The great Whig historian’s sneer at the Cavalier dramatist’s conversion to the Catholic Faith was equally ungenerous and untrue. For Dryden had in all probability become a Catholic before Charles II died, as his wife and one of his sons had already been received into the Church. And the ‘pension,’ contemptuously referred to by Macaulay, was simply the belated payment of his salary as Laureate, already four years in arrears, together with other sums owing to the poet by the spendthrift King Charles. Lord Macaulay might have discovered if he liked, in the course of his historical researches among seventeenth century documents, the existing Treasury Warrant, signed by Rochester and dated May 6th, 1684, authorising the payment to Dryden of £50, being one quarter’s annuity (as poet laureate) due at Midsummer, 1680, and also the sum of £25, being one quarter’s additional annuity by Letters of Privy Seal, due Lady Day, 1680. James II, having a stricter sense of justice, thus paid off his brother’s debts. But Dryden lost his court post, and had the mortification of seeing it transferred to Shadwell. And he died in William Ill’s reign, a staunch Catholic and a poor man under a Protestant king.

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 celebration of Jeanne d’Arc’s festival as that of the great patron saint of modern France has been more remarkable than ever this year. It was only last year that the French Government decided for the first time to take part officially in the celebrations ; and those who now proudly claim the credit of having restored France’s national Saint to her due place of honour had for many years to contest even their right to display her banners in the streets. The huge procession that filed last month through all the principal thoroughfares of Paris, from the Place St. Augustin, past the Madeleine and all round the Place de la Concorde, to lay innumerable wreaths of flowers at the foot of the gilt equestrian statue which stands at the corner of the Tuileries, was even more enthusiastic and imposing in its dimensions than were the demonstrations of last year. The Fete Jeanne d’Arc has become perhaps the greatest national festival of France. Its procession is one of the most symbolic events of the year. But how much does the demonstration signify? Is it really the spontaneous homage of a modern and highly sophisticated city, not only to a great national saint, but to a mediaeval tradition which seems strangely remote from modern Paris? Or are the enemies of the Action Francaise justified, if only to some extent, in regarding it as a purely party demonstration by the extreme nationalists, exploiting for their own ends a national tradition which the leaders of the Action Francaise have undoubtedly revived? Does it in fact afford some reliable indication of how far the religious revival in France is genuine and how far political?

My old friend, John Brayne, had gathered some remarkably choice spirits together on the occasion of my last visit to Hadlands old manor. John Brayne is an old Catholic in every sense except that associated with Jansenism, but he has the habit of renewing his youth, like the eagle, and he always manages to keep pace with the ‘young thought’ which pours itself out in places where our rising men foregather, and they foregather very readily on John Brayne’s hospitable hearth, and bring him up to date when they consider it necessary. Sometimes the necessity has been known to arise, and then old Mr. Brayne illustrates his point with a story that is generally well worth recording. The following is quite a typical one.

We were discussing the progress of Catholicism, and someone asked our host what he considered to be the chief obstacle to the advance of the faith amongst educated folk. We all awaited the answer with interest, for in some ways old John Brayne is the youngest of us all.

The exclusion of secular political questions from the subject matter of our Catholic Reviews, which obtained very largely before the war, was a weakness inherent in the mentality of the Catholic body at that time. It existed because Catholics, as a body, had never emerged from the atmosphere of sufferance; they felt their numerical weakness so strongly that it seemed a dangerous thing to discuss things on which they disagreed. It was a weakness because it hindered the development of political thought among Catholics, who, even if they have absorbed nothing more than the penny Catechism, are better equipped for it than those who have never had the advantage of that training in logic and philosophy. No Catholic should be capable of the mental confusion that so heavily overlays the political discussions of our secular press.

At the end of the reign of King Edward the First, there lived in the city of Salisbury a poor, honest Parson, who had in his charge a small church abutting on the market-place and the souls of a few hundred people thereabouts. Of both church and people he was the careful and loving custodian, but chiefly of the latter ; for he held it as a truth indubitable, that though Our Blessed Lord deigns to dwell on the altar, it is merely as a stepping-stone to the souls of the faithful.

