From Tuesday, July ioth, to Friday, July 13th, during a summer heat of unparalleled ferocity, the men and women who look upon themselves as the heirs of the Tractarians held a Congress in the Albert Hall. The things said and done by these successors of Froude, Keble and Newman give food for thought and prayer.

The Congress, merely as a social and religious phenomenon, cannot be ignored, and should not be belittled. It is a social and religious fact of no little interest that, during a heat-spell which welted our tropical visitors, one of the largest halls in the world was filled for even the less important meetings of a religious congress.

Moreover, this Congress was representative not of a Church, but only of a party within a Church. It was assuredly a religious phenomenon of significance that this section of a section of Christians could brave tropical heat for a religious idea. This is all the more interesting to us Roman Catholics, because, if we may believe our experts in organisation we, the Roman Catholics of England and Wales, might undertake the task of filling the Albert Hall at general, but hardly at the sectional, meetings of any congress.

One of the most satisfactory features in the programme of the Birmingham Catholic Congress is the announcement of the great missionary exhibition at Bingley Hall. We had a missionary exhibition on a smaller scale at Westminster last year. As a first effort of the kind it was very creditable to its promoters, though it had the defects of a first attempt. Its scope was necessarily limited. It was rather a group of small exhibitions bearing on the work of some of our mission organisations, than a well-organised demonstration of Catholic missionary enterprise as a whole. We may hope that the Bingley Hall Exhibition will show a considerable advance in this respect; and further, that it will be the first of a series of Congress Exhibitions, representing more and more efficiently at each of these Catholic gatherings the development of the foreign missions.

Speaking of the missions at the Liverpool National Catholic Congress, Cardinal Bourne said :

In the south aisle of Westminster Abbey is a monument by Flaxman, with a long and sonorous inscription in the manner of the time, to the memory of Pasquale de Paoli, the Garibaldi of the eighteenth century. In Upper Seymour Street, Portman Square, and in South Audley Street, we may see the homes in which General Paoli lived as an honoured exile. And in old St. Pancras Churchyard, the sexton will point out the spot where his remains long rested, until in our own day they were taken back to his beloved Corsica.

Our English Catholic forefathers, who heard Mass in the Sardinian and the other Embassy Chapels, must often have looked with interest at this foreigner of singularly noble bearing who shared in their devotions; and no one was more welcome than he at the meetings of the famous Literary Club, presided over by Dr. Johnson. Reynolds, Garrick, Gibbon, Goldsmith, Burke were his admiring friends. George III never signed a warrant for a government pension with greater willingness than that which bore the name of Paoli.

As the General walked the quiet London streets, what memories were his ! His early days in his native Corsica, his hatred of the Genoese oppressors of the island, his friendship and his rivalry with the Bonaparte family (some have it he was Napoleon’s godfather at baptism), his exile and military education in Naples, his return to Corsica, his nomination as Dictator and Generalissimo, his terrible struggle first with Genoa, then with France; his wise rule and excellent laws, the birth of a nation his own work; the years of splendid guerilla warfare, the expulsion of the foreigner, the final terrible battle, the cutting his way through the flower of the French troops, the refuge found on a British frigate; the enthusiastic welcome in London, the kindly words of George III.

Dr. Fortescue was not a born parish priest, but he was a far better one than many people who think they understood him suspect. The work was often against the grain—it offended the extreme reticence which was the key-note of his character—but he never shirked a duty. His visits to the poor and the sick were paid with the most scrupulous regularity, no matter how busy he might be, and he was never known to refuse to see any caller, however inconvenient it might be for him to interrupt his work to receive him. That reticence of his, and his horror of humbug, as well as his impatience with stupidity, and his absolute inability to grasp the difficulties of untrained minds and to make excuses accordingly, often caused temporary misunderstandings between him and his parishioners. There is no harm in saying—because everyone knows it—that he had a quick and very acid wit. Often—but not nearly so often of late years—he wounded the feelings of inoffensive people without, apparently, being able to realise that he was cruel. When he did realise it, he gave himself no peace until he had made amends. He would catch you up on his bicycle in the town, jump off, and without any preliminary good-mornings (he hated ceremony, and would never shake hands): ‘Look here,’ he would say, let’s be friends. I’ve been a beast to you. When are you coming to tea with me? Come next Monday.’

The title of Dr. O’Brien’s new volume is somewhat misleading. The immense research which he has here condensed into less than two hundred pages is concerned, not with a description of the practical effects of the Reformation in breaking down the social and economic life of the Middle Ages, but ‘exclusively with the effects of the Reformation on economic thought and theory.’ He disclaims all intention of writing history, on the ground that it would involve a complete study of Europe since the middle of the sixteenth century. He confines himself to the discussion of a thesis which challenges unending controversies, setting himself ‘to prove that both capitalism and socialism alike can be shown to have had their origin in the Protestant Reformation.’

At first sight, such a discussion would appear to be purely academic. But Dr. O’Brien raises questions which go to the root of all modern social reform. Whereas the standard teaching of the economists generally explains the intolerable tyranny which we understand by modern capitalism as the natural outcome of the industrial revolution, Dr. O’Brien maintains with great ability—and he supports his argument with a mass of evidence from recognised authorities in half-a-dozen countries—that it was not the industrial revolution which produced capitalism, but capitalism (as he interprets it) which produced the industrial revolution. In other words, capitalism cannot be regarded as the result of natural economic development; Dr. O’Brien maintains that it is the outcome of a false philosophy of human life.