The return to Europe of Bishop Francis Steinmetz, Vicar Apostolic of Dahomey, after thirty-eight years in French West Africa, recalls a romance of missionary enterprise which is worth recording. He belongs to the Lyons Society of African Missions, founded by Mgr. Marion de Brésillac in 1856. The holy founder applied in the first instance for Dahomey, but was refused by Propaganda on account of its evil reputation. It was considered the most pernicious district of the West African Coast from the malignity of its climate and the barbarity of its population. Instead he was allotted Sierra Leone, itself a sufficiently difficult post, as events were to prove. It was only at a later period, after his death, that it was found practicable to attempt the evangelisation of Dahomey : that, therefore, Bishop Steinmetz has been able to rule his tropical diocese for twenty years or more, and return to Europe in full health and vigour, is eloquent testimony of the progress made in the Dark Continent.

Shelley told Leigh Hunt in the duomo at Pisa that a new religion might be founded on charity instead of faith. It is in quite another sense that it is now so often and so passionately declared that what is wanted is not charity, but justice; further, that charity is only possible in an unjust society. It is one of the gravamina against the Gospel that it says so much about charity. ‘Curse your charity!’ was the legend on a Hyde Park banner. And ‘Christian-Socialist’ divines go so far as to say : ‘We do not want brotherhood, but justice.’ The reason is obvious. Brotherhood speaks of sympathy and helpfulness, of mercy and gratitude; whereas what is demanded is rather equal rights.

So St. Simonism, that pantheistic and epicurean religion of humanity, had for its object ‘the harmonious development of human society by the establishment of justice, and the increase of well-being and comfort.’ Roaring Camp and Poker Flat have also this aim.

Commodities often belie the promise of their labels, a failure noticeable in other things as well. Philanthropy turns out to be rather unfriendly, industrialism does not make for industry, a libertarian state denies the right of free association, and expels the Jesuits.

The name ‘Rationalism’ conveys the impression of something hard-headed and matter-of-fact, which scrutinizes everything in the cold light of reason, and is not averse from giving a cold douche to the emotional postulates of piety and idealism—and all that.

Accordingly, a Catholic, picking up The Rationalist Annual for 1932, might perhaps be expected to fortify himself with the thought that still le coeur a ses raisons .... But as he reads, and especially if he is a Thomist, the conviction grows that in reality the roles are reversed. He begins to feel like Charles Kingsley’s East Wind blowing into a centrally-heated hall. He must mind his manners, for he has entered a religious edifice charged with all the earnest feeling of of an ethical society; an atmosphere (to argue like a Rationalist) heavy, not with the fumes of incense, but the steam of damp umbrellas and goloshes. And if he stays, he must resist the temptation to scoff.

When I was close upon sixteen there appeared a book of poems which was quickly recognised by the judges of literature as a classic. From that verdict there has never been any appeal. A Shropshire Lad is one of the great achievements of English poetry. The author’s vernacular English is chiselled to a Greek perfection, his metrical mastery is triumphant. Until 1922 he published no further collection. To one familiar with A Shropshire Lad, Professor A. E. Housman’s Last Poems betray a notable falling off. Very few of these pieces are worthy to rank with those of the earlier volume; and that which seems to me by far the best I well remember reading in some periodical (was it the excellent Monthly Review?) about thirty years ago, a masterpiece of verbal and rhythmic beauty.

