The late Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford has published what we must call a scholarly and painful book. Only a scholar brought up in the atmosphere of a modern University could have written as Bishop Headlam has written on ‘Jesus the Christ.’ Even the ‘Map,’ which is duly heralded on the title-page, has that note of scholarship which the older Universities, with their dogged craftsmanship, keep amidst a machine-mad world.

It goes without saying that there is a long, well-documented account of ‘Modern Criticism,’ which the Bishop chivalrously calls ‘learned criticism.’ As his Lordship does not altogether agree with the findings of the learned criticism, he therefore saves us from the charge of paradox in our having suggested that a work can be at once scholarly and painful; i.e. the fruit of research, yet wide of the truth, or, in other words, learned but wrong.

In his new study of The Problem of Population, Mr. Harold Cox presents the popular case for birth-control with his customary lucidity and with that command of statistics that can compel conviction for any argument. But one rubs one’s eyes with amazement to find so stalwart a champion of individual liberty carried, by his enthusiasm for what he regards as the moral duty of birth-control, into advocating the most intolerable of all forms of State interference with personal rights. Can it indeed be Mr. Harold Cox who declares emphatically (p. 153) for the compulsory sterilisation by State-appointed practitioners, of large classes of mankind? ‘To sum up,’ he concludes roundly, ‘those persons who, as the result of physical or mental defects, are unfitted to produce children should be sterilised, with their consent or with the consent of their guardians, at the expense of the State.’ One wonders whether Mr. Cox himself, or any one of his friends whom he might name at random, would be able to satisfy a Government medical board that they possess that ‘freedom from any heritable taint’ which he postulates as being the essential condition of the right to have children. If words have any meaning at all, Mr. Cox expressly asserts that anyone in whose family there is hereditary disease—be it blindness or consumption or mental instability—must be ruthlessly forced to undergo a sterilising operation.

Thomas Carlyle never could pass by the church of St. Clement Danes without thinking with admiration and awe of Samuel Johnson ‘in the era of Voltaire’ purifying his soul within its walls, full of genuine devotion, sometimes in fear and darkness, at others in patience and quiet hope, but ever with intense and burning conviction. ‘Religion,’ says Mr. Birrell, ‘was to Johnson an awful thing; he never learned to take his ease on Zion. Yet is his trembling piety and utter sincerity a true haven of refuge for the student of the heartless scepticism of the eighteenth century.’

It is a singular fact that for more than forty years Samuel Johnson dwelt within a stone’s throw of the most venerated and conspicuous English Catholic of his day. They must inevitably often have passed each other in the street. But they lived in totally distinct worlds, and we can hardly presume that Dr. Johnson and Bishop Challoner ever exchanged a single word. Yet had they very many acquaintances in common.

The book before me opens with the following words: ‘In the year of the Incarnation of our Lord 1879, and of the Hegira of the Prophet 1296, and on the Eve of the Feast of St. Patrick, an only child was born to Sir Tatton Sykes, Baronet, of Sled-mere, in the county of York, and to Jessica Christina his lawful wife. Mark Sykes was this only son, and he always remained the original child of original parents.’ It may be added that he ended by securing an original biographer. When a biography begins with a sentence like that, we know, long before such guesses are commonly possible in more conventional cases, that the author is not a hack or a humdrum eulogist, but a man with a sense of history as a background to biography. We know that the author is as interesting as the subject. And we could distinguish this quality of distinction, even if we had not seen on the title page the name of Shane Leslie. The first sentence, recording nothing but a fact such as is found in a directory or a genealogical tree, yet gathers round it a crystallisation of creeds and influences, like the conjunction of stars in some horoscope of a happier and more Christian astrology. We have foreshadowed, as in a dissolving view of historic visions, the influences inspiring the subject and his biographer; beginning with the greatest of all influences, the mystery and majesty of their common creed. The date is stated not only as a date, but as a dogma.

The farmer, who expressed contempt for our national system of education because a lad of school-leaving age in his employ did not know the dental formula of a yearling sheep, was merely giving expression to the thought in the minds of many.

For there are two schools of thought in matters educational. One regards education as the means to an end; the other regards it as an end in itself. To the former school of thought belong most teachers and education officials; to the latter most practical business men. The effect of this conflict between the practical and the ideal is the crowding of the curriculum in both elementary and secondary schools, so that boys and girls leave those institutions with a superficial smattering of knowledge, unrelated to the occupations they intend to follow and not making, in any large degree, for any ethical advance in society.

After an interval of sixteen years, Mr. A. E. Housman has given us a sequel to A Shropshire Lad. During that time one might naturally have expected the Lad of 1896 to have arrived at manhood’s estate; expected, perhaps, from the poet a hero with a different philosophy of life, and an experience ripened by almost a score of years. Mr. Housman could so easily have made his character grow up, see with new eyes, and speak with a new tongue. That is what would have happened in the case of any other poet who was not the supreme artist Mr. Housman has proved himself to be. For in Last Poems (absit omen !) he is still in the same mood as in A Shropshire Lad, and has thus demonstrated the artistic unity of his work.

That is the crowning triumph of his poetry. The hundred and five poems that make up these two volumes, and that represent, say, twenty years work, are really just one poem looked at and presented in one hundred and five different ways. Just as one person may have a hundred striking experiences in two decades of life without losing his individuality, or breaking up his personality into little pieces; or an air may have a hundred variations; so one rich mood of imagination has sufficed for Mr. Housman to enrich our literature with a hundred poems. He struck one precious seam of gold and worked it faithfully to the end.

Twenty years ago there passed away in Italy one of the greatest exponents of Roman Law, whose researches won him a foremost place in the world of science, wresting for his native land the laurels which had hitherto been held by Germany, in the domain of Jurisprudence. The name of Contardo Ferrini, well-known as it is to present day jurists, bids fair to become familiar before long to every Catholic, inasmuch as the beatification process of its erudite bearer has already been introduced at Rome. The present Holy Father, intimately acquainted with the life and merits of Ferrini, was a warm supporter of his cause in 1905. It is therefore confidently hoped that good progress will be made during his pontificate. Pius X had already intimated the consolation it would give him to raise a university professor to the Altar.

The life of the modest, retiring scientist is a fresh proof that there is no contradiction between Faith and Science. The man for whom his teachers, the historian Mommsen, and the Byzantinist, Karl Zacharia von Lingenthal, prophesied a brilliant part in the restoration of a branch of learning then neglected in Italy, was a daily communicant, and spent every spare moment in converse with his Divine Master. ‘I pray God/ wrote Ferrini to an intimate friend,’ that prayer may never expire on my lips as long as I live, for that would be the end of my supernatural existence.’