks later, the Holy See addressed a letter to Cardinal Vaughan (April 17th). That letter set out the conditions under which Catholic men might be allowed to attend the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge.

The point which is pertinent here is that the letter is concerned with safeguards of the faith and morals of such Catholics as attend those Universities; that the safeguards are (1) regular courses of lectures in Philosophy, History and Religion should be given by Catholic professors to the Catholic students; (2) that the Catholic students who attend non-Catholic Universities are bound to attend the lectures which are specially given for their benefit, and that both parents and the Bishops should see that this is carried out.

There exists in England at the present time a state of affairs which seems to me to call for the close attention of all Catholics.

It is a commonplace to decry the faults of one’s own time. Everyone is in some degree a laudator temporis acti; and hope causes most men to look to the future for remedy of present ills. Yet, when due account has been taken of this human tendency, England today does present to the most casual observer some terribly alarming symptoms. Such things as the vast disorganisation of labour, the growing inability of the Government to find money for the payment of their colossal liabilities, the complete failure of compulsory State education to produce any sort of useful result, the despairing abandonment of the land are evident for all to see.

This anti-papal prejudice crops up over and over again in the history of our own and earlier times. Hardly is it to be eradicated, for the roots of the disease’ are in many lands a national inheritance, and Catholics share with non-Catholics the responsibility for keeping the prejudice alive. (How much alive it is affairs in Malta have manifested.) Father Thurston, patiently investigating the falsehoods of the enemy, exposes masonic libels, the foul pornography of popular writers on Vatican scandals, the mistakes and misrepresentations of our incorrigible Dr. G. G. Coulton, the queer perversions of fact offered to the public by Dean Inge and other Anglicans. It is all done very thoroughly, this investigation, and a vast amount of research has been involved. A noble anxiety for historic truth and a willingness to expand to the uttermost a large capacity for taking pains have always distinguished Father Thurston’s work, and these things are, in this examination of the significance of the ‘No Popery !’ cry, as conspicuous as ever.

Has this prejudice its mainspring—as Father Thurston suggests, quoting from John Galsworthy in support of the suggestion—in the readiness of many to believe anything discreditable of public men?

Ellen Courtenay’s ultimatum to O’Connell, declaring that she had received promises of assistance from ‘many persons,’ and that ‘it would make her fortune’ to denounce him publicly, was posted to O’Gorman Mahon, the young Member of Parliament for County Clare, at the end of February, 1831. It was exactly a year later that, in the Fleet Prison in London, she added the date to the last footnote to the pamphlet, which was published and at once broadcast over England, by the Editor of the Satirist. He must have made a very handsome profit on the sale of so small a publication at the price of half a crown per copy. The pamphlet comprises twenty-seven small pages of narrative in large black type, followed by ten pages of footnotes in smaller type, which are mainly concerned with a denunciation of O’Connell’s public activities as an Irish agitator, and are written in the familiar style of all his political critics at the time.

The first footnote, for instance, denounces ‘this man of atrocity’ for having ‘violated the sanctity of the Lord’s day by changing even its title, and styling it “the O’Connell Sunday”’ with the object of ‘wringing from the poor Peasantry their last penny .... to enable him to pursue his insatiable ambition.’ And the concluding footnote, which is quite obviously written to serve as political propaganda for quotation throughout England, fills four pages of close type.

I am all for education, but not at the expense of freedom and family life. When the House of Commons decrees that no child is to live with its father and mother on board a canal boat, it strikes a blow against marriage, and the family, and liberty, which is almost worthy of Moscow. Nor would such a measure be suggested, but for the insufficiency of our educational experts, whose indolence suggests to them that it is an easier job to destroy a home than to make a special kind of school to support a special kind of family. The modern legislator is never so happy as when he is interfering with domestic peace, or hindering a man at his work; and the Government Aunties all know, far better than mere mothers, how children should be fed, clothed and taught. I have no doubt that there are men in the Education Department, like Edward Holmes, the late chief inspector of education, who if given a free hand to-morrow, could devise an excellent scheme for providing the canal boat children with all the education they want, and saving them from many weary hours of scholastic slavery in an unwholesome atmosphere. To do this would necessitate tearing up a lot of futile regulations and obtaining a sum of money from a niggardly Treasury. Not so much, of course, as the Exchequer would spend on a useless airship, or some pictures of bananas to please Empire advertisers, but merely a few thousands for such sanitary buildings and sensible teachers as the scheme would need.