Under this simple conviction, the Parson—Sir Nicholas by name—toiled his hardest from morning till night to help every man, woman and child in his flock build and beautify, in his or her own heart, a shrine for the Most High. He aided proud, indolent and clumsy sinners to hew new stones for the repairing of their dilapidated or ruined souls; the heaviest stones he carried himself, lent a hand to fit them into their allotted places, and stepped back gaily with the poor wretch, their owner, to admire the progress of his puny fabric and congratulate him as though he were the founder of Rome itself—alter Romulus, says my pious original. For souls more advanced, he was an equal authority on spires and pinnacles, crockets and weather-vanes. All the dizziest flights of heavenly architecture he knew by heart—something from books, something from experience, and something from the inspiration on which he faithfully counted.

When the Master-Builder spoke apprehensively of the younger generation knocking at the door, it certainly never occurred to him to apprehend that it might be the church-door. And yet even in the figure of Ibsen might have been found signs of so strange a sequel. The very words Master-Builder are but a tradition from a medieval system, and it is that very system which some would now make a rough model for the modern system. And if the Master-Builder had been driven by his ruthless lady friend to make a tour of Europe, looking for the tallest towers to climb, he would soon have discovered what people of what period had the right to be called masters of building He would have found himself in the tracks of many a master, who not only climbed his own tower but carved his own angels or devils at the four corners of it, hanging as on wings above the void. The artists and art critics of the rising generation had already begun knocking at the church-door fifty years ago, in the time of Ruskin and William Morris. In our own time a yet younger generation of art students are justifying their bold or possibly bald simplifications by yet severer doctrines drawn from the Primitives. The new artists may be in a chronological sense Post-Impressionists, but they are also in a strict historical sense Pre-Raphaelites.

Among the many shibboleths which satisfy the ‘practical men’ who utter them and exasperate the ‘visionaries’ who hanker after reality, not a few are connected with the land. ‘The stately homes of England,’ ‘the playing-fields of Eton,’ ‘our national sportsmanship,’ are examples. ‘England could never grow her own food’ is another. With those chiefly concerned it is axiomatic that fox-hunting and large estates have made England what she is! They have certainly contributed to do so, and the result is, of course, highly satisfactory to—the speaker. ‘We are at the present moment in Great Britain assisting at a third of these turning points in the history of generations, for we have just arrived at the time when only a few old people can still remember an England that was not urban, policed, and dependent upon mechanical and centralised communications. We have just entered upon the time when all living memory of the older agricultural England is passing away.’

It is odd how shy people are of seeking a real change when they take a holiday. The city man, who plays golf in the suburbs every week-end throughout the rest of the year, can think of no better change than to play the same game by the sea-side in his August vacation. The middle-class villager usually departs for another village; the doctor takes a locum; the town-dweller from North or South makes a straight line for some London-by-the-sea; the nurse stays with another nurse; and people in general choose a country, near or far, that is only a glorified repetition of the countryside with which they are familiar. Conscious at last of the lack of imagination hitherto displayed in my own holidays, I determined to go to a Yorkshire coal-field, not that I might spend my time underground, for I had already visited the tube railways in London, but to see the countryside in which the smaller coal-fields lie and to make acquaintance with their inhabitants.

Turkish dominance may have been curbed in Europe by the Great War—we know that it is being allowed to run riot in Asia—but it would be a mistake to think that the canker of Islamism has been removed. The new kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes has in its midst approximately one million Sons of the Prophet. Their main stronghold is in Bosnia, together with Herzegovina, where Moslem bigotry and cruelty earned for it a title of which it was proud until yesterday : ‘The Lion that guards Stambul against the West.’ Yet Bosnia was a Christian land five centuries ago, and the story of Bosnian heroism in religious fidelity, after the lapse of its Christian leaders, has not yet been given to the world. The landlords, forebears of the present arrogant and tyrannous Begs, became apostates to Islam for the sake of their lands and titles. Their Christianity had been already undermined at the time of the Turkish invasion by the heretical tenets of the Bogumiles, a sect that had much in common with the Protestantism of later days. English writers are found who excuse the Bosnian chieftains for their preference of the Sultan’s jurisdiction to that of the Pope. The harsh measures meted out to heretics in the Middle Ages were here intensified by rivalry between Bosnian chiefs who denounced each other to the King of Hungary, or the Rulers of Venice and Ragusa, and were perverts or converts as the situation required, now submitting to Rome, next day repudiating submission.

