In the last six cantos of the Purgatorio, Dante describes the Earthly Paradise upon the summit of the Mountain of Purgatory. It is the most allegorical, and therefore the most difficult and fascinating, part of the Commedia. A. F. Ozanam called it the ‘apex’ of the Commedia.

Six times in the course of it the poet tells us that this was the ancient Garden of Eden, the ‘nest’ of the human race. And the emphasis he thus lays upon this identity of place must give us the right key to the interpretation of the wonderful scenes he there witnesses and takes part in. We propose, therefore, to follow the example of the older commentators who saw their theological and spiritual, rather than their political, signification. Here as elsewhere it is necessary to remember that the poet was, primarily, not a politician but a theologian.

In the closing lines of the twenty-seventh canto, Virgil has addressed to Dante his famous last words, ‘Now is thy will free, upright and whole; therefore with crown and mitre I make thee sovereign over thyself.’ And the twenty-eighth canto opens with that most bewitching description of the loveliness of the ‘divine forest,’ its foliage and its birds, which Ruskin quotes in Modern Painters, where he points out the significance of the contrast between its freedom and joyousness and the ‘wild and gloomy wood’ of the Inferno, which even in remembrance, said the poet, still dismayed him.

Of the three Canticas of the Commedia the hardest for a non-Catholic to understand is the Purga-torio; because the entire conception of purgatory is foreign to his mind. Hence we find even devout men like H. F. Cary, who has general sympathy with Dante’s teaching, misunderstand him here. For example, upon the well-known lines (x. 106-in, which shall be quoted from his own translation):

‘Reader! I would not that amazed thou miss Of thy good purpose, hearing how just God Decrees our debts be cancel’d. Pander not The form of suffering. Think on what succeeds :

Think that, at worst, beyond the mighty doom It cannot pass.’

Cary’s comment is : ‘This is, in truth, an unanswerable objection to the doctrine of Purgatory. It is difficult to conceive how the best can meet death without horror, if they believe it must be followed by immediate and intense suffering.’ And Leigh Hunt, in his Italian Poets, refers to this comment with approval, after his own manner, that is to say, in less refined language.

‘The purpose of this article is to show how Dante himself, on the contrary, represents the attitude of the Holy Souls towards their own sufferings in Purgatory.

There are thirty-three cantos in the Purgatorio. The first nine of these are occupied with the Ante-purgatory, the middle cantos with Purgatory itself, and the last six with the ‘Earthly Paradise.’ It is very important to bear this fact in mind because the main interest of the drama of the ‘Second Kingdom’ lies in the Ante-purgatory, and the key to its interpretation may be found there.

Every reader of Dante will remember its lovely opening verse : ‘I will sing of that second Kingdom where the human spirit is purified and becomes worthy to ascend to heaven.’

Joy wedded Sorrow:

Duly of the twain.

Mid Joy’s delight and Sorrow’s travail-pain, Young Love was born upon a blissful morrow.

Of one or other

Has the boy the most?

For, ‘He’s his father’s son,’ one heart will boast;

While one says sighing, ‘Nay, how like his mother.’

Sister Mary Benvenuta, O.P.

Heresy and schism are not a novelty of the sixteenth century, they exist from the beginning,, and always in the East. The national Church, selfgoverning, refusing all obedience to Rome, abiding in its own decrees of faith and morals, and owning na allegiance to any power without its borders, can still be seen and studied in Armenia and in the Mono-physite Coptic Church of Egypt. Plainly they are not Catholic, but national or racial these separated brethren. So too the Donatists in Africa sought to set up a national non-Catholic Church. And political nationalism, it would seem, was chiefly responsible for the schism that rent the Orthodox Church of the East from the Catholic communion of Rome; as it is responsible in our own times for the independent national Churches of the Balkans.

Before the Reformation Western Christendom, with all its troubles, was free from these things. Only with the great revolt of the sixteenth century (’ not a revolt, a revolution!’ ) does the national and territorial Church, with its disdain of the doctrine of unity, its hatred of obedience to Rome, its refusal to admit any authority in the See of Peter, come into being; to remain till our own times a witness of man’s capacity for losing the Catholic faith.

Nationality has its place subordinate to Catholicity. Nationality in opposition to Catholicity ceases, ipso facto, to be Catholic. The doctrine and discipline of the various non-Catholic Churches of the West born at the Reformation may, to-day, present a remarkable unlikeness to the forms of sixteenth century Protestantism.

From Tuesday, July ioth, to Friday, July 13th, during a summer heat of unparalleled ferocity, the men and women who look upon themselves as the heirs of the Tractarians held a Congress in the Albert Hall. The things said and done by these successors of Froude, Keble and Newman give food for thought and prayer.

