The Church has produced much spiritual writing in the five and a half centuries which have elapsed since this extraordinary genius of the Middle Ages, this woman of strenuous action, left us the written expression of her contemplative life. She, and the friends who wrote it for her, always spoke of it simply as ‘The Book,’ and after five hundred and fifty years it may well retain the title, for it has lost none of its unique character in Christian literature. It was written under peculiarly arresting circumstances : dictated by a woman of thirty-one, while in ecstasy, to three or four members of her famous circle: Barduccio, Stephen, Neri, Tuscan youths of noble family, who were her ardent disciples, and Christopher, a Sienese notary. This is the Saint’s own description of her mental and bodily state when in ecstasy:

. . . . the bodily powers alone departed, becoming united to Me through affection of Love. Then is the memory full of nought but Me; the understanding uplifted to contemplate My truth as object; the will, that follows the understanding, loves and unites itself to what the eye of the understanding sees. These powers, being united and gathered together and immersed and inflamed in Me, the body loses its feeling, so that the seeing eye sees not, and the hearing ear hears not, and the tongue does not speak, except as the abundance of the heart will sometimes permit it for the alleviation of the heart and the praise and glory of My name.’

A London Liberal journal, commenting last May on a speech by Mussolini, remarked that II Duce ‘had evidently never heard of II Risorgi-mento, Cavour, Mazzini and Garibaldi. A very sweeping assertion, this, and typical of the irresponsibility of some of our journalistic mentors. So persistently have the names of Cavour and the rest been dinned into the ears of all Italians, that you would more easily find one who has never tasted maccaroni than one who has never heard of them. Benito Mussolini is the least likely of all Italians to yield a surprise in either respect. The rise of Mussolini and Fascism is due precisely to the surfeit of Risorgi-mento, Cavour, Mazzini and Garibaldi which Italians have endured for fifty years, and which at the last brought Italy perilously near to ruin.

The proverbial insularity of Englishmen is never so apparent as when Italy is in question. To the average Englishman the name of Italy suggests Italian opera, coils of spaghetti, organ grinders, and ice-cream sellers : that is all. But even so, it is an improvement on the prejudices of sixty years ago, of which Justin McCarthy writes : ‘It is much to be feared that the popular enthusiasm for the unity and independence of Italy which (then) flamed out in England was only enthusiasm against the Pope. Something, no doubt, was due to the brilliancy of Garibaldi’s exploits in i860, and to the romantic halo which at that time, and for long after, surrounded Garibaldi himself; but no Englishman who thinks coolly over the subject will venture to deny that nine out of every ten enthusiasts for Italian liberty at that time were in favour of Italy because Italy was supposed to be in rebellion against the Pope.’

There is a tragic poetry in the phrase ‘going West’ and not even the apparent banality of a journey to America in a huge modern liner could undo the ancient birthright of that phrase. The wild October dawns came up cold and desolate in the wake of the flying ship, and night after night we plunged into the heart of stormy red sunsets, as if making an effort to keep up with the fugitive daylight—only to be defeated in the race as the starless nights overtook us and shrouded us in bitter darkness and shrieking winds. Perhaps it is because of the thinning of the atmosphere that sounds become louder at night; or it may be a question of emphasis and setting. But the noise of the ship always seemed to increase five-fold with the fall of darkness. The strenuous chorus of engine and screw, threshing and booming, vied with the piercing whistling of the wind and the surge of the waters along the side of the ship. In the midst of this weird uproar, the Italian emigrants on the second-class deck would group together and sing a goodnight hymn before going down below, a lovely plaintive Italian chant with seconds and thirds : ‘O Santa Vergine—prega per me’—pray for me—‘because I am in the midst of the sea.’

After six days of racing and tearing across the Atlantic, the sense of direction became an obsession, and the very soul felt as if it was streaming east and west like a banner in a high wind. As our ship slowed up to go into New York harbour, The Majestic, the largest liner in the world, sailed out on her way to Europe, and it was almost painful to see such an immense object as The Majestic proceeding eastward with so much confidence and weight, opposing the whole Strained direction of one’s being!

Of old, the name of Jones of Nayland was an honoured and familiar one, and the twelve volumes of his collected works found a place in the library of every self-respecting clergyman. To-day his is a quite forgotten personality, while as to his writings, the strain of false philosophy which runs through most of them would of itself be enough to warn off the ordinary reader.