Jerome of Moravia was born on the 30th of September 1200, at Olmutz, the Fortress gate of Bohemia, where his father, one of the Minnesingers attached to the Emperor’s Court, had been rewarded with an estate by Frederick Barbarossa. As these Court musicians were, to a man, the creatures of the Ghibelline sovereigns, the son could not altogether escape the taint of heterodoxy that stamped the enemies of the Church, though this malign spirit was largely neutralised by the fidelity of his mother, Ysen-trude, who, as a maid.of honour to the wife of Conrad II of Hungary, had caught some measure of the intense piety that distinguished his daughter St. Elizabeth. At an early age the boy was placed in the care of the Archbishop, who wisely recommended the tempering influence of the severe discipline of the Song School. During his leisure hours between school and chancel Jerome found delight in fingering the psaltery, rota, gigue and symphony, and made the day merry with the simpler songs of the Troubadours. He would listen wide-eyed to his father’s tales of the fifth Crusade and the Wartburg Tournament, though more frequently—for his father’s visits were rare—he would fall asleep to his mother’s stories of Tristram, Parsifal, the Nibelungs, and the Holy Grail. Soon ambition awoke and made the Cathedral school with its midnight Lauds distasteful. At fourteen he entered upon his trivium at Brunn, but he was old enough even then to find a magnet in Cologne, which was nearer Eisenach, the home of Reinmar, Wolfram and other stars in the Minnesingers’ firmament; and nearer also to his father. He attained his immediate goal in 1216. At Cologne the quadrivial course was lightened by his passion for harmony and acoustics, but his hopes were dashed when his father made it plain to him that the knightly singers’ calling was hastening to decay.

Conscience is a fact of common experience. It will be universally recognised that there is within the human consciousness some principle, some norm or measure, apparently unbiassed and involuntary, which seems to claim authority in regulating or attempting to regulate what is known as moral conduct. In other words, there is something of the Jekyll and Hyde in every man, and broadly speaking Jekyll is the personification of the voice of Conscience. But while there is universal recognition of the fact, there is less unanimity as to the precise significance of the fact of conscience. In a broad division there are two opposite views, in one of which conscience appears as rational, in the other as emotional. The latter is the view adopted by modern experimental psychologists in their attempt to analyse ‘moral consciousness.’

‘Moral consciousness’ is the somewhat undefined name given nowadays to the complexity of emotions and instincts which precede, accompany and follow a moral act, producing feelings of ‘moral’ satisfaction or disquietude as the case may be. Upon examination, however, it is found that all these emotions and instincts are placed in the order of bodily reactions to stimuli. They are confined, in other words, almost entirely to the material order, and in effect the highest and especially human faculties, namely reason and rational will, are disregarded or eliminated. This position, it should be noted, is justified by the circumstances in the sense that it represents the findings of purely experimental psychology. No one should be so foolish as to deny the authority of any science within its own sphere. It is only when any science presumes to argue to conclusions outside its own sphere that it lays itself open to criticism from without.

The words ‘musicology,’ ‘musicologist,’ and the like will not be found in English dictionaries—sufficient evidence that we lack the science which the words connote.

Since Burney’s day, English musical history has been either a safe following of ‘recognised authorities’ or a self-conscious appraisement of national achievements—plagiarism or parochialism, to be perfectly frank. But the ‘authorities’ have usually been a generation or two out of date, and our national achievements have been too rarely measured with those of other countries; hence our defective sense of proportion and our un-catholic (in the literal sense) outlook.

It is, therefore, refreshing to take up a book embodying the latest research, written by a Frenchman who is also a musicologist, and there to find ordered and logical arrangement as distinct from our own haphazard or individualistic methods, together with a Frenchman’s cultural breadth as distinct from our own musical nationalism.

In the sunlit evening I saw a little railway which led out of Tunis on the north: a railway which looked too young and small to be able to go very far, but which would be almost certain to go to some enchanted place. And sure enough, when I asked for a ticket as far as possible I was given a ticket for Tunis: the train was of the kind that does a magic circle. It started, and at once it seemed to run into heaven without further delay; the town vanished and the sky lay under us as well as over us, luminous and blue and flecked with rosy clouds. After the first airy vision this undersky turned out tobeawide shallow lake stretching away to the eastward, with flocks of rosy flamingoes standing motionless in the blue water. They stood there like the clouds of sunset, perfectly still, and entirely happy, wrapped up in some lovely dream of their own.