It is pathetic to see a young life coming of age merely to die. It is tragic if the death is due to the indifference and neglect of those who have brought the young life into being, and are responsible for its continuance. There is some danger that this year English Catholics may be, not merely witnesses of such a domestic tragedy, but actually the villains of the piece.

The Catholic Social Guild comes of age this year. At its annual meeting, just held in Oxford, it assembled its friends for the customary rejoicings. But the debutante was found to be seriously ill, sick almost to death. Instead of congratulations and good wishes for the future, there was to be heard a thin, tired voice uttering what sounds perilously like a valedictory death-bed speech.

‘Last year,’ it said, ‘we made a loss of £86. This year it is £85. The surplus of £74 on the old balance sheet has disappeared and become a deficit of £11. Our expenditure cannot be reduced below its present amount if any sort of organisation and propaganda is to be maintained. Our income is below that—our regular income from subscriptions very much below that. Whether we meet again here will depend upon whether we survive the crisis by increasing our income. If the Guild goes, the Democrat goes, the Year Book goes, and eventually the Workers’ College also goes.’

Last time I spoke at St. Dominic’s Priory, Haverstock Hill, to a crowd of boys, one of them had a fit. This shows how far from suited I am to talk to or even about boys. (However, when I was there before, someone lost his false teeth .... I was accused .... but no matter. Perhaps it’s an affair of place rather than person. Or, just fate. To resume . . . .)

I am not going to speak so much about boys, as about anyone who grows up in a place like Poplar, London, E.14; and though I shall talk about Poplar, I am not selfishly forgetting other desperately poor parishes in London, or in many another city, Glasgow for example; Bristol. I suppose that much the same happens everywhere as in Poplar. For example, the parents, either because they must or because they are short-sighted, send their children out to do such work as children can, immediately after they leave school and even before. (I knew a boy who made quite a good business, between whiles, by stealing leafy twigs and sticking them in flower-pots (also stolen) and selling them to old ladies in the suburbs on the assurance that ‘they would flower in October.’ . . . He had already learnt how to steal enough milk out of doorstep-bottles to supplement his insufficient breakfast. But he was an angel-child in school . . . .) Well, at sixteen the young labourer is sacked, because he has to be insured.

The deserter from a cause, good or otherwise, is viewed, and quite rightly, with suspicion. The assumption is that he must have some axe to grind, some grudge to settle. In this case neither is true. These comments are simply the saner reflection of one of those people ‘who cannot be fooled all the time.’ They apply only to the First Century Christian Fellowship, alias The. ‘Oxford’ Group Movement, alias ‘ Buchmanism,’ alias ‘The Groups,’ and do not in any way refer to those quiet, dignified meetings of individual churches, particularly Calvary Episcopal Church in New York City, whose staff, though holding a different viewpoint from mine, have placed me deeply in their debt by their unending kindness, affection and hospitality.

Before writing this article, the writer attended a Buchman meeting and publicly announced this intention.

A few weeks ago three sandwich-men, wandering aimlessly up and down the Cornmarket in Oxford, announced to the world, in red letters a foot high, ‘The Truth about Buchmanism.’ The Buch-manite scowled, the public laughed, which is the proper attitude for the public to take, particularly that part of it which is not interested in reviving an already dying evangelism.

Vernon Johnson’s book, One Lord, One Faith really needed no reply. It was not a challenge, not controversial : it was itself a reply to innumerable inquirers who sought to know why he had thought it necessary to leave the Church of England and seek reconciliation with the Catholic Church. In explaining why he had so acted, he made a very simple, straight-forward and sincere statement of what had happened in his own soul. His explanation is written with a very rare courtesy and there is not a word which could be seriously interpreted as offensive to his Anglican friends. The Rev. E. Milner-White and the Rev. W. L. Knox are not satisfied with Father Vernon’s explanation. In effect they think hel has acted foolishly; but their object is not so much to convince him of his folly as to warn the many readers of his book from following too rashly in his footsteps. This ‘Reply’ is not studiously courteous nor is there the careful avoidance of giving offence which distinguished Father Vernon’s statement. In fact we have heard the book curtly described as ‘bad temper, bad history, bad theology, bad morals and bad taste’ —a severe indictment, but not entirely unmerited.