When Sir Isaac Newton first propounded the theory of gravitation, it appeared to many religious-minded persons to contain within itself the seeds of atheism. Their alarm was eventually voiced by John Hutchinson (1674—1737), in his Moses’ Principia, in which was built up an opposing system of philosophy based on that inner significance which Hutchinson professed to discover in the sacred scriptures. Our modern books of reference decline altogether to make for us any analysis of Hutchinsonianism, and brush it aside as a worthless and exploded fallacy, utterly inconsistent with the received principles of physics. Yet, crude and wrong-headed as it may have been, in its day it exercised a powerful influence, and made many disciples. Of these the most conspicuous was Jones of Nayland.

The Reverend William Jones (1726—1800)1 was an Anglican divine of great learning, and (what was in the eighteenth century much more singular) one who never sought to make that learning the means of procuring a rich prebend or a comfortable benefice.

There are some Catholics who claim that the Church is not making the progress that it should in this country; they point to the scarcity of churches in some places, the shortage of schools in others, the slow growth of our numbers, the lack of Catholic influence in matters of public importance, and other signs from which they draw doleful conclusions.

Whilst our progress is never so rapid as we should wish, and while there still exist disabilities and other circumstances which we may deplore, a rapid survey of some of the changes that have come over Catholic England since the year Queen Victoria came to the throne will show what truly remarkable progress we have made in a period which may seem a long time but which is actually within the lifetime of many still living.

In 1837 there were several counties in England and Wales with no Catholic church or chapel of any kind, and eleven with only one chapel for the spiritual needs of a parish which sometimes extended far beyond the county boundary. In Scotland, of course, the position was far worse; eleven chapels had to serve the needs of twenty-four counties, thirteen being entirely devoid of any place wherein Mass could be said. Think what this means, you who have only to step across the road to a fine church in which you can hear two or three Masses every day of the week if you are so inclined.

In London there were twenty-five ‘chapels’ ; churches, and, of course, cathedrals, were unknown. In the whole of England there were 433 chapels; Lancashire, Yorkshire, Staffordshire and Middlesex accounting for nearly half.

‘‘Y’OU see a field of bones,’ says this author, speaking of Scholasticism, ‘but the bones live.’ The same may be said of the categories on which his work is built up. Categories have an obstinate way of remaining skeletons. Thanks, however, to the constructive power of the writer, the bones take on flesh and sinew: they live. In the mass of history and voice ‘production’ we welcome like the natural voice this evidence of an authentic historical gift that makes categories—those troublesome things—ceme alive, that introduces us not merely to the abstract thought but to the thinker of the Middle Ages, not only to what was thought but why it was thought, and, above all, to the vision of life that inspired the thought. The narrative is enlivened throughout with the asides ‘(one might almost call them the captions labelling the pictures), which convey the author’s conclusions to our intelligence.’ Education had come out of the sanctuary into the library, it had not yet left the library for the counting-house .... it had not yet begun to teach men how to make a livelihood, it was still engaged in teaching men how to live ‘(p. 68)—or this :’ Mediaeval man was by nature a philosopher, by instinct a believer, by education a scientist, but by choice an artist ‘(p. 236)— or :’ the analysis of thought was always his (the scholastic’s) occupation, as the analysis of man is ours ‘(p. 244). The power of conveying a swift impression in the flash of a word is certainly Father Jarrett’s, and we could go on multiplying instances by way of illustration, but let these suffice: ‘the strange pleasures of the water,’ ‘the cosier sense of home.’

The Church has witnessed within the last three decades a great revival of interest in the liturgy and in things liturgical. The great Pope, Pius X, whose motto it was ‘to restore all things in Christ,’ gave a powerful impetus to this movement. The eleven years in which he occupied the See of Peter were years full of achievement, and they have left a lasting impress on the Church. He drove out Modernism and raised the standard of traditional studies. He set up the Biblical Commission and the Biblical Institute, and inaugurated the revision of the Vulgate. The codification of the Canon Law was taken in hand, to be finished under his successor. But greatest and most fruitful of all his efforts, as it appears in the issue, were those which he devoted to the liturgy.

At the beginning of his pontificate he declared that ‘active participation in the most holy mysteries, and in the public and solemn prayer of the Church, is the primary and indispensable source of the true Christian spirit’ (Moiu Profrio, Nov. 22nd, 1903). The liturgy (he said again) is ‘the fountain head of Christian life.’ He regarded liturgical renewal as the direct road to his goal of restoring all things in Christ. And so we find him revising the breviary and the missal and the calendar, fighting vigorously for the restoration of the Gregorian Chant, and preaching early Communion for children and daily Communion for all. His object was to revive in the Catholic consciousness a practical belief in the mystical life of the Church, a genuine realisation of their fellowship with one another and with Christ.