On the other side of the lake was a hill of bare red earth crowned by a big white mosque. The train left the lake and in a little while came to the southernmost point of the promontory, where the green waves of the Mediterranean broke on the sand; then it began to turn on its circle and came to a place called Ste. Monique, where cherry trees in snow-white bloom fluttered everywhere against the red earth of the hills. Behind them a cliff-head rose above the sea, with a white Arab village crowded upon its crest. Then the train stopped on a hillside among a few villas and cornfields, and the station placard said in huge white letters, CARTHAGE. The letters needed to be huge and white, as if to emphasise a truth very difficult to believe. It simply did not seem possible.

It was a widow’s worm-eaten, tottering chair. And it was set up in a basement in N.W.3. In saying this I have unveiled the mystery lying behind what once I wrote under the title—her title, T00 Much for One. For that undying story which, thank God, I had the wit to write, had been written post haste after the widow R-----, R.I.P., had trudged from her basement to tell me of my mistake in giving her as a Christmas dinner what was ‘too much for one.’

My readers will remember how in that quivering phrase from the bowed, half-blind, four-score year widow I had seen more political and economic wisdom than was being vouchsafed by any university, or avouched by any Government Report. Moreover, when I recalled how high finance and big business were based on the horse-leech cry, ‘it is never enough,’ I saw, and perhaps said that England’s Saviour, if ever found, would be found not in a bank or in a manager’s office, but in a hut or in a basement.

As I honoured myself and my priestly profession by burying the widow R-----in Kensal Green some twelve months ago, I will set down some of the notes I wrote after having speech with her one afternoon in the half-light of her cave-dwelling.

To-day, August 6th, 1927, Widow R-----gave me a complete dramatic Philosophy of History. In other words she showed me the right way of looking at things that happen, and even of things that seem to happen wrong.

James’s solitary horseman could walk his horse up to a signpost, and duly following the directions, come upon a village, The clang of hammer upon anvil would lead him to the forge, and the hanging sign of an inn would swing its invitation to him. Should he want squire or parson or cornchandler, there was the local inhabitant fearlessly walking his own village street to tell where they were to be found.

Perhaps it may be an idle and retrogressive sentiment that makes one regret the day when sign-board and signpost met the needs of commerce and transport. The motor and the general speeding up of life have changed all that, and it seems as if a stark ugliness is to be an unavoidable adjunct to life as it is rushed nowadays.

In a verdant field, bespangled with daisies, stand the ruins of a noble mansion once known as Palace House, Titchfield. A little to the right may be seen the soft grey tones of a Gothic window in a ruined wall, the relics of an ancient Abbey that once stood upon this site. At the rear is a large pond, formerly part of the Abbey Fishponds. High brick walls surround the turreted mansion with its Tudor chimneys, whilst an older stone wall abuts the ruined archway.

The spot is peaceful and serene beyond compare; here and there are ancient timbered barns, whilst hard by flows the ‘silver Meon’ : the stream whose praises were so often sung by that famous fisherman, Izaac Walton. The river is spanned by an old bridge, at the side of which snugly lies a little Inn, ‘The Fisherman’s Rest.’ The undulating land is well wooded. Between the trees may be seen the old roofs of Titchfield village and the shingled spire of its Saxon Church.

Sea-gulls swooping over the fields proclaim the nearness of the sea. Titchfield was once an important harbour in Hampshire, until the river was artificially blocked at its mouth and the sea marshes reclaimed for cultivation.

Many of the manifestations of the counter Reformation, or rather of its backwash, are becoming almost unpopular, even among Catholics. Rococo was the first to suffer, and Baroque. Then florid counterpoint. Then some of its devotional forms and religious methods, institutions, and thought. Many expressions of the Catholic reaction do not belong merely to the period. Michael Angelo, Palestrina, and the Jesuits, for instance, if not immune from criticism, are anyhow great enough to defy it. There is now an attack on a common catechetical method which dates from the sixteenth century.

In a recent book, Père Tahon, a Scheut missionary in the Philippines and an educational expert, has marshalled the evidence to show that what he aptly calls psittacism, or the system of imposing a bare summary of Christian doctrine on the memory of the child without previous understanding, is Protestant in origin, is not authentically Catholic, exists in the Church as an abuse, and is, besides, contrary to the principles of pedagogical psychology.

