This autumn session of Parliament, when the Alternative Prayer Book of the Established Church is to be brought before the House of Commons, will provide a real crisis in the history of the Church of England: and in that crisis even the Roman Catholics must be not spectators only, but actors. When the Deposited Prayer Book comes before the Legislature of the nation, everyone who has a parliamentary vote has a moral duty, which he cannot shirk through sloth or fear.

At first sight it would seem that Roman Catholic voters and members of Parliament, inasmuch as they have no part or lot with the Church of England may easily satisfy their conscience by what is called ‘abstention.’ Indeed, on all sides we have members of the Church of England urging the incongruity of Methodists, Wesleyans, Baptists, Congregationalists, Quakers, Buddhists, Brahmins, Moslems, Atheists using their constitutional powers to vote on a domestic religious issue of a religious body claiming to be an integral part of the Christian Church. Yet something more than incongruity might be created by abstention. Just as nothing is more dogmatic than denial, so, too, nothing can be more effective than abstention. Every abstention is at least one decisive vote for the majority! To abstain from voting may merely salve and deceive the conscience of men who feel their conscience cannot allow them the positive act of voting.

In speaking of conscience-salving we have touched the heart of what we feel should be put not only before the readers of Blackfriars, but even before the electorate of England.

The, news about China doled out to the man in the street by our daily and weekly newspapers, even the best, is but scanty, and all of the same monotonous type. Civil wars, and rumours of civil wars, make up the bulk of it. The struggle of one Tu-chun against another, the march of Southerners against Northerners, captures of cities, surrenders, betrayals, flights of leaders, and re-appearances of defeated generals, and what seem to him aimless expeditions and useless fighting fill up the picture of the present state of the Middle Kingdom. It is quite incomprehensible to the ordinary Englishman; and those who have lived in the Far East and have had some dealings with the Chinese are often asked by their friends what is the meaning of it, and how it is all going to end. If wary, they will remember the wise saying ‘Never prophesy unless you know,’ for he would indeed be a rash person who professed to foresee with any certainty the final outcome of the present turmoil in that distant land. One thing is to be remembered, that the Chinese have a long history, that they have passed through many periods of worse disorder than the present, but that the ship of state has righted herself, and the country settled down again to the cultivation of the soil and the other arts of peace. There is no reason to suspect they will not eventually do so once more—if left to themselves.

In an article in The Morning Post (Nov. 6, 1926) it was stated that ‘the interested Foreign Powers in China were agreed upon one point, which is that there shall be no joint intervention in the internal affairs of that distracted country.’

In The Dublin Review of July, 1893, Abbot Butler,

O.S.B., writes : ‘The first impression made upon our minds by the foregoing extract is that the arguments advanced in it are one and all quite familiar to us; they have been in common use for three centuries. Whence we gather that Bishop Lightfoot had really nothing to add to the case his predecessors had made out. This is, beyond doubt, a fact of no small importance.

‘But on second thoughts we realise that these arguments are here made to do a different duty from that assigned to them in their traditional use among Protestant controversialists. These latter denied that the Petrine texts had conferred any primacy on St. Peter; and in these circumstances the argument of equality drawn from the passages in St. Paul’s Epistles have had some weight. But unbelieving critics in Germany —men with no higher interests at stake than those of pure scholarship and accurate exegesis—have forced scholars of Bishop Lightfoot’s quality off the old Protestant ground. Now, therefore, that it is recognised our Lord did give St. Peter a primacy, these same arguments are put in evidence of the temporary character of that primacy. There has been a complete shifting of the ground’ (pp. 511-512).

This brief comment of Abbot Butler will help the reader to see the following extracts in their true light:—

I.

Bishop Lightfoot of Durham made a name for profound scholarship by his edition of The Apostolic Fathers, especially St. Clement (1889-1890).

