The island of Trinidad off the north-eastern coast of South America is considered part of the group of West Indian islands known as the Lesser Antilles, though it is nearer than any other to the coast of Venezuela. It was discovered by Christopher Columbus on July 31st, 1498, when on his third voyage he touched the American Continent. The natives called it Yere, and it belonged to Spain until 1797, when it was seized by the English and definitely ceded to Great Britain by the Treaty of Amiens in 1802. With the adjacent island of Tobago it forms a separate British Colony of about a quarter of a million inhabitants. The climate is tropical, with only a dry and a rainy season, since it is within ten degrees of the Equator.

That valiant Protector of the American aborigines, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, has left us an interesting account of the condition of the island at the time of its discovery, and the cruel treatment of the natives by adventurers of all nations who followed in the wake or Columbus. But it may be well to give first a brief sketch of this intrepid apostle before quoting from his hitherto unpublished manuscript, Historia General de las Indias 1492-1520, in the Royal Library of Madrid.

Quite a number of books have been published lately containing, so the spiritualists declare, messages from another world. The reading of these books does not suggest that the ‘spirits or their messages are any livelier or more intelligent than they were nearly seventy years ago, when Charles Dickens came across them.

In The Haunted House, a Christmas story written for All the Year Round, 1859, Dickens begins with the revelations provided by a travelling companion in a railway train. The journey was by night, and the fellow passenger, armed with a pencil and pocket-book, was perpetually listening and taking notes.

‘I have passed the night—as indeed I pass the whole of my time now—in spiritual intercourse,’ explained the man—‘a goggle-eyed gentleman of a perplexed aspect’—in the cold light of morning.

The messages had not been rapped on any table, but had been deciphered in the jolts and bumps of the carriage. (Many of us are familiar with the rhythmic utterance of railway engines.) The seance—‘conference’ the goggle-eyed gentleman preferred to call it—began with the greeting : ‘Evil communications corrupt good manners.’

After reigning for a period of something like a thousand years, the Bavarian dynasty of the Wittelsbachs came to an end in the autumn of 1918, when, as the reader knows, Germany became a Republic. Whatever the royal family may have felt about this event it is to be supposed that one of its members at any rate looked upon it with composure, if not with relief, because it freed her from the shackles of court etiquette and enabled her to pursue, unhampered, the charitable aims she has always had so much at heart. This was Princess Ludwig Ferdinand, née the Infanta Maria de la Paz, aunt of the King of Spain. She has indeed justified her baptismal name, and she is popularly called ‘Die Friedensprincessin’ (Peace-Princess). She devotes all her intelligence, resources and energies to good works, and her desire to bring about peace among men amounts almost to an obsession.

In the summer of 1918 a woman presented herself at the residence of the Princess at Munich, stating that she had an urgent request to make. She was barefoot, décoiffée, in rags. Nevertheless, Her Royal Highness, who is nothing if not accessible, gave orders that she was to be admitted. The meeting between these two oddly-assorted women was the starting-point of what may be destined to become a great movement, of which some account will be given further on. Apart from this, it led, directly or indirectly, to a conversion remarkable enough to merit description.

Under this title a small book has been brought out by a new firm of publishers, Messrs. Sheed and Ward. It is a proof of the courage of this new firm that it should have published a book on political economy for the sum of one shilling, for it is notorious that Books on economics have very little sale in England, except text-books for examination purposes, and these have only an adventitious popularity. Indeed, popularity is probably the wrong word. We hope here that the courage of these publishers will receive the counterpart it always merits, namely encouragement, and that the book will be widely read. Certainly the book itself deserves well of the reading public, since it takes the somewhat specialist subject of Imperial Preference and succeeds in making it not only interesting but inspiring.

This is not to be wondered at, for the author, Mr. W. A. S. Hewins, knows his subject thoroughly from within. His influence in England has been considerable, though his name is not so widely known as his work has been. We think that this forgetting of his name and remembering of his work would please Mr. Hewins, for he has never been one to push his personal deserts or claims; it is a cause, an ideal, even a dream that is his real object. So long as that gets established and begins to produce its due effect, he has always been content to let the glory and the reward slip from him as the sacrificial price of its success.

