“Industrial unrest” is apt to be regarded in many quarters as something new and strange, an alarming phenomenon of the present age due to the sudden irruption of mysterious and hitherto unheard-of qualities in man. Frequent allusions are made to the “present unrest.” All manner of solutions, plans, and proposals are offered in the hope that labour troubles will disappear in the same mysterious fashion that they came. There is, too, a persistent belief in certain minds that “industrial unrest” will “blow over” as though it were merely a passing fashion, akin to the rebellion of the day scholars at Ipswich when Mr. Nupkins was magistrate and Mr. Pickwick a visitor. After they had conspired to break the windows of an obnoxious apple-seller, had hooted the beadle, and pelted the constabulary—“an elderly gentleman in top-boots, who had been called out to repress the tumult,” the latter was able to announce the retirement of the rioters in the memorable words, “Popular feeling has in a measure subsided, in consekens o’ the boys having dispersed to cricket.”

I received an amusing letter from a Catholic Layman recently, in which he said that the Holy See must be regarding with nervous apprehension the series of outspoken Lives which were accumulating round the names of the English Cardinals, Wiseman, Newman, and Manning (bis). Whether the Holy See approves of sincerity or indiscretion or both in the biographies of her favoured sons, she never speaks. She has other things to think of besides books in these days, though needless to say I would submit to the least whisper of her considered judgment, should she think it worth while to lift an eyelash over anything I happened to write.

In the matter of writing the Lives of Cardinals, one cannot be too careful, though so careful are the biographers of Cardinals abroad that their memory as men is forgotten behind a little cloud of fading incense. The tradition of writing frank and human lives of Cardinals must be an English tradition, and let us hope will remain one. Our Cardinals have been and are men of action and men of genius. I think Ward’s Life of Newman is the best Life of a Cardinal in any language, but I think that Cardinal Manning left the finest biographical material. How fine it was perhaps few except myself really know. At any rate Mr. Purcell and myself have both crawled up out of Grubb Street, thanks to piles of that splendid collection, the Manning Papers, and I think that several volumes could yet be written out of what remains.

Perhaps I am the best person to say what a number of friends and critics have hinted lately, that the final and all-comprising Life of Cardinal Manning remains to be written.

The Persians are the “race-lumière” of the East, just as France is the torch-bearer of the West; Persian ideas, Persian philosophy, Persian poetry and mysticism have tinged and penetrated all religious thought in the Near and in the Middle East. The charm of the roses of Shiráz, of dervishes and Sufis and the Rubáiyát, has not failed to reach even these remote, misty fastnesses of the work-a-day West. Some Fate seems to have been at work, pushing the Persians into the foreground of the world’s thought, ever since—shall we say the Babylonian captivity?— at any rate since the day when those three royal magicians followed the star, and, in its limelight stood around the manger-throne of the Child Jesus in Bethlehem.

It is not within the scope of this slight paper to do more than hint at the religious history of Persia. Its ancient borders on the west were the Araxes, one of the four rivers of the Earthly Paradise, and the Tigris and Euphrates, from whose banks Abram set out, at the call of God, for a strange land in the West. The tradition of the four streams of Paradise lived on in the primitive religion of Irán, and with it, no doubt, no inconsiderable share of the early wisdom of our race. The captivity of the Jews in Babylon and the residence of the prophet Daniel at the court of the Persian Emperor must certainly have had their influence on Jewish thought. In fact the books of Daniel and of Tobias—to mention only two—are full of the traces of this influence, linguistic or metaphysical.

Two dates in the present year are likely to be of great moment to the historians of this country. On Thursday, March 17 (St. Patrick’s Day) there was opened at 61 Marlborough Road, Holloway, N., the first “Mothers’ Clinic for Birth Control.” Its founders were “Humphrey Verdon Roe and his wife, Marie Carmichael Stopes, D.Sc., Ph.D.”

On Tuesday, May 31, the Queen’s Hall held a large and sympathetic audience at a “Meeting convened by Dr. Marie Stopes, author of Married Love, Wise Parenthood, and Radiant Motherhood, on the theme of Constructive Birth Control: its Ideals and Helpfulness to the Individual and to the Race.”

It is not generally known that this is a free country. Englishmen do indeed stand up when the band plays “God save the King,” and feel emotions of pride and benevolence as they see the Union Jack suspended from the balcony of the Mansion House or draped over the Cenotaph. The clock tower at Westminster is photo-engraved upon their hearts as upon their Bradburies. Festooned with Tudor roses and ribs of beef, a cornucopia of Liberty empties itself at the feet of Nelson, Dizzy, John Peel and the Iron Duke as, in scarlet, they follow the hounds and trample our defeated foes! Rule Britannia, the men in blue, S. Paul’s Cathedral, the Derby, the M.C.C., and Aston Villa, not to mention the playing-fields of Eton, awake those emotions of freedom which no coal strike can destroy nor Ireland dim. But, in spite of these telling facts, I fear we English have forgotten that we are free. We complain, at times, that our freedom has, in some measure, been taken from us.

