Since the Renaissance, the world has gained many sciences: but it has, in the process, lost not a few arts. All lost arts are to be regretted; but the loss of one of them should be a subject of special sorrow on the part of Catholics. It is the art of compiling Breviary Offices.

All flesh is not the same flesh: star differeth from star in glory. Each of our Breviaries—the Roman, the Monastic, the Dominican, the Ambrosian—contains offices of very varying degrees of beauty. Even the oldest offices, such as most of those in the Proprium de Tempore and the Commune Sanctorum, mark very different stages of the road to perfection; but speaking generally, it is in the Proper of Saints that the differences are most marked, and the modern offices which are the ugliest and least fitting.

Surely of all the hard sayings in the Gospel, the words at the end of the parable of the Good Samaritan are the hardest: ‘Go, and do thou in like manner’ —Vade, et tu fac similiter.

The story itself is plain and simple; none of the parables of Christ is more familiar. The very phrase, ‘a good Samaritan,’ has passed into the language. And yet, is there anything harder for the average man than the concluding injunction, ‘Go, and do thou in like manner’ ? Its very directness leaves no loophole for misunderstanding or evasion. There is no suggestion here of a counsel of perfection. It is just an instruction in neighbourly conduct, and an instruction exceedingly hard to obey.

The Samaritan adopts a complete stranger, whom he finds in distress, and recognizing the wounded man as a neighbour, promptly provides him with hospitality; thereby inventing a home for the homeless, and for one person at least solving the housing problem. ‘Go, and do thou likewise,’ declares the Saviour of the World!

The records of the Ecclesiastical Court, some of which have recently been available for inspection, and to which special notice has been drawn of late by the very interesting paper read before the Royal Historical Society by Mr. Fincham, are full of interest for students of Catholic history.

These records consist of Books of Acts (including ‘Corrections’ ), Assignations, Books of Depositions, and ‘Libels, Allegations, and Sentences,’ and range from the year 1467 down to 1817. The Book of Acts was a record of the summons of offenders to Court, the charge or ‘libel’ brought against them, the ‘sworn personal answers’ of the accused and of the witnesses for or against them, and the ‘depositions’ on either side.

The Allegations were the replies of the accused to the ‘libel’ ; and the ‘assignation’ was the name given to the result of secret examination of witnesses in a series of ‘Interlocutary Orders.’

Jean Francois Marmontel remotely recalls our Pepys. It is true that his memoirs, from which the following account of his school days are culled, are not a diary, and were written late in life for his children’s benefit. But they give a vivid picture of his times, from his peasant home life (after all, not so wretched as might be expected from Victorian literature), through school, college, a brief and ‘distasteful’ ecclesiastical career as a tonsured abbè, and the intrigues, amorous and otherwise, of Parisian life. He writes charmingly as a man of letters, but his confessions are no less candid than those of our Samuel. The spirit of the times made any watering down for his children’s eyes quite superfluous. He was the friend of Voltaire and Madame de Pompadour, and his office of Perpetual Secretary to the French Academy brought him into contact with all who were worth knowing. He was never in the first rank of literature, but was ‘successful in all styles.’ He attained to European celebrity chiefly through his Belisaire, a work deprecating the use of carnal weapons in spiritual warfare. The book was fortunate enough to incur the wrath of the Doctors of the Sorbonne, who drew up an ‘indiculus’ of twenty-seven condemned propositions. Voltaire christened the list ‘indiculus ridiculus,’ and, in conjunction with others, succeeded in making the learned Doctors appear exceedingly foolish.