During the last year or so, English Catholics have been subjected to a good deal of criticism. Their taste, their devotions, their religious education, their papers, have all been weighed and found wanting. Criticism is no bad thing, and Catholic criticism of Catholics is no new thing; for a certain measure of criticism is a sign of life, and, as Père Brou has well said of the Church, ‘Sa grande tradition, si l’on peut le dire, c’est de vivre.’ But the criticism to which I am now referring has this to distinguish it, that it is anonymous. No doubt, that is no new thing, either; but whether it is desirable is worth considering. We are told that an anonymous article is judged on its merits, as things should be judged; and we are led to presume that the signed article is judged with too much reference to the name, distinguished or not, that is appended to it.

The argument has had the support of some respectable names, and it might, at first sight, seem to have the authority of The Imitation of Christ, where it is written : ‘Non quaeras quishaec dixerit, sed quid dicatur, attende.’ But the quotation occurs in the chapter on the reading of Holy Scripture, and the attitude is recommended just because the scriptures are to be taken, not at their face value, but on the authority of God. And whatever the authority behind the opinion, it can hardly blame us for considering it on its merits, as, in fact, it bids us do.

Animals play a very prominent part in the Lives of the Saints, and for this reason they have, if useful, been placed under the protection or, if harmful, under the ban of some chosen patron saint. But in charity we must add that the only animal apparently without a heavenly friend is the snake, whose stout enemies are St. Paul, bitten by a viper in Malta, and St. Patrick, who chased all serpents out of Ireland. Another Irish saint, a hermit named Sauman, is invoked against poisonous reptiles, because some time in the seventh century he cured the Duke of Gascony’s daughter when bitten by an adder.

Rats and mice, who live in a world of enemies, find saints amongst their friends, particularly Blessed Martin of Porres (+1635), a Dominican Tertiary, who lived in the great convent of Lima. He used to feed the rats and mice at the end of the garden, but forbade them to enter the building; and he was, we are told, obeyed. He used to say that these little creatures would do no harm if they were fed daily as human beings are. Accordingly, though he was their friend, he is invoked against their depredations. Bd. Martin, if he cannot be, considered as the best-known animal-lover amongst the saints,, deserves to rank as their most practical friend. He made a little hospital for lost dogs and cats, and all sorts of suffering animals till his patients outgrew their accommodation, whereupon he persuaded his wealthy sister to give them lodging in her house, whither he repaired daily to doctor them.

In Monsieur Vincent, a book which has been much read of late in France, the author, Henri Lavedan, describing the horrors of the Hotel Dieu or chief hospital of Paris from an eighteenth century document, remarks that conditions were doubtless worse still in the seventeenth century. Why ‘doubtless’? Does he believe, one wonders, in the nineteenth century theory of inevitable progress; is each century really better in every way than the one which preceded it?

Many years ago Lecoy de la Marche, in his Guerre aux Erreurs, Historiques, had shown the weakness of this theory when dealing with the very theme of the help given to the poor in the Middle Ages. Both seventeenth and eighteenth centuries far from marking any sort of advance showed a terrible falling off from the standards and the practice of the past.

It is but to repeat the general verdict to say that Miss Viola Meynell has written a worthy memoir of her mother. She has been wise in avoiding the expansive, exhaustive, two-volumed, official biography. Her book is a memoir, a reminder, a brief record of things memorable; her aim is nothing more pretentious than to give fleeting glimpses, lively sketches, running commentaries which enlighten by flashes the rare life and work of her subject. A daughter is not always considered the one best qualified to write the Life of her mother : family affection might stress the unimportant things, discretion might suppress essential features, filial piety might withhold a perfect portrait. But Miss Meynell has kept in an excelling manner the balance between reverence and unreserve, and one may ask— knowing well how the question would be answered—Who else could have done the work better? Love is blind—perhaps sometimes; but more often love is keen-sighted and, according to the inspired text, love rejoiceth with the truth. Anyhow, it seems clear that the intimacy of family affection, far from handicapping Miss Meynell in her task, has actually proved to be her pre-eminent qualification in revealing and interpreting her mother.

Alice Meynell has been hailed as ‘beyond challenge the most eminent woman writer since George Eliot and Christina Rossetti.’ Your wife’s prose, wrote Coventry Patmore to Wilfrid Meynell, ‘is the finest that was ever written, and none but kindred genius can see how great it is .... it is the test of capacity in the reader for the understanding of what prose is ... . If I were you I should go mad with pride and joy.’

‘Where are you going, Judas,

With that rope in your hand?’

To scatter what God will not forgive

To the dark wind and the sand.’

‘Why is your purse empty, Judas,

Dangling light and loose?’

‘Silver I had; but all earth’s gold

Could not ransom Him from the Jews.’

‘Could you not cry for mercy, Judas?

His kindness has no scope.’

‘The kindest things that I shall find Are a tall tree and a rope.’

‘Oh fool! fool! Even this sin, Judas,

He will pardon from His cross.’

‘The death that saves all other men Is my eternal loss.’

‘Wait, and you shall see Him risen, Judas.’

‘His eyes would be to me a rod—

For I have betrayed an innocent man.’