The world of Canon Streeter is a very different world from that of William Clissold; for one thing, it seems to be based on fuller scientific knowledge, and to have been discovered by a more acute mind. William Clissold, like so many of his family, was born a little too long ago to be worth listening to when he babbles about science; had he been a specialist and kept up with the literature of his stuff, he would have been all very well. But he was too busy with his business to be a specialist. Moreover, he never had a first-class mind. His power of observation is admirable; his power of description is also equally felicitous. He had the makings of a great man.

He had one drawback. He suffered from an inferiority complex. Witness how he talks of ‘Mr. G.’ He has that unhappy mind that disdains what it cannot equal or cannot understand. Disdain ‘is probably the wrong word. He does not disdain it. He pulls snooks at it. He cannot abide anyone who is finer than himself. He and his family are clever at their little personal descriptions; they are clever, but with the cleverness of a gutter-snipe. He has the naughty gifts of the cockney, only he lacks the cockney’s heart.

Compared with his world, Canon Streeter’s world may well be called Reality; it is real in the sense that it seems to correspond with facts. Moreover, Canon Streeter has a very keen, incisive and subtle mind. There is a touch of Newman about him, as a Catholic theological expert has pointed out: he has that almost uncanny gift of analysis which Newman reveals.

Just off Leicester Square, in inconspicuous St.

Martin Street, a hoarding may to-day be seen enclosing a desolate plot of land heaped up with rubbish. There, until a short while ago, stood an ancient house, with lofty recessed windows and broad oaken staircase, carved chimney-pieces and painted ceilings, panelled walls and old-fashioned powdering-closet. Thither in the eighteenth century came time and again Sir Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, and many another Immortal; there night after night the greatest singers and violinists of the age filled the modest music-room with melody; and there Samuel Johnson delighted to read and talk and drink tea, and to show a side of his character unsuspected by Boswell—for in St. Martin Street at least there was nothing left of the Bear but his skin, and to those who dwelt there the Sage was mild as summer, full of social good humour, gay as a boy, sweet-tempered, anxious to please. That old house was the home of the Burneys, the happy talented family of which the great Lexicographer was wont to say, ‘I love all that breed, and love them because they love each other’ ; while the head and father of the household was Dr. Charles Burney, and of him Johnson wrote admiringly, ‘I much question if there is in the whole world such another man as Dr. Burney.’

When in 1776 Charles Burney, Doctor of Music and Fellow of the Royal Society, received from his bookseller the first volume of his gigantic General History of Music, he was in the enjoyment of an almost European reputation.

In the Ardennes, in what is now Belgian Luxemburg, there lies a wide tract of land some one hundred and fifty miles in extent, covered with mountain and forest, well wooded and well watered, which for long centuries formed the Sovereign Principality of Bouillon, under the suzerainty of France. Its tiny capital (known to every tourist) stands at the bottom of a little valley, where the river bends sharply round a precipitous rock crowned by a grim castle, once the home of the gallant crusader Godfrey of Bouillon. Its history, and that of its later Dukes, of the great French house of La Tour d’Auvergne, warriors and statesmen, Huguenots and Catholics, Generals of the Fronde, and Cardinals of Holy Church, may be found written by the Maurist Benedictines in one of those monumental compilations which were the glory of the eighteenth century.

In the years preceding the French Revolution, the reigning Duke of Bouillon, Charles Godfrey de la Tour d’Auvergne, dwelt in his splendid Chateau of Navarre, near the city of Evreux, an anxious and troubled man. He had vast wealth and great estates, a park of one hundred thousand acres well stocked with game, a palace which was a miniature Versailles (Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour, Voltaire and Charles Edward Stuart had been its guests, and the ex-Empress Josephine would one day hold in it her sad little court). He had his gardens and his orangeries, his aviaries and menageries, his great stables filled with plunging horses and lumbering state carriages, his hot-houses, lakes and fountains, his pagodas and oriental pavilions. His house was filled with statues and paintings, and tapestries and lustres and porcelain, silver and gold and costly gems, obsequious courtiers, guards and lacqueys.

