Those who are familiar with St. Thomas’s Proemium to his Summa contra Gentiles will recall his words on the meaning of true Wisdom. ‘Sapientis est ordinare,’ he says, ‘it is a wise man’s business to deal with things in orderly fashion, and since the goal or end we have in view must govern our procedure, and since the supreme goal for us all must be the Divine Truth, the study of it should be the one preoccupation of the wise man.’ That is Theology, or the study of God. Now God is made known to us in nature, and the true scientist is he who endeavours to arrive at a knowledge of the Creator through His creation. But besides the Book of Nature there is also the Book wherein God has spoken to us and shewn us the path to heaven, in which He has ‘set before us life and death.’ This is His Revelation, the theologian’s quarry, the true source of his wisdom. Hence the words above quoted from Job are with peculiar appositeness used by the Church in the Breviary Office for the Feast of St. Jerome, the ‘Doctor maximus’ whose entire life was spent in toiling in that quarry.

Of them ‘that go down to the sea in ships’ Saint-Malo, assuredly, has never had any lack. For the last five hundred years she has been the home of a sea-faring people; adventurers, discoverers, privateers—sometimes little better than pirates—she numbers them in plenty among her citizens, as we have good and convincing cause to remember. For it must be frankly confessed that not only did they dispute with us the freedom of the seas, but at one time it was not we who always had the best of the argument. In fact, to be honest, we suffered very considerably at the hands of these free-lances; and it is a surprising thing to remember that these men raised the little rock-city of their birth to be a power in France, and a danger to England. When the size of Saint-Malo is taken into consideration, this is a rather remarkable achievement.

Only a few of their names are familiar to us, though many more are preserved in the annals of the little town on the Brittany coast; and perhaps it is worth while to recall something of what is known of them. Commanding their own ships while they were yet boys (Duguay-Trouin was only sixteen); growing incredibly rich and piling up adventures as other lads steal apples; something more than a guild—almost a family, closely interlinked by marriage and descent; merchants sending out their own ships to trade as well as to fight, fighters manning their own ships to defend their trade—to read the story of their exploits is like turning over the pages of a fairy tale.

The inclusion of a monograph on St. Thomas in the ‘Leaders of Philosophy’ series is significant of the growing strength of the Thomist revival. Even in England, later than in the rest of Europe, St. Thomas is now coming to be considered as taking rank among the philosophers who have mainly influenced western thought; with Leibniz, Spinoza, Berkeley, Kant. Father Knox’s Lady Denham, with her ‘Sir Thomas who?’ after the game of ghosts, is a type already growing uncommon.

Perhaps there is no one in this country better qualified than Father D’Arcy to give an acceptable statement of St. Thomas’s thought. A high and dry Thomist can cut an awkward figure in modern philosophical society. Father D’Arcy is never that; his manner is always tactful, indeed at times even deprecatory. He is inclined to present a Thomist certitude almost hat in hand, as when he says that the problem of the One and the Many receives ‘an attempted explanation in the metaphysics of St. Thomas. By an employment of his fundamental distinctions and what he calls analogy he tries to find a via media’ (p. 109). Still, a wedge cannot be driven in thick end first, and it is possible that Thomists in the past have not been sufficiently ingratiating. And there cart be little doubt that Father D’Arcy has also entered well into the spirit of his subject, and has written a book profitable even to the practised Thomist; something better than a list of theses strung together and described from outside; a synthesis showing a real insight into St. Thomas’s thought and the meaning of the principles of act and potency, of analogy, and of knowledge.

They belong to history, many papal encyclicals, bulls and briefs; to interpret their meaning, to understand their purpose, and to measure what they accomplished, we must have knowledge of the circumstances that provoked these papal utterances and injunctions.

What can we make of Clericis Laicis of Boniface VIII (was it not annulled by Clement V, first of the Avignon popes?); of the Regnans in Excelsis of St. Pius V (judged to be of doubtful expediency by a later pontiff, Urban VIII); of the Unigenitum of Clement XI; the Dominus ac Redemptor of Clement XIV; the Mirari Vos of Gregory XVI—pronouncements all of interest in the history of the papacy and of mankind—unless we know the conditions and occasions? The commentary of the historian is necessary if there is to be profit from the perusal of these important documents. While it may be urged, truthfully enough, that as the judgments of the Holy See on things temporal, all briefs, bulls and encyclicals are to ‘be received with respect; yet without knowledge of the pressure that urged utterance our respect is liable to be without understanding.

As with the injunctions of a more remote past, so with the collection of encyclicals recently issued by the Catholic Truth Society annotation is needed, if the reader is to be fully enlightened on the papal teaching of our times. It is even highly probable that the documents may be misinterpreted without adequate guidance. ‘The Bible without note or comment’ was the cry of some of our undenominational educators in the past. Papal encyclicals without note or comment can easily lead the minds of men astray.

Savonarola’s adversaries had failed in their attempt to have him condemned, but as Florence was firm in her refusal to break the alliance with Charles VIII, and as this attitude was attributed to Savonarola’s exhortations, in all probability another effort would be made to have him silenced. One of the strongest opponents of the Alliance was Alexander VI. He knew that Cardinal della Rovere had urged Charles to have him deposed and that this same Cardinal, a refugee in France, was pressing the King to have a Council summoned for the reformation of the Church. The fear of a Council was therefore a very real one for Alexander, and in order to paralyse Charles VIII, it was necessary to cripple Savonarola.

