It is, we believe, uncontested, though a ‘fact not generally known,’ that English illustration attained a splendour in the sixties never equalled before or since. The fifties gave little promise of such a dazzling display, and there was already a perceptible declension in the seventies. One is sure to overlook some names if one tries to enumerate great illustrators of the sixties, but here is a sample sheaf: Millais, Tenniel, Keene, Leighton, Poynter, Du Maurier, Pettie, Pinwell, F. Sandys, A. B. Houghton, Fred Walker, J. D. Watson, Arthur Hughes. Volumes of Good Words, the Cornhill, and Once a Week lie dusty and forlorn in the ‘Threepenny Box,’ although they contain illustrations that the discerning eye could contemplate long and lovingly.

But in the decade of which we are speaking, it was common opinion in the artist-world of London that a young man had already produced such admirable work and was giving such promise of still better, that he seemed certain to make a great name for himself. So ‘man proposes.’ But Deo aliter visum. Matthew James Lawless was born in 1837. In 1864 he was lying in his grave in St. Mary’s, Kensal Green. He died in Pembridge Crescent, Bayswater.

On Sunday, October 23rd, Professor Goudge preached a sermon in St. Mary’s, Oxford, which has attracted a good deal of attention. Pleading for Reunion, he argued that while the Church as depicted in the New Testament seemed to have a monopoly of the Holy Spirit, present-day facts showed that such monopoly no longer existed. He admits that even ‘our fallen Sister’ speaks at times with the authority of the Spirit, nor ‘can we say for one moment that the Spirit of Pentecost is not present among the Protestant communions,’ while ‘a strong grasp of the Apostolic faith is found in the Church of England.’ But all have fallen short: Rome by her arrogance, cruelty, and refusal to repent, while England and all the Churches outside the Roman communion have suffered from ‘the nationalism from which the Roman Church is free.’ No shortcoming is expressly attributed to the so-called ‘free’ Churches; indeed, Professor Goudge almost idealises them: ‘Spiritual freedom is the greatest of their traditions; there will be no return to us until we, too, are free.’

What then, he asks, is the way to reunion? He frankly acknowledges that he does not see it yet, and that wet must all be content, therefore, to go slowly. But he sees room for hope in the ideas which prevailed at Lausanne : ‘we should jealously guard just that which corresponds to the Apostolic teaching;’ and the key to that lies in Apostolic Succession.

We deplore the spread of communism as much as we disapprove of much of the inept propaganda which seeks to combat it. I do not refer to the patently discreditable propaganda associated with certain phases of Capitalism so much as to the ingenuous claptrap of respectable journals which, apart from the disrepute attaching to the quotation of doubtful statistics, sins solely by debility. I am not concerned with the advisability of the religious apologist’s carefully abstaining from polemic which may be too easily mistaken for partisan political thought; nor am I involved in anything beyond a thesis based on the urgent necessity of a mutual unobstructed apprehension on the part of Catholic and Communist—of a better understanding generally of two great world influences, Catholicism and Communism.

Slight as is his real appreciation of the Church, the educated Bolshevik has greater superficial knowledge of Catholicism than has the average Catholic of applied communism (a recent experiment from which he is geographically more or less remote) or of a communist theory which is buried in tomes of an abstruseness beyond his patience. To the Western mind in the mass the Bolshevik is a rather remarkable combination of two extreme opposites. He is represented as a combination of incredible cunning and fatuousness. His propaganda, we are told, is, in its astuteness, the first step to a communist diabolarchy; but we are left to infer that he is practically incapable of intellectual process, or, if he engages at all in dispute he is to be demolished by arguments that would discredit a school debating society.