(1) The Congress, merely as a social and religious phenomenon, cannot be ignored, and should not be belittled. It is a social and religious fact of no little interest that, during a heat-spell which welted our tropical visitors, one of the largest halls in the world was filled for even the less important meetings of a religious congress.

Moreover, this Congress was representative not of a Church, but only of a party within a Church. It was assuredly a religious phenomenon of significance that this section of a section of Christians could brave tropical heat for a religious idea. This is all the more interesting to us Roman Catholics, because, if we may believe our experts in organisation we, the Roman Catholics of England and Wales, might undertake the task of filling the Albert Hall at general, but hardly at the sectional, meetings of any congress. We are therefore glad that The Tablet has set the note of commentary in these wise words of charity :

(2) The significance of this Congress may best be measured by its heredity. It is, what it claims to be, the authentic child of the Oxford Movement. The Congress hand-book recorded that . . . ‘the Saturday

Under the heading, ‘A Wonderful Demonstration,’ the English Churchman for April 19 gives an account of a meeting held at the Albert Hall nine days previously, announced as a ‘Great Protestant Appeal against the proposed Royal Visit to the Pope and to demand the withdrawal of the Envoy to the Vatican.’ The gathering ‘was a magnificent one.’

and according to another authority, the Protestant Woman, the announcement of the royal visit ‘has stirred them to their depths.’

Judging from the speech of Mr. Kensit, the Secretary of the United Protestant Council who organised the demonstration, the stirring was highly successful. All the Orange Lodges of Great Britain and Ireland sent messages of support; and although the old Orange threat to kick the King’s crown into the Boyne was not repeated, the Grand Orange Lodge of Scotland

One would have thought that a matter which had stirred Protestants to their depths and elicited ‘the prayers and longings of millions of loyal hearts’ would

In looking through some old papers, the present writer one day unearthed a contemporary account of the Coronation of William IV in 1831, and in it occurred the following rather striking passage:—

Talleyrand, at this time nearly eighty years of age,, was French Ambassador in London. No name, save that of Napoleon, had for a generation been more familiar to the ‘man in the street’ than his. None could excite a more vivid and perhaps fearful interest. His. ability was held to be almost diabolical. His alleged wickedness had become a legend. To the religious-minded he seemed like Voltaire risen from the grave.. That enigmatic figure stood for perhaps the most important personage in Europe, the Intellect behind the successive Governments of France; it stood for vast wealth said to be unscrupulously made; for the boundless ambition of one who had pulled the strings of inter-national diplomacy for a generation; for a man who had made and unmade Kings. Talleyrand was. esteemed an aristocrat who had been false to his order,, an apostate and excommunicate priest who had been the founder of a great schism and the despoiler of the Church, a Bishop whose Chapter had pronounced him deserving of infamy in this world and damnation in the next, a notorious and licentious profligate, an habitual gambler for colossal stakes, a treacherous.

Even in the ages of faith, servitude was never a congenial atmosphere for the growth of sanctity. Chattel slavery and serfdom bred an impoverished character, and rare is it to find in the calendar the name of a saint in the middle ages born or brought up in bondage to a master,—save in the case where freedom had been achieved or granted in early life.

Not that the miracle of the grace of God is withheld when social or economic conditions are unfavourable. The holy and humble of heart are discerned amongst rulers in high places, men and women of great estate, and are found in the most unlikely places. Many are the bishops, not a few are the kings and queens, and at least there is one emperor in the ranks of the saints. Even the Borgia family could produce a St. Francis. But the slave and the serf were, it seems plain, always hampered in the quest of holiness, badly handicapped in the struggle to bring the will into complete conformity with the Will of God. Compelled to subordinate the will to the devices of another or to the caprices of society the soul can hardly yield the fine fruits of sanctity.

(In this matter the middle ages of faith must not be confounded with the apostolic age and the immediately succeeding centuries. The slave of the Roman Empire won the freedom of the soul in a heathen world, and the gift of God made of small account the changes and chances of human fortune.

This is an age of revivals, and many of the minor writers of the past were never more appreciated than they are to-day. The Restoration dramatists are read in preference to the Elizabethans, and Mr. John Gay walks, where Wordsworth fears to tread. It is not merely a revolt against accepted standards that we are witnessing, it is rather a fresh outbreak of the adventurous spirit and that insatiable curiosity and methodic doubt, which serve to distinguish man from the beasts.