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.

In an ancient south country city with a great past behind it, and nothing whatever in front of it, there exist cheek by jowl a vast Norman cathedral and a small Catholic church. The church, oddly enough, is of the eighteenth century, and it is not known how the St. Lull Catholics of that era found the means to build it, still less what spirit of effrontery prompted them to rear it so close to their lost cathedral. There it is, off a bye-street of Georgian hou'ses and spiked garden-walls, its whereabouts indicated by a furtive notice at the incidence of an alley. Pursue this alley in the spirit of faith, and you come abruptly up to a dwarfish stucco building submerged in the morning shadow of the cathedral, its graveyard, planted with classical trees of the family of the willow in a mourning ring, terminated by the west transept of the fane itself.

The stucco interior is anything but architecturally impressive, and so damp that flourishing outcrops of fungus uproot the tiles in untrodden parts of the floor. But there is a clear fairway to the altar, and a frequented one. You seldom find Our Lord without one or two kneeling adorers if you look in at any time between sunrise and” sunset, and I have looked in myself at all hours of the day. I have a liking for the church, apart from my ardour for its Lord; and my liking extends to the quiet graveyard in its rear.

I was winding up a summer holiday in St. Lull: staying on at my rooms there, after my children had gone back to their convents, to meet an American friend before returning to my husband in Italy. It was the first week in October, and the friend, a greyhaired priest on leave for literary work, had come down to visit the cathedral and me.

For over one hundred and five years the memoirs of that decidedly acid female, Laetitia Matilda Hawkins, have served as a quarry from which writers on the eighteenth century have dug their best anecdotes and extracted their sourest and most spiteful criticism. But not until this present year of grace did anyone think of reproducing the original book; and even now that reproduction comes to us in an extremely abridged and compressed form, and with a large and much-needed attempt at re-arrangement. For never was there a work more devoid of method and order, or more stuffed and padded with extraneous matter— unless, indeed, it be the ‘official’ Life of Dr. Johnson perpetrated by the fair author’s father, Sir John Hawkins, Knight, that ‘most unclubbable’ of men!

Sir John Hawkins, who claimed descent from the famous Elizabethan admiral of the same name, began life as an attorney with literary tastes. A fortunate marriage enabled him to retire by the time he was forty, and to settle down as a wealthy country gentleman at Twickenham, with a town house at Queen Square, Westminster, and to devote his leisure to literature, music, angling, the formation of a fine library, and the duties of a magistrate. He wrote a tedious History of Music in five volumes quarto, and a number of other books which no one nowadays ever reads; he knew in a certain way almost everybody worth knowing; he was an original number of the famous ‘Club’ in Ivy Lane, and he was Dr. Johnson’s executor, and selected by the publishers to edit his works and write his Life. He lies buried in the cloisters of the Abbey, and very few would ever have heard of him had it not been for his rather grudging inclusion in the great ‘Johnsonian Circle.’ Boswell hated him, and Johnson just tolerated him.

In this new edition of Abbot Butler’s book there is a two-fold change. The text itself is the same as in the first edition, except that the Epilogue is placeid at the end of the first part of the book instead of at the end of the second part. But for this minor change of distribution the text of this second edition is a reprint of the first.

There is, however, a valuable addition to the book of some eighty pages, which is called ‘Afterthoughts,’ and with this addition the book opens. These ‘Afterthoughts’ are due to further reading and reflection, and in some degree are due to criticisms of the first edition.

I. The Text.

In the March number of Blackfriars, 1923, we reviewed the text of the book. We made certain criticisms which still hold good; in brief they are the following:

(1) St. Augustine’s theory of the Divine Illumination (text 49-55). The theory that God is the intellects agens was most certainly not admitted by St. Thomas to be tenable and quite probable. This is a question of fact; in the Summa 1, Q 77, Art. 4, St. Thomas says: ‘It is impossible . . . .’ Wherever then St. Augustine speaks of ideas being perceived in the light of God, in order to have a right meaning, such passages must be explained according to the doctrine of St. Thomas.