The younger generation is having an immense amount of attention paid it by the novelists of today. School stories abound, foot the jolly old-fashioned school stories, with their idealist friendships, their thrilling game contests, and their appeal to the boy reader, but problem school stories, full of desperate purpose, critical, ‘contributions to the literature of the subject,’ as the commercial jacket grimly records. They afford psychological material for Freud, Jung, and their more unpleasant followers. They are not books for boys, but about boys written for the purpose of improving the education of youth.

Then there are the young-man books, not the old-fashioned type even of Father Benson—who died in 1914, and whose characters are, therefore, pre-war and out of fashion—but the newer type, full of complexes and inhibitions with enormous elaboration of unnecessary detail, due to a pelmanistic capacity for observation, searching out and remembering the irrelevant. We notice in them the sex-impulse as a substitute for careful writing, the decay of life thus providing a rather more effortless way of book-making than painting ‘a true and perfect image of life indeed.’ The young-women problem books are, of course, even nastier. That is to be expected. A good young woman is apparently a most uninteresting subject, more uninteresting than a good young man—and that in the view of the novelists is saying a very great deal.

It is not quite that our authors wish us to believe the world is worse than it was, but only that now it doesn’t mind anyone knowing how bad it is.

‘To the Greeks and to the barbarians, to the wise and to the unwise, I am a debtor.’—Rom. I, 14.

In this declaration of St. Paul there seems no sign of humiliation, but something rather of pride. He does not mind at all that he should owe so much to the teaching of others: he seems rather to consider it an advantage to himself. He had indeed stood in the midst of the culture of his time, in the three great streams of it, and he had gained from it at every point. In his own Tarsus he had been in touch with the exquisite beauty of the balanced Greek theories of .art and die ideal poise of the athlete and the prudent management of life. His Roman citizenship had given him a width of tolerance which no mere Greek could know. His Jewish faith had given him a power of insight, a delicacy of conscience, a passion for divine things, a wisdom, a flaming love of God that melted his Greek and Roman heritage into a living sense of rapture, entranced by the comeliness of Christ.

Indeed, the sudden illumination that shone upon him on the Damascus road made him all the more grateful to the earlier knowledge which had led him to this more excellent knowledge and enabled him even better to appreciate it: Greek and Barbarian, wise and simple, all had been his schoolmasters to Christ.

The Greek beauty, the Roman tolerance and quiet dignity, the Jew’s passionate adoration of God—all had been leading him into captivity to the Crucified.

It is not often that a book excites such comment as did Spengler’s Decline of the West in postwar Germany. Only the first volume of this has been translated into English, as yet. It is an exposition of determinism involving the methodic rise and fall of cultures. And in spite of some exaggerations, and the arbitrariness of its thesis, it is of the greatest interest. Possibly its greatest value lies in this, that the author contrives to awaken in his reader an understanding of the diversity of civilizations. We are so accustomed to look from out our own culture without adjusting our prejudices, and to form judgments in a moment of time upon an almost eternal phenomenon. We take no account of the changes in culture, of the shifting perspectives, and alien outlook in countries which are spiritually as remote as another world. We condemn or praise with no real sympathy. In the hope of deepening understanding a few comparisons between civilizations are suggested in this article.

The natural opposite of Europe has been always the East. But Roman Europe was, and modem Europe is, confronted by an Orient feverish and decadent. Syria and Egypt then can be compared to India now. We can find parallels between the local cults of those countries that rose to sudden prominence as fashions at Rome and those that do the same to-day; or between the atmosphere of the Trismegistists and that of the followers of Shankara. Between that period and the present the true East and true West were separated by the vigorous world of Arab culture, alien alike to its eastern and its western neighbours.