The apostolic method of teaching beginners consisted in first presenting the facts of sacred history, and then drawing out from them the doctrinal elements of religion. This narrative method was continued by the Fathers, was formulated by St. Augustine (de Catechizandis Rudibus) precisely as the best way of instructing the ignorant, and became traditional in the Church, until it was largely displaced by a new catechetical method deriving from the polemics of the Reformation.

Someone has said that all bad Americans go to Chicago when they die; hence perhaps we may infer that all good ones, granted they have any choice in the matter, go South. Even the Semitic gentleman pounding out popular songs in a grubby office just West of Broadway, has caught something of this tendency tp localise the national heart, and is perpetually admonishing the homesick, regardless of their original habitat, to wend their erring footsteps thither.

Yqu cannot understand America unless you know something of the South; and you cannot know the South unless you understand something of the Negro, for it is the black Mammy who is really responsible for the shy friendliness, the gentle courtesy, the lovely mysticism of the little white boys and girls who grow up under her care.

The oversight on the part of my otherwise estimable parents, which prevented me from being born in the South, was partly mitigated by the amply proportioned Mammy who came to rule over our nursery. Aside from her red bandanna and her gold ear-rings, her great fascination lay in the tradition that she was the daughter of a very gorgeous and very black African king. We were convinced that nothing but generations of the purple robe, the homage of prostrate natives and a possible diet of evangelical missionaries, could account for her supreme dignity or the proud lift of her white-haired head.

After the manner of children, we loved and feared her alternately. There were moments, when in her simple piety, we were sure that she walked with the Lord, and others when we were equally positive that she consorted with the devil, beliefs coloured possibly by our own state of grace at the moment.

What a whirl of memories are stirred up by this new book of Sir Philip Gibbs! To read its pages is to be confronted by forgotten hopes, by noble plans that failed of their purpose, and again by ignoble greeds that equally failed to secure the accomplishment of their designs. Even the mistakes of postwar policies are hardly less in evidence than the inability of selfishness to establish its controls. A cynic would have merely given a catalogue of the blunders of the politicians; a sentimentalist would have talked glibly of the records of disarmament, of the League of Nations, and of the increase of the standard of comfort of the working man. Sir Philip is neither cynic nor sentimentalist, at least he is neither for very long, though he is sometimes each by turns : however, he chiefly sets himself to the task of telling us the story of what has actually befallen our world since the war ended. By ‘our world’ is meant exclusively the world that went to war. Thus Spain, the first of the dictatorships, the earliest of the new fashion of government, gets no mention : Holland and Scandinavia are equally and deliberately ignored.

But the spirit in which the book is written is amply demonstrated on the front page of it: it is called Since Then, The Disturbing Story of the World at Peace. You realise that Sir Philip is considerably disturbed by what has happened since the war ended; and as you read the volume, and especially as you read the last pages of it, you also realise why he is disturbed.

Such is the unity of all history that anyone who endeavours to tell a piece of it must feel that his first sentence tears a seamless web.’

These memorable words of Maitland naturally recur to the mind as one reads the direct and lucid story of the life and death of Roger Casement that Denis Gwynn has given to the world. In the course of his life—so abruptly ended—Roger Casement seemed to be the meeting-place of many strange forces; of the living and of the dead. Some of these forces reflect themselves or are reflected in the titles Mr. Gwynn has chosen for his contents page. The Congo; Putamayo; Ireland; Germany (The Great War); the Traitor’s Gate. The mere repetition of the names gives more than a hint of the strange cycle through which the life of Casement moved. In the beginning of his public career he was a figure of international power and reputation. Later, he declined (or ought I to say, developed?) into a person of some importance in Irish national politics. He ended as a lonely man upon the scaffold. He was so lonely at the end as to be out of touch and in a large measure out of sympathy with the counsel who defended him and with the arguments they used in his defence. And yet, just at the end, in the Divine Mercy, Roger Casement was reconciled to the Church of his Baptism, of which he had forgotten (if indeed he had ever realised) he was once a member. In truth he had received Catholic baptism as a small child at Rhyl while on holiday with his mother, who had been born a Catholic but who had ceased after marriage to practise her religion.

