John Henry Newman’s Apologia pro vita sua has been epigrammatically described as “the work of a French sceptic controlled by an English don—or a joint product of Voltaire and Bishop Butler.” Bishop Gore’s Belief in God, which might well be called his Apologia pro fide sua, is of the same dual and complementary parenthood as the earlier Apologia. Cardinal and Bishop alike belong to that resolute band of thinkers for whom the highest truths are to be discovered in a balance of probabilities and even of contradictories.

The younger apologist is hardly a less challenging personality than the elder. Few of the Tertullians or Origens of our day have had a life so crowded with happenings and doings. An Oxford Doctor of Divinity who identified his economic thought with Socialism, who interwove his theological thought with Rationalism, and who accepted the ecclesiastical mode of Anglo-Catholicism, had colour enough in his life to attract not only the undergraduate imagination of Oxford, but even the adult commercialism of Birmingham. There was no limit to the influence wielded by a man who seemed prepared to give up everything, even a belief or a Bishopric, in his thirst for the truth. Thus sceptics were dogmatic about the power wielded over men by a man who

. . . had been very far After where the shadows are.

After wellnigh eight centuries of cruelty and hate, peace seems now at last to be dawning upon Ireland. In a poem of servile flattery addressed in 1545 to Henry VIII by the antiquary Leland, are three Latin verses to celebrate an imagined final settlement of the Irish question. “Repentance has subdued the savage Irish everywhere routed, and has taught them to bear the sweet yoke of British law.” After the experience of some four further centuries of persistent attempt to force on the Irish the “yoke” —to their taste not sweet but bitter—of an alien people, we have at long last learnt that the only true and final peace between England and Ireland must be based on liberty and justice. Whether the present treaty be wholly in accordance with these is a political question I do not wish to raise. Only this is surely evident that it does offer such measure of both as will enable Ireland to enter with full self-respect a new and a better union with England, a union not of force and terror, but of free co-operation. That the dawn is overcast with the storm clouds of bitter opposition from irreconcilables should not make us despondent. For the storm clouds will pass over, and the dawn will brighten into daylight.

While we are thus watching the dawn with a hope not to be killed by passing anxieties, it seems opportune to remember one who at the very hour of sunset, when the shadows of the coming night were beginning to darken over his country, worked for that dawn whose rise we now witness.

A well-known humorist, Mr. Stephen Leacock, has decided that Popes and Ecclesiastical dignitaries are as a class deficient in humour, and he extends his condemnation to crowned heads, captains of industry, great writers, thinkers, philanthropists, martyrs, reformers and patriots. Such a sweeping charge it is difficult to challenge, and all we can do is to indicate here and there certain symptoms of a humorous nature latent in the higher clergy and royalty ; we have neither time nor space for the rest of mankind.

Humour, like a verb, is sometimes active and sometimes passive. If active in a subject it either produces wit or appreciates it in another. If passive, it is generally unconscious and consequently the amusement is gathered by others. To be plain, the one so gifted is himself a joke, and his state of mind prevents him from being a humorist of the active or real type. The heavens prevent that we should consider the Popes and “the more dignified clergy” in this category of unconscious humorists. The title of this paper is not Dignity versus Humour, and it is far from being our intention to hold up position and responsibility as objects of merriment, though misplaced dignity is one of the foundation stones of the world’s laughter. Few writers would be bold enough to regard the Popes as fit subjects for a joke, but bishops and abbots, more especially the mediaeval ones, have long been looked upon as legitimate prey by writers of amusing (?) fiction. Emperors and other crowned heads have oftentimes aroused amusement, usually a discreet amusement, amongst their subjects ; but there is little humour, conscious or unconscious, in a Captain of Industry, whatever that pompous and preposterous title means.

Seven hundred years ago, in a castle not twenty miles from Canterbury, there lived a very vain and beautiful lady. She was the wife of the lord of the manor and was known from Oxford to Jerusalem— wherever there were knights to joust for her and minstrels to sing of her—as the Fair Châtelaine. And there was also, tucked away in a little cell under the castle leads, a very holy old priest called Dan Bartholomew, who said Mass for the inmates of the castle and did his best to look after their souls.

