The fourth command of Alexander VI was contained in the Brief Reformationi et augmento, dated November 7th, 1496, but unlike the previous commands it was not imposed upon Savonarola only, it was given to the Priors and communities of sixteen Dominican houses, one of which was San Marco in Florence. No superior or religious was mentioned by name in the Brief. By this Brief a new Congregation or group of Dominican houses was established, to be known as the Tuscan-Roman Congregation of the Order of Preachers, and a Vicar General of this Congregation was to be appointed by Cardinal Caraffa after consultation with the Master General of the Order. He was to hold office for two years, and at the end of this time an election was to be held as prescribed by the Constitution of the Order. On November 17th, 1496, Father Jacopo da Sicilia was appointed Vicar-General of the newly established Tuscan-Roman Congregation and Savonarola acknowledged him as his Superior. We draw attention to this statement, for we shall see that some writers deny it.

The Brief of November pleased no one. The Tuscan houses did not wish to be separated from the Congregation of Lombardy, and the opposition to such separation was so strong that several superiors were deposed from office and threatened with imprisonment.

The Catholic Church and Art. By Ralph Adams Cram. (Calvert Series; Burns, Oates & Washbourne; 1929; 4/-).

Art Nonsense. By Eric Gill. (Cassell & Co. and Francis Walterson; 21/- net).

The first-named work deals with all that manifestation of the aesthetic instinct which flowered within the influence or the territory of Christendom whilst Christendom was at variance on things mainly human and material; and with its curious deviations and altered canalisations ensuing from Iconoclasm, as well as with the blight which came to it from Manicheeism and the sour-faced offspring Puritanism, that palmer-worm which devoured the leavings of the locust. It is truly a great little book, a masterly synthesis of all the movements which moved anything in the category of things that may be made. It is not only scholarly but abounding in observations which bespeak a right intuition upon a realm much enhavocked by people who are sure of what is not so. But can Bach be called a Catholic musician? He wrote a Mass in B minor which is one of the world’s chief treasures, but of no use to the Catholic Liturgy even were nothing enacted Motu Proprio. A greater than Bach is here, William Byrd, but though he is a very Catholic, even Papist, musician, I do not remember that he is mentioned. He labours under the disadvantage of being English. He also conducted Anglican chapels-royal for Elizabeth in her spacious time. But there is documentary evidence that both he and his organist, John Bull, kept their places at court on purpose to be able to hear Mass and get others to Mass, with impunity.

Not many of us are favoured with visions, usually through our own fault: for the best of all visions is the right appreciation of the inner significance of all these everyday things we have looked at for so long with unseeing eyes. That, we are sure, is the real character of the visions of the mystics. And these are visions which do not come suddenly and as suddenly fade away, leaving nothing but a memory behind them; they remain for ever.

It was a vision of this kind that came to a certain brother as he stood one night chanting matins in the choir along with the others. Humanly speaking, he did not deserve to have a vision, for he was not in the dispositions which are piously supposed to lead to such favours. His lips were mumbling the psalms, but his mind was far away, and he looked to be bored. To speak the truth, he was tired, and longed for nothing so much as the end, so that he might go to bed. And if you could have seen into his mind and heart, you would have found that the attitude of his soul was no better than that of his body. He was in a mood of dejection and disappointment, for he was young in religious life, and religious life had not come up to his expectations. All his young life he had been a romantic dreamer, for ever lending himself to an imaginative exaltation of the past.

We have deliberately used the phrase, ‘NeoMalthusian Birth-Control,’ because the simple phrase ‘Birth-Control’ is likely to mislead. It is not accurate to say that the Church condemns birth-control. What the Church condemns, or rather what the Church has no power to allow, is not birth-control, but birth-control by sinful methods. The Church has always had a most efficient method of birth-control, by conjugal and virginal chastity. She has never urged what Neo-Malthusians say she has urged : ‘reckless propagation.’ Indeed, her normal action seems everywhere to have resulted, not in such an increase of population as this island has seen since the Industrial revolution, but in a steady maintenance of a high level of population largely dwelling on the land.

