In fundamentals the Church rejoices in being unchangeable; but she is sometimes charged with being too stiff and stationary, even in those externals that are the legitimate sphere of change. And in one sense I think this is indeed true; if we mean by the Church its mortal machinery. The Church cannot change quite so fast as the charges against her do. She is sometimes caught napping and still disproving what was said about her on Monday, to the neglect of the completely contrary thing that is said about her on Tuesday. She does sometimes live pathetically in the past, to the extent of innocently supposing that the modern thinker may think to-day what he thought yesterday. Modern thought does outstrip her, in the sense that it disappears of itself before she has done disproving it. She is slow and belated, in the sense that she studies a heresy more seriously than the heresiarch does. Most of us could point out examples of this error, if it be an error, so far as the external controversial machinery of Catholicism is concerned. There are Catholics who are still answering Calvinists, though there are no Calvinists to answer. There are admirable apologists assuming that the average Englishman blames the Church for distrusting the Bible; though nowadays he is much more likely to blame her for trusting it. There are those who have to apologise, in the Greek if not in the English sense, for the exalted place which our theology gives to a woman; as if our fashionable feminists still held the views of John Knox about the monstrous regiment of women.

I have never found the pen move with greater difficulty than in trying to record the impression which is left with me of Mrs. Meynell’s life and death. It is as hard as writing of her poetry and her prose—the prose with which she enamelled Life, the poetry which she laid up as Death’s garland. If the supremely important moment of a saint’s life is the last, to which every thought and deed has long paved the way, the extreme ecstacy of the poet no less is death. Then the last rhythm of life is rendered and the last measure of the soul is counted. If poesy is a divine gift, then God will call account for the poetic stewardship, not for the false rhymes and broken feet—for He forgives technicalities—but for fine arts wasted and supreme inspiration thrown to the dogs.

Great poets have deliberately given their powers to evil, and petty rhymesters toss their jingles to perdition. But the great poetry of the world is ever religious. Great prose need not be so. Poetry to be great requires the sublimer touch which only religion can give. Prose can be ironical, fantastical, wise, comic, solemn, almost sublime; but sublimity demands the rushing music, the piercing note, the ordered cadence, the organ’s diapason.

After looking forward, for what seemed a very long time, to Father Martindale’s Life of Father Plater, we now find ourselves wondering how anything so thoroughly well done can have been prepared so quickly. The book is not the mere history of an eventful life; it is a skilful revelation of a remarkable personality. Many of us who before only knew Father Plater now feel that we understand him; and in human relations an understanding signifies more than it says.

It is not the usual lot of a man to be understood in his life-time by the majority of those who know him. Father Plater was more fortunate than most men in this respect, though even he had his critics. His good nature saved him from serious misunderstandings in the less pleasant sense of that word; but occasionally the differences of opinion between himself and others were serious enough. Most misunderstandings of this sort were solved during his life; but one, and that the most serious, has not only survived him, it still exists with regard to the work with which he was principally identified and which others are still carrying on in his name and spirit.

The little village of Flüelen that lies at the eastern end of the Lake of Lucerne is chiefly attractive to visitors from that city because it lies on the opposite and most distant arm of the star-shaped water. The white paddle-steamers with their scarlet pennons ply during the season several times a day between the two places. They lie about three hours apart, and those who do not make the circuit of the water nor take their luncheon on board, where it is expensive, alight at Flüelen. There, between two boats, three hours can pleasantly be spent on either side of déjeuner. The vin ordinaire of the village is a mellow wine, and half a litre, enough for two discriminating persons, could be had (last September) for one and fourpence. Sitting on a balcony of one of the cafés that are studded hospitably about the little place, one’s eyes expect to find nothing whereon to linger save the unfenced railway station, about a small gaunt chateau, the narrow quay, the winding street, and the view of the lake about the roots of the mountains. One does not wish for more, but there is such a thing as curiosity.

Therefore, especially if one has gone ashore earlier, at Tellplatz, an hour’s pleasant walk on the hither side of Flüelen, along the famous Axenstrasse road that tunnels the mountain-side with natural windows such as are seen in old cloisters, one’s eyes are persistently drawn from the mountain to the village at its foot, where they focus themselves upon a little white church, much stained by weather, whose incredibly thin and tapering red spire stands expectantly like the horn of a bright snail, just protruded.

The child can grasp only the individual and the concrete; this particular object in this particular place at this particular time. Only with growth towards maturity do we become able to grasp generalities, universal values, abstract ideas. And even the maturest adult remains in large measure a child. His mind intimately bound up with a body always stands in need of concrete physical forms, places, events, persons. Therefore the Christian revelation, addressed not to disembodied spirits nor even to thinking machines, whose bodily life has been reduced to a minimum, like Mr. Wells’s Martians, has revealed the infinite and purely spiritual God in the very concrete and bodily form of Jesus Christ with the definite events and places of His earthly life. And that revelation is preserved and applied in a particular visible body of men with a visible head whose worship is filled with sensible symbols and whose supreme gifts of grace are bestowed through definite physical acts and objects. And if our mediaeval ancestors, children all their lives through, when compared with ourselves, whose outlook is even excessively, because selfconsciously and priggishly adult, exaggerated this necessary character of human religion, and sought a particular physical object to commemorate and enshrine every person and event of scripture, careless whether that person or event belonged to history or to sacred poetry, their exaggeration, if often amusing, is always sympathetic. For it is an outlook by which God is easier found, than by the scepticism which refuses to seek the Divine, outside the sphere of strict logical demonstration, where the deepest truth is never found.