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.

The baby, new to sky and earth, surrounded by toys and playthings, extracts the keenest pleasure from throwing them about, picking them to bits, thumping them flat, pulling them awry, squeezing them out of shape.

Although this early impulse is not necessarily an evidence of original sin, it does show a twisted instinct which will need correction. That correction comes, partly through parental discipline, partly from a dawning sense in the tiny brain that things are made to be kept and used.

So, somewhere about the age of six or seven, the boy or girl sets greater store by doll or tin soldier, picture book or toy train, even taking means to preserve them from injury, and being worried if they spoil. Thus there emerges in the child consciousness the notion of repair, and an inkling of the part it plays amongst us. Then follows the training of school to drive home the lesson.

The records of the Ecclesiastical Court, some of which have recently been available for inspection, and to which special notice has been drawn of late by the very interesting paper read before the Royal Historical Society by Mr. Fincham, are full of interest for students of Catholic history.

These records consist of Books of Acts (including ‘Corrections’ ), Assignations, Books of Depositions, and ‘Libels, Allegations, and Sentences,’ and range from the year 1467 down to 1817. The Book of Acts was a record of the summons of offenders to Court, the charge or ‘libel’ brought against them, the ‘sworn personal answers’ of the accused and of the witnesses for or against them, and the ‘depositions’ on either side.

The Allegations were the replies of the accused to the ‘libel’ ; and the ‘assignation’ was the name given to the result of secret examination of witnesses in a series of ‘Interlocutary Orders.’

Abbot Butler has written an extremely fascinating book on a subject of enthralling interest. The mystical life is the highest of all practical sciences in the sense that of all others, it matters most to a human being on earth. A purely speculative knowledge of God, however profound, is wisdom, but it is not to be compared in this life with love of God, since here below the mind only thinks God, whereas the will goes out to grasp Him. The mind for ever remains within the logical order, but the will whose every act is based on love seeks to get hold of the reality—that is to say, its term or rest is the ontological. In heaven the converse is true as regards the taking hold of God : the will of a truth will attain its supreme satiety in cleaving to God, but it is the mind, first and foremost, that takes hold of God, the will cleaving to the reality made captive by the mind.

In the Beatific Vision, we hold as true that which Hegel perversely endeavoured to apply to this world, namely, the identity of the logical and ontological orders. In the Beatific Vision alone are ‘thought’ and ‘thing’ identified; for the ‘thought’ of God in the created mind is the ‘reality’ of God Himself. When Hegel formulated his astounding philosophy, he was unknowingly formulating one of the most profound doctrines of Thomistic theology concerning the Beatific Vision.

The editor of the Daily Shouter was conscious from his salutation that it was young Phelps, the new reporter, who stood behind him, so it was not necessary to turn round. He went on sorting his papers, remarking as he did so, ‘You can run down to Airminster and see if you can get a story from the R.A.F. man who got stuck up on the roof of the abbey yesterday. See if he’s got anything to say about how it felt being up there for eight hours—not about how he got down, we had all that last night; but just see if he has anything to say that you can make into a story. Hullo! ‘The editor had transferred his attention to the telephone.

Young Phelps accepted his assignation readily, and hopefully. The news editor of the Shouter had a wide reputation as a discoverer of possibilities in the events of the passing hour. True, he sometimes tested the mettle of new men on forlorn hopes, but young Phelps rather liked being put on his mettle; he hoped to be a news editor himself one day. At any rate, it was up to him to get a ‘story’ out of the hero of yesterday’s misadventure. The papers had given a due account of the accident which had brought down Flight-Lieut. Cliffordson’s aeroplane on to the roof of the fourteenth-century minster church from which Airminster derives its name. The machine had got itself entangled amongst the intricate masonry that surmounts the west facade, and when it came to earth with its pilot it was found that the lieutenant had been left clinging to a narrow ledge up amongst the gargoyles.