The writer of these words first witnessed the Passion Play in 1880, and he has done so on each occasion since. The contrast between then and now is indeed a striking one. In 1880 the arrangements were very primitive, there was no railway to the village, and visitors had to drive by carriage fifteen miles from the nearest station if they could afford the expense, or else walk or get a lift in a jolting hay waggon. Whilst the accommodation was much easier to obtain in those days, the lodgings and commissariat were naturally on a very modest scale, foreign visitors were rare, and the necessity for providing modern facilities had not arisen. The theatre itself was very uncomfortable, for the seats were merely narrow planks without backs, and to sit on them for the eight hours of performance was most fatiguing. On the other hand, the prices were very much less. The audience, mostly peasants and their families, brought provisions—beer and sausages—with them and consumed them during the performance. Then, as now, the actors were exposed to the elements, but their costumes, which were formerly supplied from the Royal theatres, are now designed and made in the village workshops. It is indeed remarkable that the whole performance is produced without any aid from outside, and that even the large orchestra is recruited in Oberammergau. In fact, no one who is not native-born can take any part in the play.

It has been market-day across the water, and the market-folk are on their way home and bringing as it were, the market with them.

The boats are coming back from the other side of the bay heaped with empty baskets and with others still full of unsold goods, and crowded with servants and housewives and peasants squeezed together in a seething, bubbling mass, like sheep in a pen to whom have been given of a sudden the voice of jays. The noise is indescribable; quarrelling, arguing, shouting, laughing, with live ducks cackling and hens flapping their wings, with the thud and rattle of the wheezy engines, the splash of the paddles, and the shouting of porters and omnibus drivers on the quay :

—such a hurly-burly as surely only French lungs can produce.

Up the hill they come in an unending procession, huge hooded omnibuses that are evidently the direct offspring of the old diligences, donkey-carts rattling and important, wagons from the country with jingling bell-hung harness on the big horses that stamp and stumble on the uneven cobbles. They are filled—and over-filled—with peasants on their way to far-off villages, or ‘getting a lift’ to nearer ones, with men in blouses, women in gay shawls and linen coiffes, who sit on the shafts, on the sides, who crowd the seats of perch insecurely on the piles of empty baskets.

Whilst Italy celebrates the bi-millenary of the birth of Virgil, Provence keeps this year the centenary of her own Virgil, Frédéric Mistral, born at Maillane, near Arles, on the 8th September, 1830. His memory is still fresh amongst his people, for he died only as recently as 1914, and we may confidently expect a flood of personal reminiscences from many who were privileged to know him intimately, but to the average Englishman, Mistral can be spoken of only as one who has already passed into literary history, and the justification of these lines must be the comparative unfamiliarity of their subject matter to most English readers.

That Mistral is so little known here is perhaps to be ascribed to the fact that his writings are to us, in a sense, doubly foreign. His most important work, Mirèio (Mireille), may be known, as to its theme, through the medium of Gounod’s opera, but, of the latter, two versions exist, one of which falsifies the action of the poem for the sake of a ‘prettier’ curtain. The poem itself has been translated into English, but such is the irony of things, that the more readable a translation, the less it savours of the original, and in the case of poetry one feels dissatisfied with anything but a strictly literal version intended to enable the reader to follow the original, line by line. Mistral is doubly foreign to us, in the sense that even Paris is able to read him only with a French translation en regard.

That little band of Franciscans in the wake of Cortes, who brought the light of faith to the Aztecs, and gave to Mexico, or New Spain, as it was then called, its first bishop, Don Francisco de Zumarraga, had its counterpart in the company of twenty-two sons of St. Dominic, who landed at Santa Marta on the southern shores of the Caribbean Sea, four hundred years ago, July 29th, 1529. Don Tomas Ortiz was their leader, and he in his turn was the first bishop of Santa Marta, the first, indeed, in New Granada. Another of the friars, Don Domingo de las Casas, was a near relative of the intrepid Fray Bartolomé, so conspicuous for his defence of the natives, since he fourteen times crossed the ocean to gain the ear of Charles and of Philip on their behalf.

Don Domingo was selected by Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada as chaplain to his troops on that expedition into the interior which resulted in adding to the Spanish crown the famous empire of the Muysca Indians or Chibchas. It was due, indeed, mainly to the brave friar’s encouragement and exhortations that they eventually reached the great plateau of Bogota and took possession of the capital.

