It is strange how the wheel of things turns and brings back the world to what it had left behind and thought to have outgrown as too primitive. But the child mind cannot be destroyed in man, and it will always return to those truths that are so simple because they are so profound.

Thus after several centuries we have again the Mystery Play—scenes taken from the World’s Great Drama—constructed on mediaeval traditions regardless of modern criticism and acted in the early spirit of Faith.

The latest edition in this revival of the Mediaeval Mystery is the Irish Nativity Play that took place every Saturday and Sunday during the month of December in the Town Hall, Dalkey, County Dublin. Written specially by Katherine Tynan, the play was acted by seventy children from the Killiney and Dalkey National Schools, under the clever management of Lady O’Connell. For three months they had studied, practised and lived in the atmosphere of the play, bringing into this Irish village something of the spirit of Oberammergau. For one month they acted the piece to audiences ever growing larger. Now the curtain has dropped, and the seventy little actors have gone into obscurity until next Christmastide, when they will again call the crowds to listen to the Mystery.

There is a saying that Erasmus laid the egg which Luther hatched. I have often wondered just how much truth there is in this expression. Opinion seems to vary. Some Catholics have read into it the condemnation of Erasmus as a secret heretic inwardly gnawing at the very vitals of the Church. Few perhaps until late years have made any honest attempt to interpret the great Humanist’s position in the light of his own explanations or by reference to the times in which he lived. No one wants to condone the faults of Erasmus, and heaven knows they were many. But let us not overlook the good points in his character, or the excuses for the bad ones.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Erasmus occupied an enviable place among the esthetes of the new Humanistic learning. He may be taken as a fair example of the critical attitude of mind in which many of the best and most loyal Catholics approached the religious problems of the age. Alive to all the abuses that prevailed among his fellow-ecclesiastics, Erasmus is perhaps injudicious at times in the manner in which he insists upon reform. But after we have sifted the matter to the bottom, we shall find that in most cases his ideas are just. He demanded a thoroughly literary education for the Churchmen of his day to put them in touch with the leading spirits of Humanism. Had they possessed this knowledge, there is little doubt but that the tide of religious affairs could have been changed for a saner direction.

The story of Anthony Tyrrell has been very fully dealt with by Father Morris in his Troubles of our Catholic Forefathers. The authority he followed was a contemporary unpublished MS. of the famous Father Persons, still preserved in the English College at Rome and bearing as its title, The Fall of Anthony Tyrrell. Persons gives his own version of the present confession and, though there is no material difference between the two, it is unfortunate that Father Morris did not go direct to Tyrrell’s own statement, especially considering the very controversial character of Father Persons’ writings, and that a contemporary text does exist in the Lansdowne MSS. of the British Museum.

A happy chance has brought into my possession what is apparently Tyrrell’s actual letter. It is here printed verbatim, in the original spelling and without any attempt to straighten its confused sentences.

It was found wrapped up with some other papers of the famous Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, favourite of Queen Elizabeth, and must either have been sent to him for transmission or intercepted by one of his agents. Unfortunately, the covering letter is gone, but a schedule shows the whole packet to have been sent to Leicester by one Walter Bagot. I have no certainty who this Walter was, but I have found in my MSS. a document of the same date (1587) describing Walter Bagot as son to Richard Bagot of Blithefield, and their identity is very probable.

‘Let us go to the Pictures.’ They all say it, young I and old, rich and poor, wise and foolish. That is why the cinema is the third greatest industry in America, and almost an institution in family and individual life.

Probably no industry before it had such a rapid rise to fame and fortune. The animated pictures of twenty-five years ago, ousting the ‘stills’ of the magic lantern, came as a shock to the old and a delight to the young. Pictures that not only moved but were moving in themselves revealed the hitherto unsuspected powers of the camera. No longer would it be necessary to coax oneself into an attitude of expectant imbecility before it; no longer need baby be placated and pleased by the despairing photographer. A moving picture of family life in all its animated phases could be made by turning a handle, without fuss or warning.