So much is, perhaps, needed as an apology for voicing the desire for a fuller measure of recognition for the works and, above all, for the personality of William Cobbett. Those who know his name are not iare, but those who have read him are probably very few.

Cobbett was a self-made man, by which I do not mean that he was a blackguard, but that, being born the son of the innkeeper of the ‘Jolly Farmer’ at Famham, he became an educated country gentleman a member of Parliament, and a prolific journalist. At the age of sixteen he enlisted as a private on the pay of sixpence a day, and, as he himself tells us, taught himself English grammar in spite of every adverse circumstance.

(concluded)

II. English Translations.

The four stanzas given by Wade have formed the basis of every English translation, from the earliest— which, according to Julian, is that beginning ‘Draw near, ye faithful Christians,’ in the Evening Office of the Church (1760)—to the present time. The rendering, however, upon which the version in most general use is based, and indeed which it mostly follows, is that made by the late Canon Oakeley in 1841 for Margaret Street Chapel (the forerunner of All Saints’, Margaret Street) of which he was then incumbent. According to Julian, ‘it was never published by the translator, but came into notice by being sung in his chapel.’ This began,‘Ye faithful, approach ye.’ The usual version, ‘O come, all ye faithful,’ appeared in Murray’s Hymnal (1852); Neale, in the Hymnal Noted (1854), has ‘Be present, ye faithful’—a much less singable rendering. (One sometimes wonders whether the quality of singableness appealed to Neale : it will be remembered that the first line of the hymn universally sung as ‘O come, O come, Emmanuel,’ was rendered by its translator ‘Draw nigh, draw nigh’ — almost impossible to sing with pleasure !) The general popularity of the Adeste undoubtedly dates from the publication of Hymns Ancient and Modern (1861); the second part of the Hymnal Noted in which it appeared was not as widely used as the earlier portion. A slightly altered version appeared in The Churck Psalter and Hymn Book (1854) by the Rev. W. Mercer, to whom the translation is sometimes attributed; this was at one time the most popular collection in Anglican use, and was in many respects a great advance on those—e.g. Bickersteth’s Christian Psalmody and Brady and Tate’s ‘new version’ of the Psalms appended to the Book of Common Prayer—which had previously held the field.

Again the great day particularly assigned to Bobby comes round with its wealth of honours, gifts, and carefully-chosen distractions—a picnic, if in summer, a matinee, if in winter—the day of days, his own especial feast, the most notable day of the year for him, the birthday of Bobby.

The cultivation of children’s birthdays is of evident importance for their development as self-assertive citizens. It entertains in their juvenile minds a proper sense of individual merit, the necessity of their existence to the rest of the world, and the right which is theirs to pleasures and luxuries. True, the event commemorated, the benefit conferred upon mankind” is not of Bobby’s own volition; but as men are born to glory, as men have, often unwittingly, greatness thrust upon them, so is Bobby made cognisant of his part in the great scheme of things by distinguishing the auspicious day on which he first saw the light. On that day he became the centre of interest in the family circle, an object of complacency to relatives and parents, and a hypothetical cause of joy to the universe. Bobby realises that on his anniversary he is entitled to the fulfilment of all his wishes. Not only does he expect and exact treats and presents of varied description; but his whims may not be thwarted. Everybody yields to him; his brothers and sisters play the games of his predilection, wait on him, court favour with him, admit his claim to be the hero, for this is the day on which Bobby, noble Bobby, has been bom into the world. The magnification of self gives to Bobby a poise which will stand him well in the battle of life, and preserve him from an altruism detrimental to his material interests.

‘I am waiting “for the evening”,’ said the Bride,

‘When the reaping shall be done and the sheaves every one, Stacked apart and harvested from the Acres of the Dead, When im sweet and starred array I go on my way,

On my way to meet my Lover,’ said the Bride.

‘Shall it be that He comes,’ asked the Bride,

‘In His living diadem, with the moon as a gem,

Robed with the sunlight and cloaked with the rain,

With His glorious gold Head, and His Hands torn and red, And His Side wounded wide? ‘said the Bride.

‘With) the treasure of my wheat and white pearls for my feet— And wine-stones and opals for my crown,

How fleet my heart shall beat as I hasten forth to meet

My Lord and my Lover who steps down

From; His Everlasting Throne, and claims me His own,

In His Kingdom to rest and to abide ....

For at moonrise shall I come and mine enemies be dumb That He stands me at His side,’ said the Bride.