The English Catholic squire of the eighteenth century, when he came to decide on the future of his sons, found his choice a very restricted one. His first-born would, no doubt, succeed to the patrimonial acres; and carry on the old traditions. Another, perhaps, might develop a vocation to the priesthood, and be satisfied with that then very humble, very obscure, and often dangerous calling. But what to do with the rest? and those were the days of large families.

Trade might claim one, and (during the first half of the century, though not so later on) without any loss of prestige, or any injury to family pride. Thus a fourth son of Sir Francis Jerningham, of Cossey, became a well-known goldsmith in Covent Garden; while the younger brother of Alban Butler, although born of an old Northern family of gentle stock, set up in business as a linen-draper in the City. But the cruel penal laws against Catholics altogether excluded them from the public services, the Universities, and the Army. The oaths of supremacy and abjuration put parliamentary life out of the question, and the Test and Corporation Acts closed the municipalities. Finally, the statute of William III forbade Catholics to exercise the professions of barrister, attorney, and notary. Hence the usual career of a younger son was found in foreign lands, and many were the English Catholics who fought for or served the Kings of France and Spain, the Emperor at Vienna, or the princes of the small Italian states.

Dr. Newman, in 1845, not ten years after he had left Oxford, came as a ‘poor English innocent’ to Catholic Ireland, Ireland broken after the famine, after the days of Davis, into the political generation of Sadlier and Keogh, the generation when the Irish language had begun quickly to melt away, when Ireland’s poor emigrants were rushing to success or to ruin in America; and the Irish at home were being brought up in ‘National’ Schools, where no history might be taught, and where every influence tended to take from a people right national pride. Yet this people had one unbroken bond with the past, its religion; though the chiefs thereof were bishops fundamentally opposed in their ideas, as to how the religious life of the Irish should be reorganized and prepared for England’s new equalizing political rights, putting Catholics into positions of public trust, infiltrating anglicization at all pores of the Irish body politic, attending to give the needed higher education by the hands of a Protestant power unready to satisfy the instincts, or to build upon the principles, of an old Catholic people, who desired perhaps they knew not what, but who were ready to follow their bishops, and were conscious of distress in the new glare of what was brought by the foreign schoolmastering, with its worship of material success, its unimaginative practical commonplace, its dreary official irreligion, and its ideals of cleanliness, order, industry, and commercialism, together with dull uniformity, and a British imperialism; the whole thing, ‘Philistine,’ as we say, to the core, hostile to local traditions of the realities and varieties of smaller nationalities, and to everything that would make an Irishman care to live in Ireland more than in any other imperial area.

The first National Catholic Congress in England was held at Norwich in 1912. It was a development of the ‘Conferences’ which had been organised by the Catholic Truth Society for many successive years, and it was announced that the Congress was to be an annual event. There was a Congress at Plymouth in 1913, and another at Cardiff on the eve of the Great War in 1914. Then the series was interrupted for years. When the fourth Congress met at Liverpool in 1920, there was some talk of its being followed by a fifth in the following year. Current report even said that Leeds had been definitely selected as the place of meeting. But for some reason the idea was abandoned. It is now announced that in the coming year there will be a Catholic Congress at Birmingham, the first of a new series, meeting, not annually, but every third year.

I was present at and took some part in the proceedings of two out of the four Congresses that have been already held During and after these gatherings I heard from not a few of my friends—both clerics and laymen—the criticism that these meetings did not give results of sufficient value in comparison with the expenditure of time, money and effort required for their organisation. It was argued that they were to a great extent something like oratorical field-days, in which there was a good deal of mutual self-congratulation, and very little opportunity for helpful debate on practical matters.