The outstanding feature of the animated pictures in their infancy was, naturally enough, that they were intensely animated. They were more animated than pictures. In those days the animation was the thing. One expected it and got it. The picture was merely the necessary medium for showing how very animated the characters could be. Originally there were no ‘stars,’ merly men and women, and no picture was made to ‘feature’ any particular individual. The screen was pleasantly free from constellations of any kind. But the animation was there in its most primitive human form, with almost incredible rough-and-tumble, and those delightful pursuits of villain or hero, in which the entire cast would assume enormous proportions and fling themselves off the screen into, as it seemed, the middle of the pit.

Before the days of ‘Mr. Sludge the Medium,’ fashionable folk had a sentimental leaning towards polite correspondence from vanished friends, who had gone to a better, or, at least, another world.

Proof of this is afforded in a delightfully languishing volume, published in 1824, the work of Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe, entitled Friendship in Death, in Letters from the Dead to the Living, with a frontispiece illustrated by two radiating tombstones. The volume is dedicated to Dr. Young, and the lady writes with great humility:

The retiring Mrs. Rowe will give some entertainment of a non-serious kind to the frivolous but harmless. Letter II, for example, from a Gentleman who died at Constantinople, to his friend in England, giving him an account of his death, is ingeniously diverting. Altamont tells his crony, Beville, how he passed away, and awoke in a genteel world, where his ladylove welcomed him with all the grace of a woman of fashion :

The recent visit to London of a troupe of players from the Comédie Française gave us a welcome opportunity of studying a few of Molière’s greatest works in the only completely satisfactory way in which they can be studied. For though we may read and re-read our Molière with never-failing joy till we know every line by heart and every character as well as the members of our own family, it is not until those familiar figures are actually moving before us and revealing their characters in every word they utter that we can realise quite fully the greatness of their creator’s genius.

Surely no dramatist has ever equalled Molière in his power of writing dialogue that is at the same time apparently so faithful a reproduction of real speech and so entirely characteristic of each individual speaker. The talk is all so natural, so spontaneous, that the fact that in many plays it is carried on in Alexandrine couplets never jars on our sense of reality in the least—it is not until afterwards, if at all, that we reflect that after all nobody ever did talk in Alexandrine couplets in real life. Molière wrote his plays for the stage and not for the study, consequently this quality of naturalness in the dialogue strikes us even more forcibly when we hear it spoken than when we read it. In the same way we have to see the characters not merely with the mind’s eye, but as actual living beings, in order fully to appreciate them.

In this book is published the series of Lectures delivered by Sir W. H. Hadow on the Stevenson Foundation, in the University and City of Glasgow, 1922. The Lectures are remarkable for their extraordinary treatment of this important subject. If they seek to define Citizenship finally, or, at least, fully— if they aim at giving the average, intelligent citizen of to-day an understanding of his citizenship as something real and worth the having, something which is at once a complexity of rights and a complexity of duties—if their object is to give a clear practical instruction rather than to contribute to an academic controversy concerning civic values—then, most regretfully, they must be marked down as a failure. Indeed, these Lectures are wrongly entitled. They do not deal directly with Citizenship: they discuss Political Theory in its wider reaches. In the main, they present a restatement of the old problem of the Nature of the State; and, reduced to a subordinate part of this thesis, is the abstract relation of the member of the State to the State itself.

Citizenship can be viewed from at least two standpoints : one, a study in political speculation—interesting in its review of historic arguments and philosophic conclusions; two, a study in practical politics—a detailed consideration of the realities constituting the fact called citizenship which (let us remember) is possessed by more than twenty millions of the members of our State, which is used by them, and which to be used rightly must be understood in its practical values, immediate and ultimate, by each single possessor.

There was a time when I used to be a vegetarian, and earnestly ate nut rissoles and marmite sausages. In those days, if I looked at a dish of lamb cutlets, I was haunted by the spectral bleatings of woolly innocents being led to the slaughter; a mutton chop was to me a menace; and if I saw a bottle of Bovril I sighed with genuine sympathy, ‘Alas, my poor brother!’ For were not the animals our ‘younger brothers’? Were they not even as we ourselves—climbing the ladder of evolution to higher and better things? What right had we to cut off their innocent lives before their destined hour had struck?