In the Summa 1, Q 79, Art. 4, St. Thomas says : ‘According to the documents of our faith the intellects agens separatus is God Himself .... whence from Him the human soul participates intellectual light, and this is the intellectus agens.’

The book is worth the money, there is such a lot of it, but the editing is defective, the misprints are the work of the devil, because they alter or obscure the sense, and the index is almost a joke. The second edition of this book, if done with better cunning, should be more valuable than the first, seeing that there are omissions to be made good and better proofreading to be expected. On p. 10, 1. 5, ‘the news dragons’ is not a shy at Northbrook or Beavermere, but a misprint for new dragons. On p. 21 ‘Great Dostoievsky’s dance’ should be ‘Dostoiesky dance,’ dance being a verb in the subjunctive, a mood abhorred of casual or half-educated persons in every land. And on p. 115 no hand hath ere let fall ‘is obviously the error of an amanuensis which ought to have been put right in printing. Mr. Chesterton cannot be expected to correct his own proofs, they are so many, but someone is expected to be careful for him.

‘Justifying one’s claim’ has an unpleasant sound. It is suggestive of a very lively consciousness of one’s merits and of an eager desire to get them recognised. Before trying to answer the question : Did Our Lord justify His claim to be God? it is useful to ask another : Did He claim to be God? And that question, as thus emphasized, can be broken u into two : What exactly did He claim to be? and : dow did He make the claim? It is not that there is the least intention of watering down Our Blessed Lord’s declarations about Himself. From those declarations it certainly follows that He was God—if He was speaking the truth. But that is just the point. That is the real meaning of the question we have to answer. Was He speaking the truth? Ought we to accept His word? And one of the chief means of deciding whether we ought to take His word is to consider His declarations, not as resolved into one general proposition, but to consider them, as far as we can, in the concrete; that is, to try to see exactly what He said, and how, and in what circumstances, He said it. For in so doing we get some glimpse of His character, and a man’s character is one test of his credibility. Another is corroboration by a reliable witness.

Bound up with the history of a neighbourhood and intimately connected with the past are the names of the fields. Those who are not countryfolk do not always realise that every field, like every village, has a name, or has had one at some time. These names are to be found in old tithe maps, and they are often of the greatest interest.

In many villages in the south of England you can find a field called Townfield. This name preserves the memory of an old feudal custom. The Townfield, a name which occurs in at least one document five centuries old, to be found in the British Museum, was the name given to the field of the village community. It belonged to a definite owner, who granted the field to certain of his tenants in return for specified services. The Townfield has no hedge, for reasons that will presently appear.

It was ploughed in acre or half-acre strips, by a team of oxen provided by the tenants, who all clubbed together for it.

These strips were each a furrow in length—i.e., 220 yards—and 22 yards wide, just as much as a team of oxen could comfortably plough in one day. The furrow represented, the length the team could go conveniently without turning, and a rod (5 ½ yards) was the room occupied by a yoke of oxen, four abreast. Our awkward ‘long measure’ thus originated in the harness and capacity of a yoke of oxen.

The following extracts from the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas may be of interest and value to our readers. They are found in the Secunda Secundae.

Question 33. Article 4.

Whether a man is bound to correct his prelate.

Obj. 2. A gloss on Gal. II, 11 : ‘I withstood him to the face adds : as an equal. Therefore since a subject is not equal to his prelate, he ought not to correct him ....

.... I answer that a subject is not competent to administer to his prelate the correction which is an act of justice through the coercive nature of punishment.

But the fraternal correction which is an act of charity is within the competency of everyone in respect of any person towards whom he is bound by charity, provided there be something in that person which requires correction.

Now an act which proceeds from a habit or power extends to whatever is contained under the object of that power or habit. Thus vision extends to all things comprised in the object of sight. Since, however, a virtuous act needs to be moderated by due circumstances, it follows that when a subject corrects his prelate he ought to do so in a becoming manner; not with impudence and harshness, but with gentleness and respect. Hence the Apostle says (I Tim. v, 1), An ancient man rebuke not, but entreat as a father. Wherefore Dionysius finds fault with Demophilus, a monk (Ep. viii), for rebuking a priest with insolence by striking and turning him out of the church.