In a very recent volume, entitled Present-Day Thinkers and the New Scholasticism, an American professor, Dr. Zybura, put together a very miscellaneous and highly informative collection of opinions of contemporary professors in America and Great Britain on the attitude of modern schools towards the Neo-Scholastic or Thomist movement, together with a number of statements by prominent Neo-Scholastics and Thomists in regard to their attitude to modern philosophy. The aim of the book was largely to call attention to the need, if not for a rapprochement at least for intercourse. It is intolerable that the scholastic movement should keep itself in isolation from contemporary philosophy. Modern schools have much to learn from acquaintance with Thomists. Dr. Zybura very rightly complains of this mutual ignorance. It is remarkable that this very book makes only a passing reference in a footnote to a series of lectures delivered in Oxford and London in 1916 under the auspices of so well-known a foundation as the Hibbert Trust, and published in 1920 and recently re-issued.a

Dr. Wicksteed’s works on Dante are well-known. He approaches St. Thomas by way of Dante, and aims not at criticism, but at exposition. He is concerned here with the Summa contra Gentes, and with apologetic and, to some extent, with the Philosophy of Religion, rather than with philosophy proper or with theology.

1 (B. Herder, London; 12/- net.)

2 The Reactions between Dogma and Philosophy illustrated from the Works of St. Thomas Aquinas. By Philip H. Wicksteed, M.A., D.Litt. (Constable, 1926; 10/6 net.)

It is seldom that so good a book is given so good an Introduction as the Rev. Spencer Jones gives to the book of the Rev. S. H .Scott. We have rarely read a statement which made a greater appeal to be quoted in full. But we can quote only the following :

’ After all, we shall find no sanction in Scripture for contradictory communions of Christians; nor at any time in its history does the Christian community appear without a prominent visible personage at the centre, in the Person of the Man Christ at the outset, of St. Peter, afterwards of the Pope; while it is into this community, not into the Church of England as such, that we are all baptised, and to which our profession expressly pledges us.

‘Now, as the great Tractarian leaders came to see this, and to appreciate the significance of the Anglican appeal to antiquity and particularly to the four first Councils, an appeal to which all parties alike are pledged and committed, they came to see also that the Catholic revival was resolving itself gradually and inevitably, not only into a counter-reformation movement, but also into a movement towards Rome; and that if “Rome” was not always meant by the mover, “Rome” was certainly what the movement itself always meant’ (pp. 8, 9).

The little book which has been served so well, though not unduly by its Introduction, is a paper recently read by its writer before the Society of St. Thomas of Canterbury. This paper is a summary of a fuller work of the same writer which the University of Oxford accepted for a research doctorate degree.

There has just left the Grotto at Lourdes, never to return to it, an old man who has been inseparable from it for over fifty years, and who will always be inseparable from it in the thoughts of countless pilgrims from every part of the world who have visited it in that long period. Perhaps no contemporary Catholic layman has had so many personal friends. This old man, who has just died in his ninetieth year, is Jean-Marie Laffont, the elder of the two Guardians of the Grotto, ‘the old candleman,’ he whose majestic head reminds one so forcibly of portraits of our own Cardinal Newman.

He was born at Poueyferré, a little village on the summit of a hill a few kilometres to the north-west of Lourdes. His family were well-to-do peasant proprietors, with a charming property which went down to the Lac de Lourdes. He was the eldest of a family of twelve children, and he and his brothers and sisters grew up in sight of the town with which he will be eternally associated. In those days village children were not worried with much instruction. If they learned to read and write, it was something of a marvel, but they certainly knew their catechism. Jean-Marie would spend most of his time helping about his father’s land, driving the cattle and the pigs to pasture, leading the sheep, going to market with the ox-waggon, and becoming astute in barter and rich in wisdom. He took the abundant corn from their rich lands to be ground in Lourdes by a miller named Soubirous— rather a slack and undependable but amiable person and one in need of help for the sake of his wife and children. The eldest child, Bernadette, was an asthmatic little thing, needing care and getting little of it.

