Last time I spoke at St. Dominic’s Priory, Haverstock Hill, to a crowd of boys, one of them had a fit. This shows how far from suited I am to talk to or even about boys. (However, when I was there before, someone lost his false teeth .... I was accused .... but no matter. Perhaps it’s an affair of place rather than person. Or, just fate. To resume . . . .)

I am not going to speak so much about boys, as about anyone who grows up in a place like Poplar, London, E.14; and though I shall talk about Poplar, I am not selfishly forgetting other desperately poor parishes in London, or in many another city, Glasgow for example; Bristol. I suppose that much the same happens everywhere as in Poplar. For example, the parents, either because they must or because they are short-sighted, send their children out to do such work as children can, immediately after they leave school and even before. (I knew a boy who made quite a good business, between whiles, by stealing leafy twigs and sticking them in flower-pots (also stolen) and selling them to old ladies in the suburbs on the assurance that ‘they would flower in October.’ . . . He had already learnt how to steal enough milk out of doorstep-bottles to supplement his insufficient breakfast. But he was an angel-child in school . . . .) Well, at sixteen the young labourer is sacked, because he has to be insured.

On Monday evening, December the 30th, 1929, Mrs. Sheppey-Greene (née Schuster) died in Charing Cross Hospital. The tragedy of a richly endowed mind and soul cut off in mid-life after a few hours’ illness came with bewildering fitness almost as we were remembering ‘Rachel weeping for her children, who were no more.’

The friars of St. Dominic were grieved that this sister of the Third Order was taken when, as they thought, her life of varied usefulness was just opening into flower. Yet they could not withhold the further thought—and it was an end to grief—that He Whom their sister had served was accounting her life not an opening flower but a ripened fruit.

Those who knew Rose Schuster best could not picture her as choosing, even for an hour, a low rather than a high way to God. I have heard her reply to the question, how did she come by her deep knowledge of the Bible, by saying that she had a governess who insisted on the word of God being committed to memory. But it was evident that the girl whose faithful memory was learning God’s word had a still more faithful heart that was learning from God’s word how best to do God’s will.

Some two years after her mother became a Catholic she followed her mother into the Church. But indeed she never followed anyone but Him Who is the way, and the truth and the life. The only life her robust mind could seek was the gift of truth.

On the 23rd of August of last year Afghanistan celebrated, as usual, the anniversary of her independence by brilliant festivities in the suburbs of Kabul. L’Illustration reproduced a photograph, brought by air, of the new Sovereign, the Emir Habib-Ullah, dressed in national costume and surrounded by members of his government.

Exactly eighty-six years before, the same Review had reproduced on its first page the portrait of an Englishwoman who had witnessed the barbarous revolt at Kabul and who had been imprisoned by Akbar-Khan for many long months.

Time rolls on, and history repeats itself. To-day, as yesterday, Afghanistan stands out as the country pre-eminently noted for riots and civil wars. Hardly are the last speeches ended, the last dances over than the news of the march on Kabul led by the rebel general Nadir-Khan, and the probable assassination of Habib-Ullah is blazoned abroad.

Those who are familiar with St. Thomas’s Proemium to his Summa contra Gentiles will recall his words on the meaning of true Wisdom. ‘Sapientis est ordinare,’ he says, ‘it is a wise man’s business to deal with things in orderly fashion, and since the goal or end we have in view must govern our procedure, and since the supreme goal for us all must be the Divine Truth, the study of it should be the one preoccupation of the wise man.’ That is Theology, or the study of God. Now God is made known to us in nature, and the true scientist is he who endeavours to arrive at a knowledge of the Creator through His creation. But besides the Book of Nature there is also the Book wherein God has spoken to us and shewn us the path to heaven, in which He has ‘set before us life and death.’ This is His Revelation, the theologian’s quarry, the true source of his wisdom. Hence the words above quoted from Job are with peculiar appositeness used by the Church in the Breviary Office for the Feast of St. Jerome, the ‘Doctor maximus’ whose entire life was spent in toiling in that quarry.

This is the story that I have been told of the ruined chapel in the Bois-Marie.

When the sun sets peacefully behind clouds, there comes an hour of hushed stillness. And on the edge of the Bois-Marie, where there were no trees, but only broken ground, tangled with bramble and bracken and dappled with hollows where the rain lay, the quietness of all the world seemed to gather and brood.

It was a high place, lifted up on the cliffs that stood with their feet in the water, and little was visible that was not sky or sea of the nearer land rising and falling as it travelled into the distance. There were no houses, no ploughed fields, no trimness of man’s work. There was only the high breast of the earth, pale and clear and quiet; the grey sea, the luminous grey sky, and the grey hush that followed the sunset.

In an article on ‘St. John’s Witness to the Blessed Sacrament’ in a former number of Blackfriars, Fr. Vincent McNabb wrote as follows:

This passage seems to me to be misleading on several points, and also to contain, at least implicitly, views which it is difficult to accept. In view of the importance of its subject no excuse need be offered for discussing it here. I venture, therefore, to set down as clearly as I can some of the objections which, it seems to me, can be legitimately urged against it. I will deal first with what Fr. McNabb calls the miracle of Transubstantiation, and secondly with the miracle of Multiplication.