At sight of his soldiers decimated by hunger and thirst, and the appalling difficulties of the passage of the Cordilleras, de Quesada was several times on the point of turning back to Santa Marta, but the good Dominican urged him to press forward and animated his troops by the thought that they were suffering for the eventual triumph of the Faith.

This is the story that I have been told of the ruined chapel in the Bois-Marie.

When the sun sets peacefully behind clouds, there comes an hour of hushed stillness. And on the edge of the Bois-Marie, where there were no trees, but only broken ground, tangled with bramble and bracken and dappled with hollows where the rain lay, the quietness of all the world seemed to gather and brood.

It was a high place, lifted up on the cliffs that stood with their feet in the water, and little was visible that was not sky or sea of the nearer land rising and falling as it travelled into the distance. There were no houses, no ploughed fields, no trimness of man’s work. There was only the high breast of the earth, pale and clear and quiet; the grey sea, the luminous grey sky, and the grey hush that followed the sunset.

It is generally recognised that the conflict between Alexander VI and Savonarola was political rather than canonical; that political reasons more than zeal for the welfare of the Church and the salvation of souls dictated every move made by Alexander in his dealings with the Friar; and, furthermore, that the Pope’s mind had been poisoned by the false accusations and slanders of Savonarola’s implacable enemies. Both men were strong characters. They clashed, and the general opinion obtains that Savonarola flatly disobeyed the commands of the Supreme Pontiff. Savonarola has been pilloried by some writers as the unique example of grave disobedience to the Vicar of Christ, since no one except heresiarchs ever dared to flout Papal commands as he did yet die in communion with the Holy See. But others are convinced that the Friar did not disobey, and therefore he neither incurred nor deserved censure. We shall examine the question as briefly, yet as fully, as possible, and shall confine ourselves strictly to the query: Did Savonarola disobey the Pope?

The subject of the devil and his power to do evil to man is seldom discussed in the pulpit with all the exactness of sound theology. A missioner will descant on the mighty intelligence of Satan, and his relentless attack on the human race. He may even draw pictures of the dreadful state of a soul that has irrendered to the devil, and become completely possessed by him. He will warn his hearers that the devil is a powerful adversary, and that their strength is small and puny compared with Satan’s. In all this there is a good purpose, and the missioner’s words are often a very useful goad for the sluggish type of character that requires more vivid and more fiery (often in a literal sense) motives of action than the somewhat cold idea of duty to God. But there is a want of exactness and balance if no mention is made of the precise limits of Satan’s power over man, and there is the danger of causing unnecessary fear. One could wish that more attention were devoted to a careful explanation of the method of Satan’s attack, and of the limits of its efficacy.

A very important point to make, first of all, is that the devil can never act directly on the human intellect or the will. In other words, the devil has no means of getting inside a man’s soul and taking possession of man’s free-will. St. Thomas gives the following reason : to be within another is to be within his terms (terminos, limits),

In that strip of country that lies between France and North Brittany, and is locally known as the pays gallot, the racial characteristics of the people are peculiar. They come of a very anciently mixed stock, and do not closely resemble either of their neighbours; less excitable than the French, they are shallower and more pleasure-loving than the Bretons, and if they follow their church with no less faith, they treat it, sometimes, with more levity. They fulfil the duties that belong to the solemn days of Lent and Easter—though in Saint-Malo, at any rate, carnival has a surprising habit of breaking out on all the earlier Sundays of Lent—but they are very ready to turn to the irresponsibilities of life with a sense of having done all that is required of them. They lose no time in starting on that amazing series of fairs and assemblèes that follow on each other’s heels during the latter half of April and May.

In the district surrounding Saint-Malo, indeed, one of the oldest and best-beloved of these assemblèes is held no later than on Easter Monday, when all the world and his wife, his children and his neighbours, set forth on their yearly pilgrimage to La Boul’neu— which is, being interpreted, the very ancient fair of Bourgneuf, a small village on the road between Dinard and Pleurtuit. It is not, of course, a pilgrimage in any literal sense of the word to-day; but of what it may have been in the past it is impossible to speak with certainty.