The Holy Father’s lately-issued Encyclical with its clear statement of the doctrine of the unity of the Church based upon the primacy of jurisdiction of the See of Peter, comes as an opportune commentary upon the Report of the Malines Conversations now at last published. The plan of these Conversations was to proceed by way of affirmation—to bring forward the points upon which agreement could be reached and to shelve, at any rate for the time being, the attempt to come to any conclusions upon questions where there was likelihood of radical disagreement. As the Report proceeds we become increasingly conscious of the presence of a fundamental difference of outlook underlying such agreement as was reached. To the Anglican representatives the unity of the Body of Christ’ is something desirable but unattained ; to the Catholics it is an existing fact and a necessary presupposition. This is the crux of the whole question. The corporate union of the Church of England with the Holy See, the ultimate object envisaged by the Conversations, were it ever to come about, would not be the re-joining of two separated parts of the Body of Christ, it would be the uniting of a schismatic member to the one and indivisible Body.

When Sir Robert Peel, as leader of the House of Commons in the Duke of Wellington’s administration, dramatically resigned his seat for Oxford University in the spring of 1829 to obtain its approval for his change of front in regard to the concession of Catholic Emancipation, he was ignominiously rejected for his constituency at the very time when O’Connell had been triumphantly returned for Clare. Peel’s defeat was the climax of a long conflict between the two men. It had begun when Peel came to Dublin as Chief Secretary in 1812, a young man of twenty-four, at the opening of his ,career. The conflict between them was thus symbolical of the forces that were arrayed on each side in the last and most bitter phase of the agitation for Catholic rights.

Peel had come to Dublin full of self-confidence and energy, wealthy, backed by powerful interests, and as the rising hope of the English Conservatives, keenly interested in politics, hard working and determined to assert his mastery in a position which could be made important or insignificant according to his own abilities and success as an administrator. Miss Ramsay in her admirably sympathetic study of his life points out how chance favoured him in the first year of his new office. Neither the Viceroy nor the Chief Secretary for Ireland in those days had a seat in the Cabinet, and ‘the division of authority between them varied according to the character of the individuals who held the posts.’

There is in drama a situation where one man on the stage holds a secret, which he shares with the audience, but wishes to keep hid from the other players. He never gives the secret away on the stage, yet he acts all the time in the presence, so to speak, of the fact kept thus hidden. It is only the presence of that fact that fully explains what he says, by giving a second and deeper significance to his words. Where the other characters in the play will be able to see only a normal, even necessary flow of words, the audience may be able to see a strain, a definite turn given to the conversation, a deliberate undercurrent introduced. It is tremendous fun for the audience.

This goes to explain much of the enjoyment derived from a recent reading of Dean Inge’s Protestantism. A Catholic will see at once what another man may not be table to see, namely, that Dean Inge writes in the presence of a certain fact, the Catholic Church; that he cannot altogether rid himself of its presence ; that when he is writing about something apparently different he will be, perhaps unconsciously, referring back to it; that this—a normal exposé of Protestantism—is in truth a painful, straining affair; that what would seem to be the logical sequence of statement is a sequence adopted for a purpose ; and that many things written have twa planes of meaning, the often calm surface being not the more interesting or instructive.

The bomb outrage perpetrated at Milan on Thursday, the 12th of April, is one of a long series of crimes which have gained for the fair name of Italy an unenviable notoriety.

Bombs have been exploded in other countries, revolvers and daggers have been used by other nationals, but statistics are there to prove that for the last century Italians both in and outside their country have been the authors of the greater number of these horrible political assassinations. One has to go back to the early second half of last century to find a parallel to what has recently occurred at Milan : to 1858 when Orsini made the attempt upon the life of Napoleon III, or 1867 when Monti and Tognetti blew up the Serristori Barracks in Rome. On both occasions, as at Milan, the result was a veritable and indiscriminate slaughter of innocent persons. Agesilao Milano, Luccheni, Angiolillo, Carserio, Oberdank, Passanante, Acciarito, Bresci, Crispi, Gallenga and others more recent all belong to that infamous class of Italians who have dishonoured their Mother Country before the civilised world.

The Italians are a warm-hearted, generous and chivalrous people, they belong to a highly civilised and cultured race; their family ties are intense, their respect for women and children borders the romantic. How comes it then that sweet and gentle Italy is responsible for this brood of monsters called political assassins? An exhaustive answer can only be given when a true and real history of Modern Italy is written.

