Mr. Purcell’s Life of Cardinal Manning has so long held the field and the market that it may be questioned whether it can be ever supplanted or at most supplemented, for its claim was certainly to be exclusive and inclusive. A quarter of a century has elapsed since Mr. Gladstone congratulated the author on writing “the history of a soul, a dividing of marrow and bone,” and leaving so little for disclosure on the Day of Judgment. And few critics have questioned the finality of that utterance.

It is well known that Mr. Purcell differed from most biographers by committing no sins of omission with the signal exception of an autobiographical note on the corporate action of the Society of Jesus in England. Mystery veils this as well as the memory of Mr. Purcell himself. As an orthodox and humble journalist his name sometimes occurs in the papers of ecclesiastics. Mr. Purcell had for a time conducted an ultramontane but unsuccessful venture in journalism, for he later confided to Archbishop Ullathorne of Birmingham (November 2, 1881), “Since giving up the Westminster Gazette I have been exclusively engaged in writing for non-Catholic papers.” His Life of Manning was presumably written for the same public. By the year 1887 the Cardinal, being anxious to recoup him for his losses, allowed him to begin to write a brief Memoir of himself, to be published and scrutinized in his own lifetime. He lent him one of his diaries on condition that it should not be quoted, but he had already suggested that Mr. J. E. C. Bodley should write the final Life, and had given leave to Mr. Bodley to remove his notebooks and diaries.

In a recent book called Fleet Street and Downing Street, by Mr. Kennedy Jones, who was one of the driving forces behind that enormous engine of publicity known as “ the Northcliffe Press,” there are some candid remarks about the status and influence of modern journalism. In a series of chapters he argues that journalism has become more of a business than a profession, and, in one chapter, he states bluntly that at no previous time has the reading public been so suspicious of the “ news “ presented to it by English newspapers as it is to-day owing to the suppression, exaggeration or falsification of news for political reasons. I think both statements are true, at the present time, and as a journalist proud of my “ profession,” and of what I refuse to call my “ business,” I think both are lamentable.

It is a curious thing that during the past twenty-five years which have seen the evolution of the New Journalism, represented by the Northcliffe Press, with many other imitators and rivals, two opposing tendencies have been at work. The first is the gradual loss of political prestige, owing to the capture of the papers’ policy by financial and wire-pulling groups, and the second is the social elevation of the journalist himself, especially in the lower ranks of the newspaper world. Both these changes have been brought about by the same pioneers, and I prophecy that there will soon be a struggle between the professional journalist and the business groups that control his work and life.

What causes most despair to anyone who tries to persuade people in England of the real state of affairs in Ireland is the answer that invariably follows every attempt to overcome a deep-rooted incredulity, that “we can do nothing until you Irishmen agree among yourselves.” One of the impressions that affected me most strongly on returning to Ireland after an absence of four years, was that of a unanimity among all classes such as has never existed in Ireland before. In a sense, it is the unity that is to be found among the passengers of a ship which has been set on fire. But the present unity of political feeling in Ireland is far more deep than any transient emotion of that kind. It is much more genuine and more remarkable than was the unity which prevailed in this country during the war. It is no mere suspension of party strife, but the real and lasting discovery of common interests and a common outlook upon life.

Go where you please in Ireland, outside the four eastern counties of Ulster, and you will find only one attitude and one aspiration from Donegal to Wexford, or from Galway to Dublin. In what follows, I do not speak of Unionist Ulster. The gulf between the four Unionist counties and the rest of Ireland is more open and more difficult to bridge over than it has ever been. Those whose deliberate policy it has been to frustrate the national movement in Ireland by setting North against South have achieved their purpose as fully as they could ever have wished.

A good deal of misunderstanding appears to exist upon the subject of the Stations of the Cross in Westminster Cathedral, and there is danger that works which should be regarded simply as a necessary part of the furniture of the Cathedral Church—a via dolorosa by which the devout person retraces in spirit the holy procession to Calvary—should become not a means to devotion so much as an occasion for idle sightseeing. It would be deplorable if it became the custom in the Cathedral to “make” the Stations in a spirit similar to that in which a person from the country goes round Westminster Abbey ; and that such a possibility may be obviated I offer the following suggestions.