For years before the war the falling birth-rate in France was recognized as the most serious social and economic problem that threatened the future of the country. The war, with its death-roll of nearly a million and a quarter young Frenchmen, to say nothing of the tens of thousands of others who are maimed for life and rendered incapable of providing for the maintenance of families, has enormously increased the gravity of the problem. But apart from these obvious and well-known factors, the years of war and those which have intervened since the armistice have produced a further decline in the population which only a revolution in the prevailing standards of family life in France can remedy.

The statistics of the French birth-rate and death-rate, apart altogether from the awful roll of honour of the French armies in the war, are so terribly eloquent that no juggling with figures could obscure their meaning. It was not to be hoped that even in the year after the armistice, the normal birth-rate would have been restored. But in the year 1919 alone, which surely deserves to count as one of the most glorious in the history of France, there were only three out of her ninety departments in which the population did not actually decline. In all the other eighty-seven the number of deaths during the year was in excess of the number of births, and in no less than twelve—not even counting in the departments devastated by the war—the births did not equal even half the total of deaths.

Having refrained from verse more or less successfully for twenty years, or it might be only fifteen, I was seized with a certain impulse on re-reading the hymns in The Dream of Gerontius. An impulse is not the same as a well-considered reason for doing things, and so is not easy to define, but as well as I can analyse it, it was to this effect: That theology—that unwrought mine of poetry, as Patmore calls it—is by no means represented in our hymns except by fits and starts, and what we want, says impulse, is the cycle complete. See what Newman has done in his choir of Angelicals in surveying the subject from the nebular hypothesis right away to Purgatory. God wills it! Be a crusader, do one pillar of the temple—no one can do them all, but if you stir, someone else will do so too. Thus I began to find out some of the many, many things which mere critics never suspect: e.g. that a hymn, and a very good one, might be based on, say, the nature of efficacious grace, if only one could keep the subject long enough in solution in the alembic of imaginative experience. But there is the difficulty. It is only by a series of cosmic accidents that such things can arise, like the making of minerals, especially of that very condensed vegetable the diamond. So while we leave these processes to themselves, we must translate, translate, translate. This is the only feasible way of producing anything like a cycle of vernacular hymns. Songs, lyrics, more sacred or less, the vernacular is producing, has produced, but these fill no gaps in the cycle. This was Faber’s failure.

To have been a student in Paris in the early thirteenth century, to have seen the foundation of the Dominican Order, to have been present at the coronation of St. Louis and to have assisted at the Council of Lyons ; to have spent one’s early manhood in missionary journeys and one’s riper years as an Inquisitor, knowing France from end to end and acquainted with all the important people of one’s time ; surely such fullness of life as this would justify a man, if ever anything could, in writing his autobiography.

Great is the difference between old things that are dead, and old things that live. And still greater between old institutions, however glorious, that have passed away for ever, and old institutions that, adapting themselvesto new conditions and environment, have continued in vigorous life unto our own day. Crowns and orbs and sceptres when collected in some dreary museum of antiquities interest but a few, and excite a very languid curiosity ; the feudal and medieval trappings of the British monarchy (ancient indeed, but still a power that counts for something in the world) appeal to the historic imagination of multitudes, and even fill them with enthusiasm. Who cares to read of the quaint but utterly dead constitutions of Venice and Genoa and Poland? But what student does not delight to study the time-honoured customs of the “Mother of Parliaments,” faithfully and scrupulously perpetuated in the legislative assemblies of the Dominions and the Commonwealths?

Two recent efforts towards Reunion between the Church of England and the Eastern Orthodox Church are worthy of notice.

The first is entitled Terms of Intercommunion suggested between the Church of England and the Churches in communion with her and the Eastern Orthodox Church (S.P.C.K.). “These terms were drawn up at the request of the Eastern Churches Committee appointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury and are now published at their request.”

The second is entitled The Relations of the Anglican Churches with the Eastern Orthodox, especially in regard to Anglican Orders, by the Rev. J. A. Douglas, B.D. (The Faith Press, pp. 198 ; 12s.).

As an organism is essentially defined in terms, not of what it is, but of what it will become, and as movement is essentially defined in terms, not of its term whence but of its term whereto, we are loath to criticize the present state of a movement which may one day re-unite the scattered flocks of Christendom. We are not sure that the present interchange of terms between semi-official groups on either side is a display of sincere faith. But if it is a display of sincere charity we may hope that divisions and schisms begotten and fostered by a lack of love may be undone when charity—which is the love of truth—has come unto its own. For this reason we would ask the writer of the second work to drink deeply of the spirit of the first. The recurrent anti-papalism of his work is but a dubious compliment to the Orthodox Christians with whom he wishes to intercommunicate.