You have set off before eleven from Ballindalloch Station. The sky is high and overcast; delicate as an answer to prayer. The air is still and cool. These conditions are well met; bright sun is no more favourable to perspective than to walking comfort; wind is seldom acceptable. You must provide a merry heart to breast the matter ahead in snow time; it is a stormy region.

In the precincts of the Railway Goods Yard (the good thing implied is whisky) a commercial name suggests a subject for reminiscence, to pass the time.

There was a man named Gilbey, a breeder of shire horses, slight and wonderfully tailored, with a small, grey, cadaverous head; the two elements becomingly united by abundance of white stock.

‘The Prince once said to me (but that was, of course, before my title): “I am going to have a few serious words with Mrs. Gilbey.”

‘I must have looked astonished, for the Prince said: “I do not think that she takes proper care of you”; adding something about a man of value and importance.

‘I must have looked more astonished, for the Prince said: “I do not think you are sufficiently clad.”

‘“Oh, Sir,” I said; “I may mention that I am wearing at the present moment four pairs of socks, two pairs of drawers, three undershirts, two waistcoats, five coats, two pairs of trousers, some other garments and two pairs of boots.”

‘But the Prince did not seem at all satisfied.’ Cross the traffic road, and continue by the direction ‘Kilnamachlie.’ The scene soon gets to work.

Engineers know where folk need to go, and provide according to their knowledge. They like long valleys in which to place their sweetest lines at the service of men. Seldom do they desire to meddle with tracks made by sheep and the weather to destinations which have now lost much of their significance, with Kirkgates and Howgates. Here is one of the latter; take it. As to the gate, it is easy; men gang their ain gate in older speech; so let us, in both senses. But the How? It was not nothing once, whatever it be to-day, or the road to it would not have been tramped smooth, notwithstanding its other linear peculiarities. A shrine of sorts, to which innumerable feet tended, before people had the Mass, and a priestcraft, less rich in prophetic utterance, but more able in counsels of expiation.

Out and upward it drives, the Howgate, with the undecided obstination of the stream it often counters. Under its guidance cultivation deteriorates by small degrees from opulence to the derisory, even to piteous vestiges of abandoned effort. The rough; tenuous pasture; grouse and the curlew. For us the quality is improved with every mile; for our meditations are in a key which does not admit commiseration. Ancient images gather in us; there is no discord among them, and the spirit is stronger for this.

It is a rare privilege to have been born an Englishman. But it is a rare misfortune to have nurtured the ambition of one day growing up to be a great Englishman.

A friend of mine who did so has just died of a broken heart in a workhouse asylum, aged forty. As a child he showed great promise, and received even greater encouragement. At fourteen he construed Xenophon with such rapidity and intelligence that his masters spoke to him without reserve of their hope that he might become even as themselves one day. He was esteemed and praised as much for his moral as for his intellectual virtues. He had an engaging manner, a quick creative fancy, a keen eye, and neat, clever, untiring hands.

His first great shock befell him when he was seventeen. It was on the annual prize day, when he was leaving school. He had been heaped with prizes and congratulations by a Right Reverend Prelate, and cheered to the echo by his hundreds of companions and the whole teaching staff. He sat at his desk modestly concealed behind Lingard’s History, Jebb’s SofHoctes, Morley’s English Poets, sundry popular scientific treatises, and a tiny purse of golden sovereigns. He had a minimum of ordinary human vanity, and a maximum of ordinary human gratitude. He was meditating profoundly and with some wonder on the inscription at the head of the prize-list—Paltnam Qui Meruit Ferat—when the Right Reverend Prelate rose to sum up the prize-giving with appropriate words.

It was customary (he said) on these occasions to congratulate the prize-winners and to condole with those who had gained no prizes.

Af EW months ago ninety thousand sporting men, before settling down to the serious business of football at the London Stadium, sang the well-known hymn ‘Abide with me,’ or ‘Mane nobiscum quoniam advesfer ascii’ A Catholic who had heard it told me it was Great.’ He meant that he had no other means of describing the powerful effect of the hymn thus sung by this huge, haphazard choir. I asked about tHe general demeanour during this act of Christian devotion. My friend informed me that the hymn was sung with apparent reverence, with conviction, and with unmistakable satisfaction by every man in that vast assembly.

