Every Christmas as it returns brings with it as an inseparable adjunct the Adeste Fideles. To a Catholic, as to an Anglican, Christmas would not be Christmas without it. Yet it can claim no great antiquity: it finds no place in Missal or Breviary, nor has it any liturgical association.

Its origin—whether as to words or tune—is ‘wropt in mistery,’ nor has any definite light been thrown upon either. Both have been discussed at intervals for at least fifty years, with little result—I was surprised, on looking up some of the references in Notes and Queries, extending over fifty years, to discover from one of them that in 1879 I knew almost as much about the hymn as I do now. That the mystery as to origin should apply equally to the words and the music is hardly surprising, for both are, and have always been, so inseparably associated that it is difficult to imagine an independent source for either, although, as will be seen, this has been suggested.

It will probably come as a surprise to many, considering the various periods to which the hymn has been assigned, that our first definite knowledge of both words and music dates from the middle of the eighteenth century and comes from an English source. This is supplied by John Francis Wade, a church student who did not go on to the priesthood, though he is referred to as a priest: he compiled collections of church music, the words and notes being beautifully written, of which four copies are extant—the earliest at Clongowes Wood College, Co. Kildare, Ireland, dated 17491; the others in the Ewing Library, Glasgow, at Stonyhurst College, and at St. Edmund’s College, Ware, dated respectively, 1750, 1751, and 1760.

Divorce was unknown in France until the Revolution. But the exponents of the new gospel of Liberty and Equality soon discovered that the system of indissoluble marriage was logically incompatible with their fundamental principles. And so in 1792, the Legislative Assembly decided, after three minutes of discussion, that ‘the right to divorce was a necessary corollary of individual liberty, which could not permit of any indissoluble tie.’ On this principle the Assembly authorised divorce by mutual consent, with a minimum of formalities; at the same time it abolished the old system of legal separations. The result of the change was more rapid than anyone had anticipated, and in Paris there were in the years 1793 and 1794 half as many divorces as marriages. Napoleon, who was a convinced believer in the necessity for a strict marriage law—apart from the special circumstances of his own career—made drastic changes in the revolutionary system when he promulgated the Code Civil in 1804. He revived the old system of legal separations and, while he retained the right to divorce by mutual consent, he introduced many formal requirements before it could be obtained, and also insisted upon the fulfilment of certain conditions. Thus, divorce by mutual consent could not be obtained either before two years had elapsed after the marriage (and under the Code Civil a French woman is obliged to live with her husband unless she has obtained either a separation or a divorce), or after the marriage had lasted twenty years. Also no woman over forty-five could obtain a divorce by consent. The consent of the parents on both sides must also be obtained.

It was Mr. G. K. Chesterton, I believe, who once defended misquotation on the ground that it was proof of a far greater and more affectionate intimacy with the writer quoted than the meticulousness which verified all references. What he had in mind was clearly the verbal slips of which even the most deeply-read scholar or most tenacious memory can be guilty. It takes a real lover of Dickens—the author to whom Mr. Chesterton particularly referred—to misquote him, precisely because it takes a real lover of Dickens to quote him spontaneously and at random at all.

But there is another sort of misquotation which, although it is not wholly bad, cannot be defended so easily—the misquoted epigram or catchword. It is true, not only of to-day, but of all ages, that men’s minds are largely influenced, their minds made up, by catchwords. Every hoarding says, ‘Billson’s tea is the best,’ and the world believes it; every popular history says, or used to say, forgetting that the saying was first mentioned in 1789, ‘Galileo’s immortal words, “And yet it moves,”’ and the whole world conjures up an heroic picture of a martyr to the Inquisition. The process is the same in both cases, and it is a question whether the second kind of iteration is not the more powerful in its effect and sinister in its results. In any case one of the most useful services the newspapers could perform would be the revision of popular historical sayings, the scrutiny of their credentials, just as the credentials of commercial advertisers are scrutinised. It is not often nowadays that a reputable newspaper can, without protest at least, talk of ‘Jesuitical’ as synonymous with ‘cunning,’ or refer to ‘doing evil that good may come’ as characteristic of members of the Society of Jesus.

Among recent books, one of the most thoughtful and helpful, I venture to think, is Mr. Joseph Clayton’s Economics for Christians, wherein I find this striking passage : ‘First things must come first in a wise economy, and therefore the economist explains that the first thing to be done is to make use in the fullest way of the resources of land, that storehouse of wealth. Without access to the land, man is starved. Hence for example when there are thousands seeking employment on the land and vast areas are uncultivated, it is peculiarly wasteful to forbid labour from working on the land’ (p. 7). This, surely, is the A B C of economics and at the same time a brief and clear indication of England’s temporal problem. And yet if there is one point on which the political parties agree, it is in ignoring this fundamental truth. In very deed the land is desolate, and we look in vain among publicists for those who consider in their heart. It has happened before, and the warning was little regarded then as now. May we not say that it is a recurring phenomenon in the course of Empire? That of Rome is the best known example. ‘At the same period, the country places witnessed the gradual disappearance of the independent labourer, the very seed and stock of a sovereign people. Lands formerly divided into small holdings, fell finally into the hands of a few lords; the cultivated plains give place to the immense pasture-lands which still occupy the environs of Rome and exhaust its resources.’