First, then, let us dispose of the vexed question of style. The Westminster Stations are not carved in imitation of a bygone style—Byzantine or any other. Let the would-be worshipper put any such idea resolutely away from him. A visitor in the house of a friend, being invited to sit down, does not approach the proffered chair in the state of mind of a connoisseur at a sale. Neither should a worshipper entering a church think it “up to him” to feel critical.

Is it too soon to write on a country after having been in it only a fortnight? Or should we not rather say, if one stayed in a country longer than a fortnight, one would not have enough courage to write about it at all. You see, a fortnight just gives one time to take the most superficial view of things. Later on, mere knowledge brings disconcertment. You might learn too many details, too many contrary instances, to fit in with the generalizations you had first made. Yet after all it is our first impressions that are nearly always truer. Instinct, the illative sense, the intellectus of the Scholastics, the “morning knowledge of the Angels” in the fantastic Africanism of St. Augustine, these are finer than reason, aren’t they? at least more to be trusted? Why it is the very age of instinct! “We feel that we are greater than we know.” So here I shall set down my account of the condition of Ireland after a fortnight in Cork.

Yes, but whom did I see and talk to? Well, there you are. That does, of course, make a great difference. The class, the temperament, the political outlook, must each give a twist to the expression of opinions and help one to know how much to accept and how much to discount. By your leave, however, I shall give no names, for a third-class railway ticket, the conversation of priests and undergraduates, oh, and nuns, why there you have the most perfect instruments whence to hear the music of real public opinion.

A literary habit has accustomed us to speak of the Middle Ages as the Ages of Faith ; and it is no doubt our fond hope that future generations will speak of us by contrast as the Age of Reason. But unless future generations are hypnotized by our pretensions, we are much more likely to be known as the Age of Imagination. We are enormously busied over imagination. We have even reached the position in which we are scientifically educating imagination, developing it and with cold deliberation harnessing it to practical purposes. Yes, it is really quite unfair for an age that dabbles in Spiritism, Christian Science, Theosophy, and Pelmanism to pretend to be reasonable. Possibly the ages that lay between medieval times and our own have some right to that name ; but, since, fortunately, both Queen Anne and Queen Victoria are dead, we have no business to be claiming it. Reason is probably all very well in its way, but not in everybody else’s way.

Now imagination has immense powers. It has founded the Daily Mail, canonized Mrs. Eddy, and deceived “eminent scientists” like Oliver Lodge and Arthur Conan Doyle, whom it is not unkind or frivolous to call dazed knights. Of course it hasn’t deceived them in matters where they know more than we do, in science and literature ; but only in matters where we are at least on their level, at the séance. People ask breathlessly whether one’s faith isn’t upset by this earnest belief in spooks publicly professed by our dazed knights.

Out of the pall of gloom that hangs over Ireland to-day there has emerged a gleam of light. The Archbishop of Tuam, in weightiest words, has urged a Truce of God : a cessation on both sides of shooting and raiding in order that, in an atmosphere of calm and peace the foundation of an understanding between the two nations may be laid. On both sides of the Channel the idea is being eagerly canvassed, and men have at last been brought to see that a truce of some kind is an urgent necessity unless murder and violence and ruthless destruction of property are to be prolonged with ever-increasing bitterness, Somehow moderate men in either camp must be got together in spite of Dublin Castle on one side and the Irish Republican Forces on the other. But how? At the moment of writing, in Dublin, amid daily shootings, raids, arrests, and re-arrests, the prospect would appear utterly black were it not that the very intensity of the evil compels men to seek desperately for a solution. .

Readers of Blackfriars (Nov.) have already been given by an able pen all the main features of the situation. Nothing has changed since then save an intensification of the horror. There is little to be gained by summarizing here the melancholy events of the last few weeks. It is more to the purpose to try and put before English readers something of the mentality of the Irish people in this crisis of their history.