Then by the hand of destiny I was brought in contact with the Super-Vegetarians. The Super-Vegetarians are a sect of Hindus, usually known as the Jains. It so happened that my work in India threw me into intimate contact with these interesting people. I found them not only interesting, but exceedingly kind and hospitable, and in many other ways unusually charming and refined. In fact their code of ethics with regard to the animal world was too refined for me altogether. I became aware that I was only a beginner in these matters, a despairing amateur in the presence of professionals; I was not even an ‘also ran.’ In the presence of such high and austere consistency I gave up the competition; and, realising the direction in which my ideals were leading, fell back —not without relief—on the flesh-pots of Egypt.

Hardly more than a stone’s throw outside the northern or Damascus Gate of the Holy City stands a white block of buildings which glare in the brilliance of the Oriental sun. The whiteness is enhanced by the dark green of the pines, olives and fig trees from the midst of which the buildings rise. Altogether the place with its garden is a landmark of the district, bare for the most part of vegetation. Indeed there are few such gardens near Jerusalem, and this owes its existence solely to the energy and enthusiasm of a group of men whose aim in the Holy Land is by no means that of gardeners. Forty years ago and less, the place was as barren and desolate as the sun-scorched surroundings are to-day. That garden seems to me symbolic.

As you look out over the trees from a window or from a terrace of the house, a glorious sight meets the gaze. Jerusalem lies spread at your feet. You are looking almost due south. On your right you see the great black dome of the church of the Holy Sepulchre ; over on the left is a similar dome, the Dome of the Rock, covering the site of the ancient altar of holocausts ; in the distance rises the pyramidal church of the Dormition of Our Lady, with its accompanying tower marking the scene of the Last Supper; further on the left stands the Mount of Olives crowned by the tower of the Ascension, and at its feet snuggles the little Garden of Gethsemane.

The attack made on the Church to-day is, not merely different from, but, the exact opposite of, that made in the sixteenth century. What was then an offence is now a recommendation; what was then a mitigating circumstance is now a stumbling block. At the time of the ‘Reformation’ the accusation was one of superstition and materialism, though the latter word was not used. Our opponents posed as more spiritual in their conception of worship. Speech took the place of corporeal action. The pulpit replaced the altar and the preacher ousted the priest. The sacramental idea was almost completely lost.

It is startling to turn from these criticisms to the censure of Catholicism, and, indeed, of all forms of religion, current at the present time. Other-worldliness is the favourite charge. We are said to divert the attention of the democracy from those material interests in the understanding of which lies its hope of salvation, and to fix it on an unreal heaven and hell. Dogmas are derided because they lead to what are regarded as unprofitable discussions concerning abstruse matters remote from everyday needs. It is we now who are too ‘spiritual.’

This wave of materialistic thought finds the old-fashioned types of Protestantism entirely unprepared. The preacher addresses himself to empty pews. The exhortation to face the possibilities of the Future Life falls on deaf ears. Even the moral idealism that is adopted as a substitute for doctrinal truth fares no better; it is stigmatised as bourgeois ideology.

None of his friends were prepared for the sudden change in him. And yet there was no doubt that he had completely changed, almost beyond recognition. His cynical temper had gone, his overbearing manner had disappeared, his repellent selfishness had vanished. He had become gentle, courteous, self-effacing. The amazing thing about it was that it had happened suddenly.

In fact we did not realise all at once what had happened. It dawned upon us gradually. And then we saw that the change itself had not been gradual, but only our perception of it. We were expecting the old sneering tone, the usual hard, cold, unsympathetic selfishness, and we were unprepared for the transformation. We refrained from making any remark about it in his hearing lest he should feel ashamed and return to his former unpleasant manner.

One evening, however, some of us at the Century Club were discussing the subject of dreams and their connection with the subliminal consciousness, when he strolled in. I was surprised to see him there, for he was an unsociable fellow and I had forgotten that he was a member of the Club. He wandered up to where we were sitting and overheard part of our conversation. Presently he remarked, in a tone which none of us could possibly have resented :