Two Fellows of Oriel walked daily in the calm and classic ways of Oxford. They were bosom friends, and, men said, kindred spirits, burning and shining lights of their college, then the leading Oxford college in culture, studies, and famous names. The elder, tall, strenuous, robust, talked didactically, rather pompously, but with precision of thought and word. He was an author of text-books on Logic and on Rhetoric, and on the Johnsonian principle, that ‘who drives fat cattle should himself be fat,’ was a living embodiment of the science and the art of accurate thinking and correct phrasing. He was Richard Whately (1787-1863).

The delicate, pale youth by his side, another Fellow of Oriel, listened and learned from Whately—and learned with lasting profit to himself and to the men of all time, logic and rhetoric. Both were parsons, staunch Protestants. In their walks several times they met poor strolling Irishmen, ragged, hungry Papists, toilers from the fields, beggars, ballad singers. The dons were almost heedless, unobservant of the poor human clods, their religion, their country. If any seer or sybil had told those master-thinkers that one of them would become a bitter opponent of the faith and fortunes of Ireland, as a leader of politics and religion in the fateful isle, and that the other would after a forlorn expedition come to love Ireland and be a prince of her faith—both Richard Whately and John Henry Newman would have laughed, logical and rhetorical laughs. Yet Fate destined the Oriel men to drift, to part, and to live in Dublin, not under the same roof as at St. Alban’s Hall and at Oriel, but within five minutes’ walk of each other’s houses.

In the new religion of science God is supposed to have had the goodness to invite man to profiteer upon the universe.’ When Daedalus found he could fly he got too far above himself—and the vanquished world: his wings melted in the sun’s heat and, being dust, he unto dust returned.

The science of the world, it would seem, is in fair way to conquering the world. Having measured the world, it cannot but think it has measured the master of the world. It re-edits its theology to suit the newer enlightenment, and ‘the God of Mr. Pupin, we are given to understand, is a God who serves.’

Mr. Ransom sketches the religious history of East and West in terms of an Eternal Triangle. There was the bearded, inscrutable God of Thunder : the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob. There was the Logos : Reason, the Patron of Science. There was the Pneuma, the Paraclete, the Ghost. There came a day, says Mr. Ransom, when the Logos, the Demigod, was substituted for ‘the Pneuma, the Holy Ghost, the Tetragram, the God of Israel.’ ‘And this was the very beginning of Occidentalism.’ We cast out the thunder : we could make our own. We wanted something sane yet soothingly sentimental. And so we chose the Logos. homely, serviceable scientist like ourselves. We fashioned the ‘soft modern version of Christ.’ We had been left with too remote a Reason : we said : ‘Not on bread alone doth man live’ (We neglected to add ‘Nor on butter’).

Of social panaceas there is no end, and after G. K. C.’s Distributism comes Mr. J. R. Bellerby’s Contributism. As the author of A Contributive Society promises us a criticism of the idea contained in that book during the present year, it would seem unfair for a mere layman in the economic world to enter the lists of criticism before the appearance of that second work. But it may be shrewdly suspected that it is only the latter part of the book, containing the reconstructive ideas, which will be submitted to this self criticism, and an examination of the premises on which the scheme of social reconstruction is based may not come amiss. In any case, the critical volume may be anticipated with unmixed feelings, for how rarely do authors develop into critics of themselves.

Mr. Bellerby’s description of what he is pleased to call the ‘economic system’ gives the impression that he has been shown round by someone who regards that system with complacency. It has weak points, he admits, but it is a good machine which only requires better oiling and one or two minor replacements to function perfectly.

Throughout his analysis of what he calls the economic system (although many of us are inclined to regard it as the economic scramble), he makes use of terms which, like the words used by Humpty-Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland, mean just what he intends them to mean. He speaks of ‘goods’ not ‘commodities’ —a vital distinction.