The problem of the Unity of Christendom, and in particular of the reconciliation of the East, has occupied the minds of the Popes, sometimes more sometimes less urgently, since the consummation of the schism under Michael Cerularius in the eleventh century. But hitherto all their efforts have been in vain. The Councils of Lyons and Florence were abortive. The personal efforts of individual Popes have not met with any greater success. In the last century Popes Pius IX and Leo XIII both tried to reopen official relations with the East, but their overtures were rejected. Yet, nothing daunted, the Holy See is now embarked upon another effort after Christian Unity.

It would appear that in this new effort the Holy See is approaching the matter, not with any less courage or confidence, not in any spirit of compromise or dissimulation of the truth, but with a special emphasis on what may be called the psychological conditions of the problem. It would have the apostles of unity set forth the Catholic doctrine in its fullness; but it would have them also approach their enterprise in the spirt of charity and sympathy. It would have them endeavour, before all else, to remove prejudice and misunderstanding, to abstain from acute controversy, to create an atmosphere of peace and mutual sympathy.

For what is the main obstacle to Christian Unity? There are, of course, dogmatic obstacles, reducible finally, at least in the case of the Eastern Churches, to the one point of the Primacy of the Apostolic See. But it appears to the Holy Father that dogma is not the whole difficulty, nor the most immediate difficulty.

Now that the whole hierarchy of France, Cardinals, Archbishops, and Bishops-more than a hundred in number-have joined in addressing to the Holy Father a collective letter expressing their complete devotion and loyalty to the Holy See, and their full appreciation of the need for condemning what has been condemned in the Action Française, there should be no further rumours and insinuations to the effect that the Catholics of France were showing any reluctance in their submission to the Pope’s authority. One bishop after another has promulgated the decree of condemnation in his own diocese, and published a letter explaining the nature and necessity of the condemnation.

The main facts have been published in BLACKFRIARS and elsewhere at considerable length. But among the immense mass of documents from many sources which have been published in France in connection with the condemnation, two seem to call for special attention because of the light they throw upon particular points. One shows how strong was the demand for the condemnation of M. Maurras even before the War, when Pope Pius X actually did condemn the books which have now been publicly placed upon the Index. The other is a singularly impressive and vigorous retort to the accusations made in the Action Française suggesting that the Holy Father was misled by a conspiracy which aims at defeating the Nationalist forces in France.

Last night to see the earth snow-kissed I thrust My frozen window fro; and from the Thames The sirens sounded; seeing that sparkling dust I knew that even God was fond of gems.

Rupert Croft-Cooke.

Now half a hundred golden years are gone;

For golden were they in the sun-thrilled haze Of youth’s enchanted morning, till the day’s Young splendour paled and passed; and high noon shone,

And golden now again before the wan

Grey ashes of the twilight quench the blaze That gilds again more gloriously the ways Your feet have trod, as though God smiled thereon.

Is it indeed life’s transient sunset light,

A-shine with memories that shift and fade?

Or is it He Whom on the western height

The poet saw in ‘pomp of blood’ portrayed? From feet and hands and Heart the red rays smite The golden road His alchemy has made.

Sister Mary Benvenuta, O.P,

Quite a number of books have been published lately containing, so the spiritualists declare, messages from another world. The reading of these books does not suggest that the ‘spirits or their messages are any livelier or more intelligent than they were nearly seventy years ago, when Charles Dickens came across them.

In The Haunted House, a Christmas story written for All the Year Round, 1859, Dickens begins with the revelations provided by a travelling companion in a railway train. The journey was by night, and the fellow passenger, armed with a pencil and pocket-book, was perpetually listening and taking notes.

‘I have passed the night—as indeed I pass the whole of my time now—in spiritual intercourse,’ explained the man—‘a goggle-eyed gentleman of a perplexed aspect’—in the cold light of morning.

The messages had not been rapped on any table, but had been deciphered in the jolts and bumps of the carriage. (Many of us are familiar with the rhythmic utterance of railway engines.) The seance—‘conference’ the goggle-eyed gentleman preferred to call it—began with the greeting : ‘Evil communications corrupt good manners.’