This autumn session of Parliament, when the Alternative Prayer Book of the Established Church is to be brought before the House of Commons, will provide a real crisis in the history of the Church of England: and in that crisis even the Roman Catholics must be not spectators only, but actors. When the Deposited Prayer Book comes before the Legislature of the nation, everyone who has a parliamentary vote has a moral duty, which he cannot shirk through sloth or fear.

At first sight it would seem that Roman Catholic voters and members of Parliament, inasmuch as they have no part or lot with the Church of England may easily satisfy their conscience by what is called ‘abstention.’ Indeed, on all sides we have members of the Church of England urging the incongruity of Methodists, Wesleyans, Baptists, Congregationalists, Quakers, Buddhists, Brahmins, Moslems, Atheists using their constitutional powers to vote on a domestic religious issue of a religious body claiming to be an integral part of the Christian Church. Yet something more than incongruity might be created by abstention. Just as nothing is more dogmatic than denial, so, too, nothing can be more effective than abstention. Every abstention is at least one decisive vote for the majority! To abstain from voting may merely salve and deceive the conscience of men who feel their conscience cannot allow them the positive act of voting.

The problem of the Unity of Christendom, and in particular of the reconciliation of the East, has occupied the minds of the Popes, sometimes more sometimes less urgently, since the consummation of the schism under Michael Cerularius in the eleventh century. But hitherto all their efforts have been in vain. The Councils of Lyons and Florence were abortive. The personal efforts of individual Popes have not met with any greater success. In the last century Popes Pius IX and Leo XIII both tried to reopen official relations with the East, but their overtures were rejected. Yet, nothing daunted, the Holy See is now embarked upon another effort after Christian Unity.

It would appear that in this new effort the Holy See is approaching the matter, not with any less courage or confidence, not in any spirit of compromise or dissimulation of the truth, but with a special emphasis on what may be called the psychological conditions of the problem. It would have the apostles of unity set forth the Catholic doctrine in its fullness; but it would have them also approach their enterprise in the spirt of charity and sympathy. It would have them endeavour, before all else, to remove prejudice and misunderstanding, to abstain from acute controversy, to create an atmosphere of peace and mutual sympathy.

An English translation of Renan’s Vie de Jesus has just been published in ‘Everyman’s Library,’ and Dr. Gore has written a short introduction to it. Both of these facts are, of course, regrettable in themselves. But since, as far as we know, the publishers do not profess the Catholic Faith, and in view of the present state of religious belief in England, we should hardly be justified in protesting against the publication; and as regards the introduction it would be unfair to Dr. Gore to judge him as if he were really a Catholic. ‘If,’ writes Dr. Gore (p. x), I have been chosen by the publishers of this translation to write a very brief Introduction to a work which has been more than sixty years in circulation, it is certainly not because I could be expected to write a panegyric, nor because I was wanted to write a denunciation, but because what was desired was a critical estimate, from a present-day point of view— a very different day from Renan’s own.’ We cannot pretend to Dr. Gore’s extensive acquaintance with present-day criticism of the New Testament. In the few lines that follow we can only offer an estimate of the book (and of the introduction) formed in the light of the ordinary principles of common sense— which, however, have this advantage that they were valid long before Renan’s day and will be long after Dr. Gore’s.

You have set off before eleven from Ballindalloch Station. The sky is high and overcast; delicate as an answer to prayer. The air is still and cool. These conditions are well met; bright sun is no more favourable to perspective than to walking comfort; wind is seldom acceptable. You must provide a merry heart to breast the matter ahead in snow time; it is a stormy region.

In the precincts of the Railway Goods Yard (the good thing implied is whisky) a commercial name suggests a subject for reminiscence, to pass the time.

There was a man named Gilbey, a breeder of shire horses, slight and wonderfully tailored, with a small, grey, cadaverous head; the two elements becomingly united by abundance of white stock.

‘The Prince once said to me (but that was, of course, before my title): “I am going to have a few serious words with Mrs. Gilbey.”

‘I must have looked astonished, for the Prince said: “I do not think that she takes proper care of you”; adding something about a man of value and importance.

‘I must have looked more astonished, for the Prince said: “I do not think you are sufficiently clad.”

For the sake of those—perhaps the bulk of our readers—to whom the name of Wilde is only a faint memory, we may venture to say, with the help of D.N.B., that Oscar O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, wit and dramatist, born in Dublin on October 15th, 1856, was the younger son of Sir William Robert Wills Wilde, who married, in 1851, Jane Francisca Elgee, a granddaughter of Archdeacon Elgee of Wexford. This lady, who wrote under the signature of ‘Speranza,’ had a literary salon in Dublin, where much clever talk was listened to by the children.

From a school in Enniskillen Oscar Wilde went, in 1873, to Trinity College, Dublin, where he won a gold medal with an essay on the Greek comic poets. He entered Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1874, where he obtained with ease a First Class both in classical moderations and in literæ humaniores. A vacation ramble, during which he visited Ravenna and Greece, in company with Professor Mahaffy, was followed by his winning the Newdigate Prize with a poem on ‘Ravenna.’ At Oxford he heard Ruskin lecture, and took part in Ruskin’s road-making schemes: he eschewed games and sport of all kinds, except riding, and became the apostle of the aesthetic movement which took ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ as its watchword.

No one has ever told the story of Saint Catherine of Siena as truthfully as her own Letters tell it. She is more realistic in those pages of her own composition than within the compass of all the varied ‘Lives,’ from Di Capua’s to the most recent and beautiful one by Johannes Joergensen. It is said that the Sienese artists were never so truly inspired as when they painted her, but it is in the art as in the literature around her name : a succession of glimpses. Andrea di Vanni, her contemporary and a pupil in her school of mysticism, has left us one genuine likeness of her m his famous portrait: pallid oval face, long nose, mouth and chin which give some hint of her sheer courage and resolution, dark eyes with the abstracted expression of one who is solely concerned with the internal reality behind ‘the terrible doubt of appearances.’ So, remote and unresponsive, she probably looked when people crowded round her to kiss her hand; a fashion for which she was severely criticized, and which she defended by saying (somewhat wearily, perhaps) that she simply didn’t see how persons greeted her, she was so interested in them. Passing on to Bazzi’s really exquisite ‘Svenimento,’ this, too, probably represents her as she was in that moment of mystery of the Stigmatization: but through the whole gallery of frescoes and pictures, down to those of the sixteenth century, which depict her with the simper of a debutante, the real Catherine is not seized anywhere. Of necessity, the artists have failed more signally than the hagiographers and essayists.