Mgr. Walsh has added one more to the small number of volumes which provide the authentic materials from which the history of the Catholic Church in England and in Ireland during the past hundred years will have to be written. He promises a second volume to deal with the pastoral work of the great Archbishop who, during nearly forty years of rule in Dublin, played an important part in obtaining the reform of the Irish land system, and after many years of patient effort against innumerable discouragements helped to win for Ireland its National University. He became its first Chancellor, and the photograph of him taken at the time, which is reproduced in Mgr. Walsh’s biography, shows him still vigorous. But his labours on the Statutory Commission of the University brought on a nervous breakdown, which left him a physical wreck for the remainder of his life. For the last ten years he took very little active part in public affairs. He died when the Black and Tan regime in Ireland was still rioting unchecked; and when the first tentative efforts of Sir Alfred Cope to bring about a settlement by negotiations, in which Archbishop Walsh himself took part, had not yet shown any hope of peace.

But though the Archbishop died a broken and disillusioned man, he had seen great improvements in the position of the Irish Catholics during his own lifetime, and no man had done more to bring them about Not only because of his ecclesiastical position, but by his intellectual abilities and courage, he was one of the most important public men in Ireland during the nineteenth century.

Readers of The Daily News were recently given a scare in an article on a book which treats of the world’s food supply and the increase of population. The alarming conclusion was to the effect that within a measureable space of years the world would be faced with the prospect of starvation for many of its inhabitants, unless remedies were immediately devised to avert the danger. It is hardly necessary to say that ‘a constructive method of birth-control’ was among the suggested remedies.

Now this is the sort of scare that has an influence on the minds of many to-day who, through unavoidable ignorance of the true facts, are overawed by any quack who claims to speak in the name of what is called Science—a much abused word ! Science, if it be really science and worthy of our acceptance as representative of objective truth, ought to be a sure and evident knowledge of things. But many of the statements and conclusions of your modern scientist are nothing of the kind. They are, to say the best, no more than theories or hypotheses : to say the worst, they are often no better than myths which the scientists of to-morrow will throw aside as childish.

And in the case of the problem of the food-supply and the population, the scare-mongering scientists cannot even claim the support of their fellow-scientists. The fact of the matter is that there is plenty of evidence, theoretical and experimental, to prove that the feeding of the world, both present and future, in itself presents no extraordinary difficulty, provided that the artificial restrictions induced by modern financial control be removed.

‘Le chacal, monté sur un piédestal vide, allonge son museau de loup derrière le buste d’un Pan à tête de bélier; la gazelle, l’autruche, l’ibis, la gerboise, sautent parmi les décombres, tandis que la poule sultane se tient immobile sur quelque débris, comme un oiseau hiéroglyphique de granit et de porphyre.’

We search in vain Brunetière’s History of Classical French Literature for a chapter on St. Simon; George Saintsbury deliberately omits Les liaisons dangereuses from his French Novel. Brunetiére and Saints-bury give their reasons, good or plausible; but who can tell us why Madame Gabrielli in hitherto published memoirs shares the fate of the due de St. Simon and Choderlos de Laclos?

She may haunt the manuscript pages that will delight and amaze the first quarter of the twenty-first century, if there are still readers to be delighted and amazed in those scarce imaginable years : in white, always, white boots, white gloves. She will trip or stumble, high-heeled, short-sighted, with her white silk bag containing sometimes diminutive white shoes (in rainy weather), with her wig frankly like a night cap. ‘In my youth they called me the lily,’ she declared at some dinner table, and the foreign butler tittered. When reproved the following day, he defended himself :’ Yes, I know, Miladi, mais le nez.’

Her hair was never white. In my time it was the colour of fuller’s earth. I saw her first at Mrs. Singleton’s. I thought her copper-coloured : but it must have been, a lighting effect.

Though the following pages are concerned with the Fourth Book of the Summa contra Gentiles, we may be allowed first to mention the fact that the English translation of the Third Book has now appeared. It is sufficient here to say that, as in the case of the former books, the translation has been carefully done, and it both reads well and is reliable. One would think it would not have been difficult to publish the whole of this Third Book in a single volume, and we think it regrettable that it should have been published in two, for, thus divided, it costs the no small sum of twenty-four shillings. The work itself, of course, would be worth any price asked for it; but, in fixing a price, more consideration might have been had for the many would-be purchasers who will now find it beyond their means.

There is a difficulty in the way of the translation of the Fourth Book, and it is that we are still without a critical text, that book not yet having appeared in the Leonine edition of the works of St. Thomas. It is to be hoped, however, that it will not be long before we are given a translation of it not below the level of the translation of the other books. For it is concerned with such high themes as the Trinity and the Incarnation, and St. Thomas supplies just such a treatment of them as we need to-day. Nowhere is the robust, vigorous common sense of his genius more in evidence.

GK. Chesterton has said rightly that Protestantism never emphasises a truth except by means of denying some other truth—which is, I suppose, the reason that it shows to-day a reaction against all its first positions. Faith alone has changed to works alone, no temporal punishment in the next world has changed into no eternal punishment, the Bible an entirely divine document has become the Bible an entirely human document. In all these instances the reformers asserted that they wanted to emphasise a truth which the Church was neglecting; in all these cases their successors are trying to affirm another truth forgotten or denied by them.

In some ways the most interesting instance of this see-saw is the case of the Bible, and we need not go back three hundred years to study in this matter the earlier attitude of Protestantism. We can study it in the remoter parts of America or the suburbs of London and Birmingham in the persons of Fundamentalists and Four Square Gospellers. At many a C.E.G. Platform do they heckle, and in the Protestant Alliance magazines they state also their simple creed : ‘the pure word of God without note or comment.’

Yet is it really so simple? Without entering into the question of why the hecklers contradict each other, and contradict Catholic teaching as well, we may ask one question that insistently suggests itself : If the word of God requires no note or comment, why do they write or preach? When a crowd of ‘Hot Gospellers’ gathered in the Albert Hall to listen to Aimée Semple Macpherson,

There seems to be a growing tendency among writers of Catholic fiction, especially of the short story, to fall back on the miraculous in the working out of the plot. There is a two-fold lure. The writers, possessed of a belief in the miraculous themselves, may aim at augmenting the faith of others, or they may use the miraculous as a deus ex machina in the evolution of a plot beyond mere human power, unaided, to solve. It may be contended that after all, as fiction, it is all in the realm of fancy and, being so understood by the reader, no harm is done. But consider how our sense of accuracy is being daily vitiated by the ordinary allurements of fiction and of film. And yet never was there an age when the possibilities of accuracy were greater, for research in every direction is piling up verified facts, which are gradually, though slowly enough, being disseminated. But there are so many who are being drugged into indifferentism, and even into unbelief, by the very embarrassment of the riches of the unveracious. Is it wise, therefore, to use a miracle like ‘a golden banner dragged in the mud’ to add to the enhancement of an ordinary tale, or even of a story grandly told?

It is an incredulous age, but it is not through the medium of fiction, no matter how reverently written, that belief in the miraculous will be inspired or increased.