‘I have praise of harp and pen but my home is not with men, I have trod where my God was denied—

Red lilies of the martyrs and the prophets of my days,

Moon; of guidance in the night—these my children! gave me praise;

My lands they are wide—where my Love lived and died, Slept within His Sepulchre, veiled in shrouds and wrapped with myrrh,

And then rose to the Height, spanned with splendour, throned in light,

From our sight, and enskied—

O then, come to me soon—Lord and King, Sun and Moon! ‘cried the Bride.

Vivienne, M. Dayrell.

The purpose of this brief article is simply to draw attention to the new church recently erected at Droitwich, and to suggest that its basilica form is more suitable than the Gothic for small village churches. For there can be no doubt that the great Catholic revival which this century is witnessing will lead to a large increase in their number, and that before the end of it there will be a Catholic church in nearly every village in England. And therefore the type of ecclesiastical architecture with which our Catholic descendants will be made familiar is an important question.

This new church, dedicated to the Sacred Heart and Saint Catharine of Alexandria, can be easily seen by all, for it stands by the side of the high road between Birmingham and Worcester. Its erection is due not only to the pious generosity of its founder, Mr.

W. L. Hodgkinson, but also to his wisdom and ‘vision,’ for the architect, Mr. Barry Peacock, of Birmingham, was instructed by him to embody the idea of ‘the early Christian basilicas as they may be seen at Rome and Ravenna’ ; and this not through any mere artistic preference, but because they are most suitable for a country congregation and provide scope for the mural decoration—the ‘illuminated Missal,’ as Ruskin called it—which is a feature in an Italian basilica. ‘The Mosaics,’ said that great art-critic,

‘were its illuminations, and the common people of the time were taught their Scripture history by means of them.’

There is an interesting passage in one of Cardinal Newman’s letters from Milan, quoted by Mr. Wilfrid Ward :

In the September issue of Blackfriars we took occasion to point out the fundamental and very serious error of Pere de la Taille’s book, Mysterium Fidei, on the Sacrifice of Calvary. Our last argument against the new theory of Père de la Taille was drawn from the Gospel of St. John. We said: ‘If there is one Evangelist who seems concerned to bring out the fact that Jesus was a priest and that His death was the act of sacrificial redemption, it is St. John . . . Yet St. John does not mention the Last Supper’—which, according to Pere de la Taille, was the ‘unbloody Oblation of the bloody Immolation to be made on Calvary.’ We have therefore felt it might further our readers’ thought if we made a study of St. John’s attitude towards the Sacrifice of Calvary.

To understand the sacrificial teaching of St. John’s Gospel, we must compare it with (i) the Synoptists,

(2) the Epistle of St. Paul, and (3) the Epistles and Apocalypse of St. John. Four times do the Synoptists record that our Blessed Lord referred to His coming death. The following group from St. Mark may be of use :

Thomas Carlyle never could pass by the church of St. Clement Danes without thinking with admiration and awe of Samuel Johnson ‘in the era of Voltaire’ purifying his soul within its walls, full of genuine devotion, sometimes in fear and darkness, at others in patience and quiet hope, but ever with intense and burning conviction. ‘Religion,’ says Mr. Birrell, ‘was to Johnson an awful thing; he never learned to take his ease on Zion. Yet is his trembling piety and utter sincerity a true haven of refuge for the student of the heartless scepticism of the eighteenth century.’

It is a singular fact that for more than forty years Samuel Johnson dwelt within a stone’s throw of the most venerated and conspicuous English Catholic of his day. They must inevitably often have passed each other in the street. But they lived in totally distinct worlds, and we can hardly presume that Dr. Johnson and Bishop Challoner ever exchanged a single word. Yet had they very many acquaintances in common.

Pages, volumes almost, have been written regarding Johnson’s sympathy with Catholic doctrine and practice. He frequently stood up for Catholics : he would refute objections, brush aside prejudices, weigh everything in the scales of his sturdy common-sense. His attitude in this respect was far in advance of that of his contemporaries, and this is doubtless the secret of the reverence with which so many children of the Church have regarded him in later generations.

But we question if it has ever quite been realised how very many Catholics he personally knew. Considering how Catholics in those days of the Penal Laws shrank from observation, kept

Monitor Wyndup swore, he, at least, would avoid swift generalizations when he started on his combined honeymoon and political trip to the Continent. As writer of a remarkable letter on Road .Transport to the Limechester Gazette, he felt called upon to apply his insight to a wider field; and the conditions of South Eastern Europe clearly demanded what light he could throw on their problems. He was not one of those lightning tourists who confound Bucarest and Budapest, or Teschen with Wreschen (the latter being, of course, the Polish name for Warsaw); and he understood that the Balkan and Baltic Republics were to be kept quite distinct. Their fusion, he declared, would endanger the peace of Europe almost as much as the German Reich had done. Now, however, casting a discouraged look at the monotonous chairs and tables of the stereotyped, modern restaurant in the twenty-fourth town he had inspected, he found he was a little too early on the scene to guage things properly.

