There is so sharp a glare of the miraculous about Blessed I Martin of Lima, and sometimes such a haze of mere emotionalism, that it is hard to see the man as he was, the hard-working, patiently enduring Dominican lay-brother in the flesh. What follows is an attempt to depict him as he appeared to his contemporaries, and is based on ten of the seventy-six accounts given twenty years after his death at the Diocesan enquiry by people who knew him.

The background needs to be realised: a huge old Spanish-style convent, its several hundred religious occupied in all the work needed in a city of the New World: preaching, teaching, care of orphans, children, poor, sick. Lima, even when Martin died at the age of sixty, had existed a bare hundred years, a city of Spanish immigrants or first descendants of the conquistadores, merchants, soldiers, religious of every description. Side by side with these lived the dispossessed Indians, the imported Negro slaves. In the priory were not only religious, but the boys they looked after, and men staying there on retreat or learning a trade. There were Negro servants in the kitchen and the laundry and at all the menial tasks in the place. The Dominicans themselves comprised priests, student-novices (from fourteen and upwards), lay-brothers, and donados (not strictly religious, but ‘familiars’ living in the house). They had their cells; not necessarily small rooms, but places with alcoves and closets off them shared by visitors and children.

Harry (Hilary) Douglas Clarke Pepler was born on January 14th, 1878. His father, George Henry Pepler, who came of an old Wiltshire family, was a partner in Messrs Diplocks, Brewers, of Eastbourne. The family were Quakers, and Hilary and his brother (now Sir George Pepler) were educated at Bootham School, York. At the age of fourteen Hilary was apprenticed to Sir Reginald Hanson, Bart., as a Merchant Taylor in London; but after a time he entered the tea trade. Then followed a post with a firm of wholesale grocers in Cannon Street. With £250 inherited from his grandfather, he next bought a pewterer’s business and set up as a maker and caster of pewter, employing eight men. But his machines were out of date and eventually he sold the business to a competitor from the United States. During this time he shared rooms in London with Harry Mennell (one of the Quaker branch), through whom he became very friendly with the children of Wilfrid and Alice Meynell at Palace Court, where he often saw Francis Thompson.

In 1903 Pepler met Clare Whiteman, who was studying art under Herkomer at the Bushey School of Art, and they were married in the following year. For some reason, he then decided that his vocation was land surveying, and after his marriage he spent a year at Tunbridge Wells learning this business. His own comment, in some manuscript reminiscences, is: ‘Good heavens, I was a rolling stone’.

The title of this essay requires immediate modification. In fact it is concerned with one cultural movement, one historic process, which in spite of constant and recurring crises may be termed continuous. The so-called civilisation of the West,—Mediterranean in origin, and now, at least in a superficial and technological sense, world-wide in extent—provides its historical background. The purpose of the essay is to view the history of this culture in terms of personality.

Two questions at once suggest themselves: What is meant by history? and What is personality? By history is here meant an interpretative inquiry concerned with human activity—a description derived from Collingwood, but not understood in quite the same way. This description has at least the value that it forces the mind to consider the second question. For what is human activity but the exteriorisation of mental and moral processes which have their root in the person? No sooner has this been asserted than a doubt arises: What is meant by saying that human activity is the activity of a person?

The artistic record of the Church in England over the last hundred years is indeed a dismal one. Dull, drab and even ugly churches, in what passes for a period style, are furnished with clumsy woodwork, characterless plaster statues and fussy, over-decorated altars, exhibiting so often a general air of tawdriness which can scarcely fail to depress and may actually repel a seeker after peace and beauty in God’s house. There are, of course, exceptions. There are always exceptions; but no more than enough of them to prove the rule and to show the tremendous opportunities which lie within our grasp.

The reasons for this unhappy state of affairs are not difficult to discover or to understand. The restoration of the English Hierarchy, and the emergence of the Church from obscurity, took place at a time when artistic taste in this country had sunk to its lowest ebb. The classical tradition had had its last flourish in the first two decades of the century, in the form which we now call the Regency style. But it flourished then not as the accepted tradition in which all men worked and within which the genius of the time found new expression, but as one of several styles, an alternative to more exotic forms borrowed from the East, or to the revived ‘Gothick’ manner. There was no longer any accepted grammar of architecture, or any universal standard of artistic criticism. The Romantic Movement in literature had been followed in the graphic arts, and the paintings of Claude and Poussin had fired the imagination of patrons of architecture.

Had Fr John Gerard been a highwayman instead of a Jesuit his name would doubtless be familiar to every schoolboy, for his exploits are far more exciting than those of Dick Turpin or Robin Hood, and have the additional recommendation of being authentic. It is strange that such a thrilling autobiography should have been allowed to remain out of print for half a century, and Fr Caraman is to be congratulated not only on making good this deficiency, but on producing an edition that may be read as easily as a novel. The former editions edited by Fr John Morris, s.j., had obvious shortcomings. The homely Latin had been turned into solemn, Victorian prose with a mock-Elizabethan tang about it quite unsuited to the original. The text was so interlarded with notes that one could never be sure whether one was reading Gerard, or his editor, or some spy’s report. Fr Caraman has extricated the text from these encumbrances, and put the notes at the end of the book. He has translated Gerard’s brisk and unstudied Latin into exactly the sort of colloquial English that it demands. He has brought Gerard to life in a remarkable way: at last we can fully appreciate his simple piety, his sense of humour, his love of field sports, and his amazing courage. Those who do not know Fr Gerard should read his narrative straight through as they would a novel, and then turn to the notes, and see how almost every incident may be checked and amplified by reference to State Papers and other sources.