Cardinal Newman held that modern thought needed reforming in the light of the Christian revelation, not the Christian revelation in the light of modern thought. The opposite and Protestant view prevails with the greater number of our neighbours who profess a theism and do not disdain to be known as Christians.

But what is this modern thought,’ which daily with the steady destructiveness of an encroaching sea wears and crumbles the faith of Anglicans and free-church-men, and from time to time detaches Catholics from the household of faith? Whence comes it? A new impression of the Hibbert Lectures on the Reformation, delivered by Dr. Beard—a nonconformist divine—rather more than forty years ago, prefaced by Dr. Ernest Barker, the distinguished Principal of King’s College, London, bids us place the beginnings of modern thought in the break up of Christendom in the sixteenth century—in ‘the specifically religious revolution which we call the Reformation.’ Dr. Beard, with the persuasive reasonableness of a good Victorian, is content to let modern thought whittle away all Christian dogma, believing that mankind will thereby ‘penetrate more and more deeply into the glory and the wonder of God.’ Dr. Ernest Barker, maintaining that ‘the fundamental meaning of the Reformation is a new theology; and the new theology ‘a purer revelation of God direct to each Christian soul,’ hopes, with Dr. Beard, for ‘a new kindling and a further brightening of its light.’

Cider is vile stuff. This is not demonstration, but abuse. So is bottled eider. So is cider. No matter which kind of cup it is drunk from; whether the blue and white decorated mug, with only one handle; or the other, with tall stem and shallow calix, used at weddings. Spelling its name with Y or Z does not enhance the beverage. Yet the drink exists.

Philips and others have blown up the subject to the limit of elasticity; but all good evidence points to the truth that it is radically the drink of the thirsty labourer.

Robert Bloomfield had reason to know what he was writing about; and is a credible witness that sturdy Mower will soon want a drink. If we assemble all the conditions, and have patience to adumbrate the sort of fluid called for, we shall approach the definition of cider. Not water; for the thirsty is not yet in pain and resisting despair. Like the seaman at the capstan or halliards, his cheerfulness is to be kept at due pitch. Enjoyment, such as it is, is already possessed; and has not now to be sought.

The visits of Our Lady to a poor native Mexican in the early years of the Spanish occupation of New Spain, and her gift through him of the miraculous painting, now venerated under the title of ‘Our Lady of Guadalupe,’ have often been recounted, but none of the early traditions, it would seem, bear a greater impress of truth and scrupulous investigation than the account left by the Spanish chronicler Fray Luis Becerra Tanco, Professor of Native Languages in the University of Mexico, and dated in 1666. He says that in the previous year he was invited by the Cathedral Chapter to depose on oath all that he knew on the subject, and he now commits to writing an accurate and circumstantial record of this evidence.

In the first place, he says he has a very clear recollection of the incident as related to him in his youth by three Spaniards of note, one of them his uncle, who had known contemporaries of the Bishop Fray Don Juan de Zumarraga and other personages concerned in the event, and were themselves born within a few years of the date of the miracle. Further, his knowledge of the native language and customs—his favourite study—-has enabled him to examine the native records of this happening before they had disappeared, for he says that, under the influence of Spanish education, the natives are losing the art they possessed of transmitting their traditions by pictures and chants. He adds that it cost him many vigils to correlate their reckoning with his own and separate exaggerations from reality: . . . . y a mi me costó mucho desvelo el ajustar su computo a el nuestro y aportar lo supersticioso de lo natural.’

‘E.M. Forster warms the teapot well enough,’ said Katherine Mansfield (she had just finished reading Howard's End), ‘ but he does not put in the tea.’ How aptly this sentence defines and relegates our clever (in the worst sense of the word) too clever women novelists, so sensitive to the charms of nature and of art, of human relationships and of animal favourites, so obtuse, so stupid in the vicinity of sin! The demoralised, de-Christianised novel—when the writer has listened deferentially to her inspirer’s Eriiis sicut Deæ—bears witness to the absurdities of living without God, or rather in defiance of Him and His known laws.