The episode is significant. The world has dis covered a fact which the Church has known from her cradle: that where two or three units, hundreds or thousands are gathered together, they want to sing. Hitherto almost the only outlet for this urgent instinct has been congregational singing in the churches; but as men have, in the main, given up church-going altogether, the instinct runs to waste. The thought occurred to somebody that it might be organised to suit a useful social purpose. The result is community singing. But, although the catalogues have all been ransacked over and over again (for community songs must be old songs), the organisers find a difficulty in providing acceptable fare. The crowds are hard to please; they will not swallow every bait. At a pinch, for want of better, traditional Southerners will sing the federal John Brown's Body, invoke again for the thousandth time the ghost of Annie Laurie, and grow happier while ‘Poor Mary is a-weeping’ ; but the kind of song that forces men to sing, and women too, even though its words are only vaguely comprehensible, is Shenandoah; for the successful community song must have its special characteristics.

For the sake of those—perhaps the bulk of our readers—to whom the name of Wilde is only a faint memory, we may venture to say, with the help of D.N.B., that Oscar O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, wit and dramatist, born in Dublin on October 15th, 1856, was the younger son of Sir William Robert Wills Wilde, who married, in 1851, Jane Francisca Elgee, a granddaughter of Archdeacon Elgee of Wexford. This lady, who wrote under the signature of ‘Speranza,’ had a literary salon in Dublin, where much clever talk was listened to by the children.

From a school in Enniskillen Oscar Wilde went, in 1873, to Trinity College, Dublin, where he won a gold medal with an essay on the Greek comic poets. He entered Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1874, where he obtained with ease a First Class both in classical moderations and in literes humaniores. A vacation ramble, during which he visited Ravenna and Greece, in company with Professor Mahaffy, was followed by his winning the Newdigate Prize with a poem on ‘Ravenna.’ At Oxford he heard Ruskin lecture, and took part in Ruskin’s road-making schemes: he eschewed games and sport of alj kinds, except riding, and became the apostle of the aesthetic movement which took ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ as its watchword.

On leaving Oxford, Wilde was already well-known : he won the fame of frequent notice in Punch, and was caricatured in Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera Patience. He published Poems; founded the aesthetic cult, the symbols of which were peacocks’ feathers, sunflowers, dados, and blue china, long hair, and velveteen breeches; and his smart sayings were passed from mouth to mouth as those of one of the professed wits of the age.

The great lines of the Alps, and their sweet perfumes and haunting voices, reach the mind through the senses, and the mind in its impotence deals with them in a succession of images. Mont Blanc is a tidal wave that never falls, the crash for ever imminent above the valley; you watch it and feel that the very next moment it will surge forward and curl over in a dreadful arc and drop down upon the villages beneath in a glory and confusion of snow-white foam shot with innumerable rainbows. The Dents de Midi rears his great heads against the sky, a diabolic Trinity with his three dreadful faces staring over into Savoy. But he is a giant who has his mood of repentance for whatever stony sins have so scarred his forehead. From the top of the Col de Chesèrie in July, as you come up the final slope, there he is, quite suddenly, almost leaning over you, iron-grey and terrible, his granite faces streaked with tears of melting snow. From down on the shore of the lake of Geneva the Spring climbs the slope with difficulty : first the cherry-blossom : then the sharp green of the lower beechwoods, and higher up browny-green beech-woods half in bud, and, above them, brown woods where the winter still holds its own. The blending bands of colour mount upwards to the old dark green of the pines, to the stony crags, to the snow. It looks as if the light-foot Spring will never conquer up there.

For a long time we have admired Mr. Penty’s subtle argument for the necessity of the Guild of Experts based on the fundamental necessity of the Just Price. As a work of economic craftsmanship, this argument has long seemed to us to have few rivals, and no answer.

Yet we were never without our misgivings that somewhere in the subtle-simple ratiocination there was something akin to what the metaphysicians would call ‘a passing from the ideal order to the real.’ An uncomfortable feeling that there was a fly in Mr. Penty's translucent amber left us little or no intellectual rest.

We were not concerned to deny the ultimate conclusions drawn by Mr. Penty from his ultimate premisses. Indeed, for a long time, we hesitated to discuss even with ourselves our doubts about his reasoning, lest we should throw doubts upon his conclusions and eventually about his premisses. But in the end our thoughts have taken such definite shape that we cannot withold them from ourselves and even from Mr. Penty himself.