In the course of the debate in Parliament on the Revised Prayer-Book many startling things were said, but few things can have been more startling than Sir Henry Slesser’s speech.

As the time for the general elections in France at the end of April approaches, the Catholics are once again faced with a situation of real anxiety; and several recent indications of the attitude which they are adopting in regard to the elections deserve close attention. There is no denying the seriousness of the danger to which the Church may be exposed if the elections should produce results at all resembling those of four years ago—when the Bloc National was overthrown and M. Herriot came into office, pledged to revive immediately the old campaign of persecution against the Church. Much has happened in the meantime, and it may be useful to summarise briefly the main factors which have altered the situation.

Four years ago M. Poincaré went to the country after he had successfully carried out the threat of occupying the Ruhr—which other Governments had not dared to enforce, in their efforts to make Germany shoulder the costs of war damage. M. Poincaré put the threat into effect, with the backing of a great majority of the Bloc National Parliament, in much the same spirit in which last year he succeeded in restoring the value of the franc, by strong action and by a bold appeal for patriotic support, when all other politicians had failed to control the situation. But whereas M. Poincare’s efforts to save French credit have for various reasons succeeded, his policy in the Ruhr was disastrous not only to French finance, but to his own political position.

For many reasons a whole-hearted welcome will be given to Father Brodrick’s Life of Blessed Robert Bellarmine. The profound sanctity of the great controversialist was a legacy to the Church which has long called for recognition and acclamation; and all Catholic students have felt deep gratitude to the Holy See for raising this great member of the Society of Jesus to the altars of the Church. The new Beatus will rightly become a fitting patron in these days of missionary need. The period of his life was, roughly speaking, the hour when the great schism in modern Europe was becoming stabilised. Looking back now over the intervening centuries, we see him as one of the last great warriors in defence of the old Church of Christendom, before the night of the Reformation had settled down upon us. After his day the Church withdrew in large measure from the guidance of Northern Europe, and a situation arose in which Catholicism stood enclosed and in a state of siege. Even into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the siege had to some extent been raised, the Church seemed to have been passed by, and half Europe stood determined to forget it. During this long period intermittent warfare has continued, and in the ephemeral and local controversies Catholic writers have mainly drawn on the armoury fashioned by Robert Bellarmine.

In 1862 Henry Adams was a guest of Monckton Milnes at Fryston : Laurence Oliphant, Sterling of Keir will not detain us, although we owe to the future Sir William Sterling-Maxwell a definition worthy to rank with Max Beerbohm’s visit to The Pines, Putney, and with George Meredith’s Daumier lithograph of Theodore Watts Dunton.

‘The fourth [man] was a boy, or had the look of one, though in fact a year older than Adams himself. He resembled in action—and in this trait was remotely followed, a generation later, by another famous young man, Robert Louis Stevenson—a tropical bird, high-crested, long-beaked, quick-moving, with rapid utterance and screams of humour, quite unlike any English lark or nightingale. One could hardly call him a crimson macaw among owls, and yet no ordinary contrast availed. Milnes introduced him as Mr. Algernon Swinburne. The name suggested nothing. Milnes was always unearthing new coins and trying to give them currency .... Conversation ran first to Oliphant who told his dramatic story simply, and from him the talk drifted off into other channels, until Milnes thought it time to bring Swinburne out . . . For the rest of the evening Swinburne figured alone; the end of dinner made the monologue only freer, for in 1862, even when ladies were not in the house, smoking was forbidden, and guests usually smoked in the stables or the kitchen; but Monckton Milnes was a licensed libertine who let his guests smoke in Adams’s bedroom, since Adams was an American-German barbarian ignorant of manners;