The inhabitants had not yet acquired English in spite of the war; and the occasional waiter who could speak to him in his own tongue, was astray on international relations.

‘I wish to Heaven,’ he said to Alice, ‘you could remember the place where we had that nice omelet, and that other place where we were cheated! And I wonder where we had better go next, if we are to manage seven countries properly in three weeks. There doesn’t seem much use in going to Macedonia just now when the Letts are, so to speak, out of hand, and the Yugoslovaks and Czechoslavs at each other’s throats about the Iron Gates !

The Decree of the Sacred Congregation of Rites (12th January, 1921) authorising the Office and Mass of our Lady ‘Mediatrix Gratiarum’ (Mediatrix of Graces), has given rise to a theological discussion on the nature of this mediatorship of our Blessed Lady..

The most common, and perhaps the most convenient, formula of this mediatorship is :

All Graces come through Mary, the Mother

This formula has two meanings. First, all graces come through Mary because Jesus Christ, the Divine Redeemer, came through her. Second, all graces come through Mary because her intercession is now a preliminary of the distribution of all graces. We will discuss these two meanings separately.

All Graces come through Mary because Jesus Christy, the Divine Redeemer, came through her.

(1) Our Blessed Lady’s greatest title is that given by the Council of Ephesus, namely, θϵoτóκoζ Deipara” Mother of God. For His own inscrutable ends God chose to take flesh miraculously in the virgin womb, arid after the free consent of Mary, the wife of St. Joseph of Nazareth.

(2) Our Blessed Lady did not merit as such the Incarnation. St. Thomas says that no one could have merited the Incarnation condignly (ex condigno), ‘yet the holy Fathers merited the Incarnation congruously by desiring and beseeching; for it was becoming (congruum) that God should hearken to those who obeyed Him’ (III Qu. 2, Art. 2, Eng. trans.).

Acertain man of the world lately astonished his friends by making a pilgrimage to Lisieux. When he was asked what possible interest he had in the ‘Little Flower/ he replied with a quotation from Scripture :’ If I find but ten just souls, surely I will spare the wicked for their sake/

The thought that lies behind these words was a singularly familiar one in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The world and the cloister were then strangely linked together. In reading the memoirs and biographies of pre-Revolution France, one is struck by the fact that almost everyone, courtier, statesman, financier, soldier, man of letters, man of fashion, had some relation or friend in ‘Religion/ with whom he corresponded, whom he very occasionally visited, and on whose prayers and penances and vicarious satisfactions he constantly and confidently relied. Those who prayed little for themselves were unaffectedly rejoiced at the thought that there were those who would pray (and suffer) for them, and in their stead. They had little or no religious heroism of their own, but they knew others were heroically offering their lives that they themselves might be saved. And because of this, they hoped to make a good end and climb up into heaven after all. There was not a little presumption in their attitude, and yet somehow it was generally justified by the result. In the brilliant, luxurious, pleasure-loving, inexpressibly-dissolute circles of Versailles, how very worldly and irreligious were often the lives, but how edifying and devout almost always the death-beds! And if this was true of the courtiers, it was pre-eminently true of the sovereigns round whom they revolved. The explanation thereof was perhaps to be found within the walls of Carmel.

The book before me opens with the following words: ‘In the year of the Incarnation of our Lord 1879, and of the Hegira of the Prophet 1296, and on the Eve of the Feast of St. Patrick, an only child was born to Sir Tatton Sykes, Baronet, of Sled-mere, in the county of York, and to Jessica Christina his lawful wife. Mark Sykes was this only son, and he always remained the original child of original parents.’ It may be added that he ended by securing an original biographer. When a biography begins with a sentence like that, we know, long before such guesses are commonly possible in more conventional cases, that the author is not a hack or a humdrum eulogist, but a man with a sense of history as a background to biography. We know that the author is as interesting as the subject. And we could distinguish this quality of distinction, even if we had not seen on the title page the name of Shane Leslie. The first sentence, recording nothing but a fact such as is found in a directory or a genealogical tree, yet gathers round it a crystallisation of creeds and influences, like the conjunction of stars in some horoscope of a happier and more Christian astrology. We have foreshadowed, as in a dissolving view of historic visions, the influences inspiring the subject and his biographer; beginning with the greatest of all influences, the mystery and majesty of their common creed. The date is stated not only as a date, but as a dogma.