‘Nay, Judas, only a God.’

Theodore Maynard.

English Anti-Catholic legislation reached its climax in the first year of the reign of William and Mary, when it provided that, in future, all recruits, before enlistment in the army, should be forced to take the attestation oath forswearing the Catholic religion. This stupid piece of bigotry prevented Catholics from engaging in the defence of their native land, and drove many ardent young spirits amongst English, Scottish, and Irish Catholics into foreign military service. Thus England was robbed of men who would have led her armies with the same brilliant success that attended them in their foreign commands. Every student of European history is confronted, from time to time, with the names of Brown, O’Donnell, Blake, MacMahon, to mention but a few. Perhaps the best known of these were the two Browns, Count George Brown, who held a high command in the Russian army, and his brilliant nephew, Ulysses Maximilian Brown, Count of the Holy Roman Empire and Field Marshal of Austria, who, after checking the victorious Frederick the Great on the field of Lobositz, 1756, fell in the battle of Prague (1757).

The state of Ireland a hundred years ago was sad. Acute, and widespread poverty, hunger, rags, hovels met the eyes of travellers at every turn in every town, village and roadside. The Irish knew the causes. Visitors and those who there sat in the seats of the mighty knew that all evils in Ireland and elsewhere came from one, and only one source, the Catholic Church.

Hence with an overpowering zeal the State-paid Church in Ireland, with its followers, judges, lord lieutenants, army officers, landlords, land agents, squires, government officials, and parsons, banded themselves together to cure permanently Ireland’s woes, to extirpate the Catholic Faith, to convert to Protestantism of any shade all the Irish from Cork to Derry. It was rather a big programme, a big campaign, and had proved for centuries a failure disastrous. New methods were adopted. The sword had failed, eviction had failed, well engineered poverty and crime had failed. An appeal to the souls of the poor misguided Papishes, a big campaign of Bible distribution, of blasphemy by well-trained bigot parsons, by tracts deriding the Mass, Confession, the Pope, Mary, the Mother of God. Every market and fair had its street preachers, with their select blasphemy, lies, filthy stories about convents. In Westmoreland Street, Dublin, in a window of a leading shop was a picture in two parts, a hideous Indian idol, and a mouse gnawing a Host, and beneath were the words, ‘Two Idols.’ People were pestered by insulting remarks on Catholic doctrine, with tracts galore, and were pained by the reports of the sermons, the speeches, the boastings of the thousands and thousands of converts flocking daily to the services in Protestant churches, renouncing Rome, embracing the Bible, reading it hourly and blessing God for the light of the Gospel denied them by the accursed church of Rome, the harlot of the Seven Hills.

A Parable

A few years ago I travelled from Montreal to Quebec in a Pullman car which, strange to say, never contained more than three passengers till we reached our destination. Opposite me sat a McGill girl—a junior I inferred from her conversation with two other girls who were seeing her off On the other side of the aisle sat a young man, one of those handsome, perfectly well-tailored youths, so attractive that you are willing to ascribe genius to them as well as a host of minor perfections. This demi-god was reading. The McGill girl looked across at hjm for some time, till their eyes met. ‘Reading?’ she half queried, after an interval of mute presentation leading to a simultaneous smile. ‘Yes,’ a very uncultivated voice answered, ‘what I want is a love story with a kid in it and lots of devilry in him.’ The book was handed across the aisle, and the girl began to read. The voice had been an anti-climax, and so evidently was the book, yet the girl read on, skimming and skipping. After a while my conscience smote me, and, bending over the love-and-kid-story, I whispered : ‘Have you ever read Vanity Fair?’ The girl looked up, flushed a little, and answered : ‘Dickens?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘Thack------’ ‘Oh! Thackeray, of

course! No, it was not on our list.’

What would I not have given to have Vanity Fair in my valise, open it at random, and watch the girl’s delight at Becky Sharp’s introduction to Sir Pitt’s town house and to his immortal charwoman!

I

We had been sitting in the galerie through the lovely August afternoon, watching the wind ruffle the grasses in the fields before us, and gently swing the trees. Better, we felt, under that hot sun, to contemplate beauty, than to waste energy in dissecting it. So we sat in the flickering shade of the wisteria, breaking now into tardy hesitant heavenly blossoming, and; saw the acacias foam on the brink of the steep to the south. Above them, the crosses on Calvary hill were steadfast amongst the changing verdure. Higher still, the Pyrenees leapt to meet the sky.

As we sat at ease, a woman came into view along the path fringed by the acacias. We leant forward a little to watch her, wondering what friend this might be. She wore black, she was slender, she was unusually graceful; and none of us could remember having seen her before.

She approached the gate; and, as I ran down to greet her, she smiled at me from under her drooping hat.

I am Mlle. Deschamps,’ she said. ‘Forgive me for coming to call on you first. I came because I was told you would be glad to see me, to talk about the pilgrimage.’

She was charming, I thought, and distinguished, with delightful gestures. Her head was small and beautifully poised. The forehead was broad and low, the eyes so dark a brown as to make one think them black, the nose aquiline, the mouth strong and tender.