On October 16th, 1495, Alexander VI issued another Brief, Licet uberius, by which the former Brief Quia divini consilii of September 8th was annulled. The Pope had received Savonarola’s letter of September 29th and the copy of the letter of July 31st, and accepted Savonarola’s reasons for not having gone to Rome. By ‘some hitherto unexplained cause,’ Pastor tells us, this Brief ‘did not arrive till after the 26th of October.’

In that stretch of country that may be described as lying between France and Brittany—the pays gallot —there is a still narrower district that encircles the Three Towns (Saint-Malo, Saint-Servan, and Dinard) and lies along the banks of the Rance. It is known in the local speech as the Clos-Poulet, a quaint phrase with a ring of the patois about it, and like the patois itself venerable and significant; for it has a meaning that is plainly declared by the name of a village within its borders, Saint-Pierre-Marc-en-poulet, or in the Latin Sanctus Petrus de Marco in pago Aletho.

Now this ‘Aleth’ deserves at least a word in passing. Very long ago—I cannot give a precise date, but it was in ‘the time of the Saints’ when they crossed the water (in stone boats or not, as you may prefer) as missioners to the folk of Armorica : when Saint-Malo found his way to Saint-Aaron’s hermitage on the rock then rising in the midst of forests that was later to be called after him; when men of our own race, our own blood, Scots, Welsh, and Irish, came here to conquer, to teach, and to pray, saints and fighting-men, an endless list of amazing names, Coulfmith, Armaël, Cadocanam, Jagu, Maclou—somewhere in the fifth or sixth century, Aleth came first into being. Very little is known of that first settlement, but it was the home of one of the many early bishops or missioners, more important than the rock of Malo to which some centuries later the Bishop and his Chapter removed. And somewhere very early in the ninth century it emerges from the shadows, if not into the full light of history, at least into the daybreak of a clear tradition.

The fortunes of Blaise Pascal, that brilliant genius and highly-gifted soul, would now seem to be in the ascendant. Ever since his death he has suffered at the hands of editors and critics, beginning with the Pensées of Port Royal, going on to the calumnies of Voltaire, ending with his adoption by the nineteenth century sceptics. It is only in recent years that Pascal has received his due, and M. Chevalier’s book is the final stage in this rehabilitation. Nor is it merely that the charges against him have been proved to be false, for there is a positive growth in his fame; he is coming to be recognised as a Christian apologist of an original and persuasive quality. It is to France that we naturally look for an interpretation of this great Frenchman, and much has been written there about him in recent years; but there is no book, we believe, which is equal to M. Chevalier’s in its masterly account of Pascal’s life and in its just and sympathetic exposition of his religious philosophy.

For a long time, unquestionably, Pascal’s reputation has suffered among Catholics from his association with Jansenism and from his unfortunate quarrel with the Society of Jesus. In the partisan dust raised by those controversies his chief work and true significance were almost completely obscured. We shall say very little about them, except this that in the matter of the Provinciates M. Chevalier seems to us rather lenient to Pascal.

The restoration of the Papal sovereignty, which was happily brought about last year, brings to mind the name of one whose voice was amongst the few in Europe to be raised in sincere and unwavering defence of the Holy See throughout the troubled years of Italian unification. In an age when the flock seemed to be denying Peter, as Peter had once denied his Lord, the ardent crusadership of Louis Veuillot would have sufficiently distinguished an otherwise obscure person; but Veuillot, a man of humble origin, self-educated and self-made in his professional career, has been appreciated as the greatest journalist, and one of the most extraordinary personalities, of the nineteenth century.

He was twenty-five years of age, and had been engaged for eight years in political journalism, when a seemingly chance visit to Rome in 1838 led to his conversion to Catholicism. Now for the first time he found a field for the enthusiastic exercise of his talents. Rome had cast her spell on him and, on returning to Paris, he vowed himself to the service of the Pope and of the Church. Under his direction the Univers, from being an unknown and unimportant journal, became the organ of an articulate Catholic party fighting the anti-clericalism of the reign of Louis-Philippe. Under the Second Empire it stood out as the relentless critic of free thought and religious liberalism, and most of all as the champion of the Temporal Power of the Papacy, already menaced by the Franco-Piedmontese victories of 1859 over Austria, and the subsequent annexation by Victor Emmanuel II of Romagna.

Non semper aliquis obedit legi ex bonitate perfectae virtutis;

It is not always through perfect goodness of virtue that one obeys the law;

Above the narrow valley of Champéry the Dent du Midi makes a dreadful caricature of the Trinity. The three great figures loom up against the sky, huddling together in evil conclave, leaning backwards in attitudes of insolence and pride. When the light is behind them their stony faces brood darkly in the shadow, a living monument to the mystery of evil; when the sun beats on them they stare over into Savoy, blank, cruel, unanswering; mouthless and eyeless, yet they grin and mock as if eternally amused at the helplessness of the human intellect faced with the unanswered question of evil. Their snow-streaked robes fall in gigantic folds about the granite cliffs where they sit enthroned; there is a suggestion of vast elbows and shoulders, of dreadful muscles and sinews, of huge limbs reposing, of fearful power waiting and held in reserve. Yet somewhere amidst that mighty solidity there is a hint of heaviness, of blankness, of —stupidity. They are a trio of darkness; and though the light is on them, it is never in them, and though the clouds gather about them as if to hide their great Council from human eyes, the frightened watcher has a suspicion, deep down, that their staring pride is valueless to the heavens and their mighty cogitations are empty and unwise.

Immediately beside the third great figure is a fourth point, the Haute Cime, higher than all three, standing up like the back of a throne; the cliff falls down from it in a great sweeping curve and gathers again into the solid bastion of golden granite called the Dent de Chaux.