It is a little disconcerting that Catholic apologetics and Biblical exegesis, on the whole, have not yet grasped the full value of the organic treatment of the Gospels; especially in the matter of the Petrine privilege. Apologists and Biblical exegetes still largely appraise the gospel data by what may almost be called ‘a show of hands.’ We have no wish to discourage this method of valuation; which, indeed, is often demanded by the literary character of the exegesis. But if there is a higher and truer method it will be found that ‘the best is the foe of the good.’

Let us exemplify this by studying some of the lesser ways in which the Gospel of St. Luke witnesses to the primacy of St. Peter. We will pass over the classical passage (Lk. xxii, 25-32) with its clear assertion of St. Peter’s power over the other apostles. To the present writer this passage has always seemed to be of even greater importance than St. Matthew’s witness ‘Thou art Peter, etc.’ (Mt. xvi, 18-19).

In order to appreciate St. Luke’s witness to St. Peter it should be borne in mind and used as an exegetical principle that roughly speaking what St. Mark was to St. Peter—that was St. Luke to St. Paul. His devotion to a master who made many demands on his tact and patience seems never to have flagged. It is seen in many details of his two great works, his Gospel of Jesus Christ and his Acts of the Apostles. Even in such a supreme matter as the institution of the Blessed Sacrament he left the tradition of St. Matthew and St. Mark for the tradition of St. Paul.

The title of Dr. O’Brien’s new volume is somewhat misleading. The immense research which he has here condensed into less than two hundred pages is concerned, not with a description of the practical effects of the Reformation in breaking down the social and economic life of the Middle Ages, but ‘exclusively with the effects of the Reformation on economic thought and theory.’ He disclaims all intention of writing history, on the ground that it would involve a complete study of Europe since the middle of the sixteenth century. He confines himself to the discussion of a thesis which challenges unending controversies, setting himself ‘to prove that both capitalism and socialism alike can be shown to have had their origin in the Protestant Reformation.’

At first sight, such a discussion would appear to be purely academic. But Dr. O’Brien raises questions which go to the root of all modern social reform. Whereas the standard teaching of the economists generally explains the intolerable tyranny which we understand by modern capitalism as the natural outcome of the industrial revolution, Dr. O’Brien maintains with great ability—and he supports his argument with a mass of evidence from recognised authorities in half-a-dozen countries—that it was not the industrial revolution which produced capitalism, but capitalism (as he interprets it) which produced the industrial revolution. In other words, capitalism cannot be regarded as the result of natural economic development; Dr. O’Brien maintains that it is the outcome of a false philosophy of human life.

Twenty years ago there passed away in Italy one of the greatest exponents of Roman Law, whose researches won him a foremost place in the world of science, wresting for his native land the laurels which had hitherto been held by Germany, in the domain of Jurisprudence. The name of Contardo Ferrini, well-known as it is to present day jurists, bids fair to become familiar before long to every Catholic, inasmuch as the beatification process of its erudite bearer has already been introduced at Rome. The present Holy Father, intimately acquainted with the life and merits of Ferrini, was a warm supporter of his cause in 1905. It is therefore confidently hoped that good progress will be made during his pontificate. Pius X had already intimated the consolation it would give him to raise a university professor to the Altar.

The life of the modest, retiring scientist is a fresh proof that there is no contradiction between Faith and Science. The man for whom his teachers, the historian Mommsen, and the Byzantinist, Karl Zacharia von Lingenthal, prophesied a brilliant part in the restoration of a branch of learning then neglected in Italy, was a daily communicant, and spent every spare moment in converse with his Divine Master. ‘I pray God/ wrote Ferrini to an intimate friend,’ that prayer may never expire on my lips as long as I live, for that would be the end of my supernatural existence.’

What traveller abroad does not know the Central Station at Milan? All the railroads of Europe would seem to lead there. And what a journey back it is to France over the Simplon route—even in its beginnings ! At Arona we come to the first hills rising on the northern limits of the plain of Lombardy. We skirt the shores of Lago Maggiore past Stresa, past Baveno. Isola Bella and her sister isles are sleeping in all their magical loveliness on the blue waters of the lake. There beyond them is Pallanza! At Feriolo we pass from the lake into the Toce valley and into the mountains. At Vogogna we are not a dozen miles from Domodossola and the tunnel beyond. But as we are pilgrims and not tourists we climb down from our train and set out on foot across the valley, that is to say, across a mile and more of the turbulent Toce’s wide-strewn debris to Pie di Mulera. Here the Anza flows in adding its tribute of glacier waters to the main stream. It is up the Val Anzasca we walk the ten miles to Vanzone, where we spend our first night among the Italian Alps.

Before dawn on July 29th, 1889, two young Milanese priests who had also spent the night at Vanzone, set off up the same valley on a great adventure. The scene of it rose majestically before their eyes as they approached Prequatero four miles on. It was Monte Rosa—’ a spectacle of incomparable beauty.’ Around us was the fresh green of the meadows and the woods; above us the canopy of heaven, fringed with the most beautiful blue that was ever seen . . . and in front towered the Alpine giant, inviting or defying—I hardly know which—with the immense extent of its snow and ice, with the mighty crown of its ten peaks . . . sparkling and flaming in the rosy rays of the rising sun.