This was no light task. For though the lord of the castle was a pious enough man when he was at home (which was not often), and the poor peasants round about found time between dawn and dusk to say a few prayers and light a few candles in the forlorn little chapel by the gate-house, the lady kept as far as she could from prayer and altogether from penance. Yet certainly few people needed penance more than that worldly dame. Never a year went by but she spent a knight’s ransom in clothes ; and the older she got and the more her beauty waned, the more new-fangled and costly became her attire.

Of course in her husband’s absence it was Dan Bartholomew’s business to check her ; but she was like the crab which when asked why it walked sideways said, “So I learnt from my parents,” and gave him nothing but saucy answers in return for his serious admonitions. When her husband came back from the Crusade it was even worse.

When Peter the Great built St. Petersburg he said he was opening a window into Europe. Gogol, Turgenief, Tolstoy, and Dostoievsky opened the greatest windows that we have even yet into Russia. The Russia that they described is buried, though perhaps it is not really dead. It may yet stretch its enormous bulk and cast away its foul and bloody grave-clothes.

At all events, the Russia of those four masters has disappeared behind the Red Dark. Their work is not the less interesting, and would not be, even if the disappearance should be final. It would remain a portentous monument four-square ; Gogol’s side the most uncouth, but not the least striking; Turgenief’s the most ornamental and most adorned, but not the most definite—indeed, the least national and the least powerful; Tolstoy’s the most eulogized, perhaps the most renowned, but not the greatest or the strongest; Dostoievsky’s the most passionately truthful, sincere, and pathetic, if also the most terrible. Of these four architects of the great monument, Turgenief was the least Russian : he had lived in the light of common day outside, and he wrote from memory ; into his memories shone gleams of a western sun. His pen was half-civilized, and that gain was a loss to him. One meets in his books characters that one might meet in a French novel—though it would be one of the finest and best of the French novels. He had ideas of beauty less Russian than western, and his absence tempered his pictures ; he desired that they should please, and a certain haze of gentleness softens their definition. They are incomparably less massive, less prepotent, than Gogol’s or Dostoievsky’s, and are weakened by their graciousness. There was nothing gracious about Gogol’s pictures ; he painted brutally and did not shrink from their brutality, or dream of making it please. The truth he saw was vastly ugly, and he was only concerned to show it vast and true. He did not write of civilized persons and did not himself pose as a civilized writer. He stripped himself and his characters to the shirt, and gave the latter no pose and no quarter.

Swing thy slow circles, Thurible, before His Face,

Nor let there one grain fall Of incense . . . for the thurible is Space,

Unstarréd Space : and this revolving ball One grain of incense in the dust of all,

That in the solemn silence no winds stir.

. . . Planets and constellations , . . these are votive myrrh And frankincense, to give sweet-scented praise And prayer, before the Stall Where lies the Lord of All.

. . . Swing thy slow circles, Thurible, before His Face.

Swing thy slow circles, Thurible, before His Feet ...

O Planets, nought save earth,

Dust shall you burn before His judgment throne

As now you burn to celebrate His birth

When all the Sons of God exult and sing for mirth.

. . . Pale streams of stars, you smoke in sacrifice Perpetually slow-rising up to Paradise Still as unwavering flame and faintly sweet,

To praise the Eternal One,

Incarnate Word, the Son. -

. . . Swing thy slow circles, Thurible, before His Feet.

Swing thy slow circles, Thurible, for Him, thy Lord,

Within Whose Hand, heaped light

The Cosmos lies : and through Whose Fingers poured

Run like fine sand the planets . . . they that write

High in black Space the message of His might

Who sleeps, half-hearing through His dreams, the Song

Rise as a tide, triumphantly and strong—

“ Stars as tall altar-tapers light With steady flame the deeps of Night,

But low in the heavens a greater shines.

Kings have found the key

Of this Mystery

In the last of all the Signs.”