'The Church Dormant? . . . I have never heard of it,’ the puzzled reader will say : ‘the Church Militant I know, the Church Triumphant and the Church Suffering I have also heard of, but what on earth is the Church Dormant? Is it by chance a new confraternity for the aged?’

Nothing of the sort. It is merely a pathological condition of the Church Militant. It is endemic, but sometimes epidemic: it is epidemic to-day. It is analogous to certain functional disorders of the human body, which result from over-indulgence in eating or in drinking, or even from neglecting to take sufficient exercise. For there is a curious parallelism between spiritual and material processes, and all experience teaches us that, as the body for its life and weli-being requires a certain amount of hardship and discomfort in its surroundings, so too does the soul,—both the individual soul of the Christian man or woman, and the aggregate soul of the Christian Church.

We are accustomed to speak of the Church upon earth as the Church Militant, but we do not always realise how necessarily true that description is. In fact, the Church upon earth can never rightly be other than a militant body. She is never so well, and so truly herself as when things are going ill with her, and she is never so powerful as when fighting for her life against the embattled enemies of her Lord. It is significant that the Age of the Martyrs was also the Age of her most rapid extension and development. In later times, with greater general security, and in apparently improved circumstances, she seems largely to have lost her grip, and instead of the ‘general advance’ that distinguished her beginnings, she now either marks time, or else just jogs along, barely holding her own. The Age of the Martyrs is over, at any rate for the present.

Heresy and schism are not a novelty of the sixteenth century, they exist from the beginning, and always in the East. The national Church, self-governing, refusing all obedience to Rome, abiding in its own decrees of faith and morals, and owning na allegiance to any power without its borders, can still be seen and studied in Armenia and in the Monophysite Coptic Church of Egypt. Plainly they are not Catholic, but national or racial these separated brethren. So too the Donatists in Africa sought to set up a national non-Catholic Church. And political nationalism, it would seem, was chiefly responsible for the schism that rent the Orthodox Church of the East from the Catholic communion of Rome; as it is responsible in our own times for the independent national Churches of the Balkans.

In looking through some old papers, the present writer one day unearthed a contemporary account of the Coronation of William IV in 1831, and in it occurred the following rather striking passage:—

After a long period of neglect the English Mystics of the fourteenth century are coming again to the light. Patient workers have provided us with accurate texts and greatly helped to show how valuable are the writings of these mystics. One may perhaps apply to their re-birth the words that St. Ambrose used of the birth of St. John the Baptist: ‘Habet sanctorum editio laetitiam plurimorum, quia commune bonum est.’ This is especially the case with the most original writer of the whole school, the anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing and of the Epistles connected with it. It is true that Father Henry Collins, so long ago as 1870, edited the Cloud and the Epistle of Privy Counsel; but his text, though sufficient for devotional use, was not very exact, chiefly as regards the Epistle, and it was not till 1912 that the Cloud was issued for the first time in all its genuineness and originality. We must remain very grateful to Miss Evelyn Underhill for her work.

There is room, however, for other editions—as Miss Underhill herself would acknowledge—and Catholics will welcome the news that a new one, containing— I hope—the Cloud and all the Epistles, is now being prepared for the ‘Orchard Books’ by Dom Justin McCann. It will do a great service to contemplative souls, and I believe that there may still be many such among the countrymen of St. Bede, Rolle, Hilton, and Father Baker.

Will this new edition throw light on the question of the authorship of the Cloud and its attendant treatises? That is perhaps to hope too much, for the problem is one that has hitherto baffled every investigator.

In a time in the golden past, two hundred years or so before Protestantism was misbegot, there stood on the banks of a river a certain fair monastery; a beautiful pale grey building, austere and massive. It hung high up over the water, and deeply rolled the river at its base : in the early morning it swam in mists of palest ivory, what time the sun rose majestic over the hill, and smiled to see so lordly a sight. Though so massive and severe, the building was no wise grim : it shone a pale gem in green meadows and kingly trees.

The dwellers therein were as austere and simple as their dwelling; and they too irradiated cheerfulness, from my Lord Abbot to the latest scrubby postulant: and all met trouble and difficulty with a smile.

All—but one. One there was, as gloomy as a cave at midnight.

One there was as grim as a Donjon. He smiled never—neither did he laugh. He went further! He took scandal at the cheerfulness around him—a grim Brother! Whether he thought on the wickedness of the world, or the severity of the rule, ‘twas the same to him—all things worked together into gloom. A terrible fellow is a scowling Brother. To him a smile was a sin, to laugh a.crime. Saw he a swaggering gay fellow from out beyond, come to see the monastery— his soul shuddered within him : did his eye catch the Guest Master’s smiling welcome on such a one—he gloomed with misery—’ accomplices in crime.’

The very chant of the Office was too gay for him. In sooth a fanatical Brother.

And in his cell at night, he groaned aloud and thumped his chest, and bewailed the levity and brightness of the Brethren. ‘Distinguish between me and those others, Lord!’ he wailed. ‘I am not as they; oh ! deliver me from this house of doom.’

Divorce was unknown in France until the Revolution. But the exponents of the new gospel of Liberty and Equality soon discovered that the system of indissoluble marriage was logically incompatible with their fundamental principles. And so in 1792, the Legislative Assembly decided, after three minutes of discussion, that ‘the right to divorce was a necessary corollary of individual liberty, which could not permit of any indissoluble tie.’ On this principle the Assembly authorised divorce by mutual consent, with a minimum of formalities; at the same time it abolished the old system of legal separations. The result of the change was more rapid than anyone had anticipated, and in Paris there were in the years 1793 and 1794 half as many divorces as marriages. Napoleon, who was a convinced believer in the necessity for a strict marriage law—apart from the special circumstances of his own career—made drastic changes in the revolutionary system when he promulgated the Code Civil in 1804. He revived the old system of legal separations and, while he retained the right to divorce by mutual consent, he introduced many formal requirements before it could be obtained, and also insisted upon the fulfilment of certain conditions. Thus, divorce by mutual consent could not be obtained either before two years had elapsed after the marriage (and under the Code Civil a French woman is obliged to live with her husband unless she has obtained either a separation or a divorce), or after the marriage had lasted twenty years. Also no woman over forty-five could obtain a divorce by consent. The consent of the parents on both sides must also be obtained.