Is it good history, for instance, to say that the Churches of England and Rome ‘definitely claim unbroken descent from the Apostles through their similar ministries (a claim which history, that is to say, fact, allows to be equally strong in each case)’? And is this good theology?

With the ignorance that is so common in matters concerning Spain, it is often stated and more generally thought that Spain was an obstacle to the Renaissance, if by Renaissance is understood the Reformation, then the statement is true. As it stands it is far from the truth. It is lamentable enough that the simplest facts about Spain should not form part of the average Englishman’s education, but such ignorance is unpardonable in a Catholic. This attitude towards Spain has a long and interesting history behind it, but it is time it were abandoned. Mere misguided supposition should give way to intelligent search and, what is even more important, to intelligent understanding.

No period of Spanish history is more instructive and enlightening than the Renaissance and post-Renaissance period from 1475 to 1700. It was the period that saw Spain rise from a group of medieval states to the premier position among the nations of the world and then sink down into a condition of almost complete political insignificance. The Renaissance in Spain explains both medieval and modern Spain. It is the logical development of the one as well as the necessary cause of the other.

Those fortunate enough to live in the country in early spring know well the pleasure that is to be found in watching and listening to the birds. Now legends grow in the country, and when towns were only houses collected together in the country they grew there also. Legends are amongst life’s most precious gifts, telling us, as they do in story-shape how God is love, and how the saints were his friends. Perhaps it is in legends that we get nearest to the real man in the saint. The saints loved God, and therefore all his creatures—a solid fact, not a beautiful phrase. They spent their days helping others to come with them to God, a work which made them the busiest of the busy, and yet gave them leisure to thank God for all He had made and to admire His handiwork. Their love overflowed to the animal creation, the beauties of which inspired them to sing such canticles as we find in the life of St. Francis of Assisi, wherein God is thanked for the beauty He has given to His creatures. No more beautiful legends exist than those which tell us of saints and birds, and even Our Lord’s life became in the middle ages a centre of bird-lore. The wren was placed in the stable at Bethlehem, and the robin got his little red-breast from staunching the Precious Blood, so that ‘Robins and wrens are God Almighty’s friends.’

Two recent reviews of Mr. Eric Gill’s latest book, Art Nonsense, make us think that it is time Mr. Gill’s art was discussed from the point of view of his own writings and the Thomistic philosophy of which he professes to be so ardent a follower.

Few living artists enjoy the distinction of being the subject of special books; both Mr. Joseph Thorp and J.K.M.R. in Mr. A. Rutherston’s series of Contemporary British Artists have written with keen appreciation of Mr. Gill’s artistic achievements, illustrating their books with numerous reproductions of his sculpture and carving. Yet opinion as to the merits of his work is widely divergent. Whilst some admire it unreservedly, others dislike it as intensely. Undoubtedly the same divergence of opinion exists concerning all artists’ works, but in the given case the Artist who is at the same time a writer will help us to a correct appreciation of his work as judged by his own principles. And in fact it is not the writing but the work that matters, for, as Mr. Gill himself reminds us : ‘There are plenty of lying documents, and very great skill and judgment is required to use them. But works are infallible guides .... You may write an elaborate series of lies on paper, but your handwriting will betray you and show what manner of man you are.’ So we shall proceed with the examination of these ‘infallible guides’ in the light of Art Nonsense which one of its reviewers declares to ‘say the last word on matters which have long been spoken of in vain.’

On Monday evening, December the 30th, 1929, Mrs. Sheppey-Greene (née Schuster) died in Charing Cross Hospital. The tragedy of a richly endowed mind and soul cut off in mid-life after a few hours’ illness came with bewildering fitness almost as we were remembering ‘Rachel weeping for her children, who were no more.’

The friars of St. Dominic were grieved that this sister of the Third Order was taken when, as they thought, her life of varied usefulness was just opening into flower. Yet they could not withhold the further thought—and it was an end to grief—that He Whom their sister had served was accounting her life not an opening flower but a ripened fruit.

Those who knew Rose Schuster best could not picture her as choosing, even for an hour, a low rather than a high way to God. I have heard her reply to the question, how did she come by her deep knowledge of the Bible, by saying that she had a governess who insisted on the word of God being committed to memory. But it was evident that the girl whose faithful memory was learning God’s word had a still more faithful heart that was learning from God’s word how best to do God’s will.