‘Religion is like adenoids. We have read Freud and Havelock Ellis. We say “syncopated,” not “ragtime” like our elders nor “jazz” like the herd. There is no harm except pain.’ We see and touch in ‘Helen and Felicia (by E. B. C. Jones; Chatto and Windus, 1927) the blight of the author’s immoral theories destroying the vitality of the characters skilfully evoked. Remove chastity from the virtues, exalt conceit, and then write Helen and Felicia. In her Inigo Sandys Miss Jones had attacked, in the most ladylike way, a redoubtable situation; but her Inigo had not been able to give Charles what he wanted : her rashness has grown with the impurity of the modern novel, and her Helen serenely offers her husband to her younger sister, not out of Pandarus perversity, but because she is so fond of both. Eriiis sicut Deæ, surely, surely. Rosamond Lehmann at least had left her Judith pondering on Dusty Answers. E. B. C. Jones with less charm, less atmosphere, more experience, has not dared to look beyond the triumph of the three adversaries of the soul.

Lord—at a mountain tomb in Bethany

Once Thou didst stand, and with the word ‘Come forth’

Raised Lazarus to the quick. And stumbling he Pathetically raised protecting hands Because the sun was strong. They loosed the bands That bound his buried limbs. Before their eyes In wonder, jealousy, or fear that gazed Young Lazarus stood, and heard their startled cries, And saw his Lord smile welcome, and with dazed Senses he wondered what new dream was this;

Then the world faded as he knelt to kiss Thy feet . . .

Lord—see this sepulchre that keeps my soul And call forth the dead self that tarries there,

Send angel hands, that they in pity roll The stone away, and at Thy word let rise This buried self, that with new life and care May learn to kiss Thy feet, and meet Thine eyes.

Rupert Croft-Cooke.

The Exhibition of Flemish Art on view at the Royal Academy should not be missed by any lover of art. Not only will he there find a feast of colour and beauty sufficient to satisfy the most fastidious, but a complete exhibition of the art of Flanders from its earliest beginnings to the present day. It is seldom so representative an exhibition of the art of a nation in all its periods is available for the student to note its entire origin, growth and development. But more. The exhibition should not be missed by any student of Christian economics, especially any Catholic student. For here he has an unparalleled object-lesson of the effect of the Church’s social influence on the world when her guidance and direction were acknowledged. The display of masterpieces in painting alone is so superb that, as one writer in the daily press was led to exclaim : ‘there are times when one is tempted to cry out that painting began and ended with the early Flemish artists.’ But painting was only one of the arts brought to perfection by the Church in the Middle Ages; Flanders only one of the nations of Europe under the influence of the cultural tradition of Latin Christendom. Painting may have blossomed earlier in Flanders and Italy than among the other nations of Europe, owing to their more flourishing commerce and intercourse with the East; but all were in the same line of tradition and cultural development until destroyed by the disruptive influences of the Reformation with its subsequent confusion of ideas from which we still suffer: and only a return to unity can heal the wounds of society.

Something was said, in the last number of Blackfriars, about the modern liturgical movement and about a German centre of that movement, the Abbey of Maria Laach. It was hinted also in that article that behind the movement, especially in Germany, there lay a definite theory, or body of theory, regarding Catholic worship and devotion. The movement in Germany is in fact especially characterised by its insistence on the doctrinal foundations as distinguished from antiquarian or aesthetical considerations. It is essentially theological in its nature, bases its appeal upon doctrine, and asks for a full realisation of the implications of the official Christian liturgy. In the present article some attempt will be made to expound the criticism which this militant movement would pass upon our present practice, and to set forth the claims which it makes for the liturgy. We shall not attempt to set the matter out in full, but endeavour only to give a few of the main ideas which lie behind the liturgical attack.

Abbot Herwegen is of the opinion that there has been nothing short of a revolution in our devotional attitude as compared with the devotional attitude of the early Church. On the one hand, he argues, we have an objective, sacramental and social worship; on the other, a highly subjective, personal and individualistic effort. He conceives it to be the main work of the ‘liturgical apostolate’ to reform this state of affairs and to infuse into our present-day religion some measure of the ancient spirit. And he believes that the instrument of such a reform lies ready to our hands, is in fact nothing else than our current and official liturgy.