Some two years after her mother became a Catholic she followed her mother into the Church. But indeed she never followed anyone but Him Who is the way, and the truth and the life. The only life her robust mind could seek was the gift of truth.

The course of the Reformation in England—’ that catastrophe in the history of Christian civilization —the Reformation so-called ‘—is plain sailing, the proceedings in the alteration of religion are clear. It is otherwise with Ireland. Confusion and obscurity attend the narrative of events and historians of the period have for the most part earned an advocate’s reward and left truth to take care of itself. The work of Father Ronan is therefore the more valuable, and this second volume, which covers the critical years from Elizabeth’s accession till the death of James Fitzmaurice, is of high importance.

The story itself is dreary enough. It was ‘an age of insincerity, inconsistency, bluffing and temporising on all sides.’ Pride and avarice are exhibited, and at their worst; treachery and murder most foul are recurring incidents in the history of the relations of the English government to the people of Ireland. The feuds of the great Norman-Irish chieftains, of the houses of Butler and Geraldine in especial, the overweening pride of Shane O’Neill—whose patriotism is not to be denied, though Father Wolf, S.J., the papal commissary, wrote him down ‘a cruel, impious heretical tyrant’ —the nominal submission of chiefs and nobles to the sovereignty of Elizabeth, the acceptance by seven of the Irish bishops of the Elizabethan supremacy and the further acceptance by five of the seven of the Protestant order of service—all these conspicuous things make melancholy reading. But despite the failure of the Irish chiefs to stand together in the presence of a common enemy and despite the utter misery and savagery of the people, the Elizabethan ‘reform’ had no success in Ireland.

To discuss the private life of Daniel O’Connell as though it required vindication is, especially around the centenary year of the Catholic Emancipation Act, an impertinence which would have called forth a scathing rebuke from the Liberator himself, if he had not passed beyond the range of those bitter controversies that saddened all his later public life. But a vindication has, in fact, become requisite in view of the extraordinary and quite gratuitous attack upon O’Connell’s moral reputation which was made a few years ago in a book which has attracted a great deal of public attention both because of its sensational style and because its author is not only an Irish Catholic but a former Lord Justice of the Irish Courts.

In all the vast output of recrimination with which O’Connell was assailed during his long struggle to win Catholic emancipation, and later as the leader of the Repeal movement, there is certainly no more astonishing and vindictive attack than that which was made quite recently by the Rt. Hon. Sir James O’Connor in his History of Ireland 1798-1924. And as this ex-Lord Justice has seen fit to attack O’Connell’s reputation from a new angle, throwing into the scales against a dead man his own prestige and authority as one of the principal former members of the Irish judiciary, the attack cannot, in fairness to O’Connell’s memory, be left unnoticed. The present writer has by accident discovered quite recently new evidence bearing directly upon the flimsy testimony which Sir James O’Connor produced.

It is not long since a book bearing almost the same title as the one before me now appeared under the aegis of a judge’s name; which, while it set out to give a clear and readable account of the Monmouth rising and its consequences, was a disappointment to the serious student because of its obvious Whig bias and lack of that chief essential of the judicial mind—the sense of balance. Judge Parry, moreover, was content to perpetuate many errors because they fitted in with his own conceptions, and I fear that, backed by the influence of his name and position, they have been strengthened in the mind of the casual reader.

The present volume is unlike its predecessor in all but name; the whole aim and intention so different that in a sense the title is misleading. Mr. Muddiman is not really concerned at all with the rising itself, nor does he attempt to give us dramatic sketches of the characters connected with it; we find here no suggestion of the Walking Gentleman, the Low-Comedy Buffoon, or the Comic Villain, no tolerance for Oates or Tutchin, no special tenderness for Dissenters, and above all no bias against ‘Judge’ Jeffreys. Even the standpoint—and the book is written from the Tory standpoint on the whole—is one of reason, moderation, and restraint. In short, it is necessary to realise from the beginning that these pages deal less with opinions than with facts; and that, while Judge Parry aims at giving us his own New of the period and the personalities who played their parts in it, Mr. Muddiman is inquiring into the foundations on which our knowledge of that period and of those personalities is based.