In the course of the debate in Parliament on the Revised Prayer-Book many startling things were said, but few things can have been more startling than Sir Henry Slesser’s speech.

In reading one of the most recent histories of the Tudor period, the impression was gained that the Catholic martyrs, admittedly gallant men, worthy to be compared for courage even (amazing admission!) to Drake and the seamen, were swept to a glorious doom for attempting to stem the tide of inevitable change. The stirrings of the Renaissance and Reformation, the coming-of-age of the spirit of nationality, the mental activity that followed the spread of printed books, and, to crown and clinch it all, the popular, forceful, ruthless, but progressive tyranny of the Tudors—all these forces were sweeping away the mediaeval Church as surely as the rising tide sweeps away a castle of sand.

The martyrs, one gathers, were brave men—to be admired for refusing to change with the times out of base motives, but their cause was as hopeless and their protest as useless as that of (say) a modern upholder of the legitimist claims of the Stuarts. And it is as well, the history almost makes us feel, that this was so, because their cause and the modern world, even that adolescent modern world of the sixteenth century, had nothing in common.

Then it is not impossible for us to break in on the dead as still living, and settle for ourselves historic problems that have troubled the specialists : Did Louis XVI die nobly or in cowardly fashion? Was the Church of England, as by law established in the reign of Elizabeth, really considered to be continuous with the older Church that had been certainly continuous in England for a thousand years? Could Charlemagne have written a hymn? Were the Gospellers accurate in their chronology? What did the blessed Master mean in His teaching on the Eucharist or Divorce? Actually to watch and listen and be convinced: is this likely? No one knows. Is it possible ? Certainly, if Einstein’s theory is correct. The historian, alas ! can’t tell whether Einstein’s theory is correct or no.

For the best part of the nineteenth century Russia was intellectually divided between two hostile camps—the ‘Westernizers’ and the ‘Slavophils.’ Had Russia a particular mission of her own, or was she to follow the rest of Europe? The Slavophils stood for a national culture : they believed that Russia, with her profound religious sense, might bring together the scattered elements of mankind into an inner organic union. The Westernizers, on the other hand, were all for cosmopolitan eclecticism; some looking for salvation to a close co-operation with the Catholic West; others—the radicals—inclining to the scientific, liberal and socialistic ideas, then becoming prevalent in Europe.

From the early thirties of last century to the sixties both schools were under the influence of second-rate philosophers, mostly French and German. Spencer, Stuart Mill, and Comte did not influence Russian thought until later on. These theories, imported from abroad and followed with great enthusiasm, did not produce a single original thinker. For the last century Russia can only boast of one really great philosopher, Vladimir Soloviev. His was a creative mind. A great scholar, a profound thinker, one of the most delicate of Russian poets, Soloviev had no equal among his contemporaries. Apart from him all Russian philosophic and social thought found expression in fiction.

It was into this welter of religious, scientific, and political argument that Leo Tolstoy was born in August, 1828. The age in which he was born and ripened into manhood, and which he ultimately influenced so profoundly with his own writings, was not only an age of ardent quest for truth in all spheres of human activity, but—for Russia especially—one of great passions and cruel strife.

Several pronouncements by Mgr. Ruch, the Bishop of Strasburg, within the past few weeks, have drawn attention to one of the most intricate and difficult problems of the Church in France since the War. Without attempting to present the whole problem that is involved, it is of considerable interest to note the attitude which has been adopted by the ‘patriot Bishop of Strasburg,’ whose conduct during the trying years since the War has shown him to be one of the most courageous and outspoken and also one of the ablest members of the French hierarchy. He has had to face a situation more embarrassing and more complicated than has any other bishop in France. Nothing proves more strikingly both the simplicity and the courage with which he has faced his duties than his own reluctant disclosure, made at a banquet of the Catholic Young Men’s Association in the spring of last year, that he had been prevented by the Pope himself, year after year since the War, from resigning his bishopric and retiring to a Carthusian monastery.

The circumstances which led to that revelation have already been described in BLACKFRIARS. Mgr. Ruch was speaking in reply to a campaign of persistent misrepresentation of his own conduct by the Action Francaise. It was not that the Action Francaise had attacked him personally. On the contrary, it was they who gave him the title of the ‘patriot Bishop of Strasburg,’ and proclaimed, week after week—until he was forced into making public the most intimate secrets of his spiritual life—that the Vatican had attempted to remove him from his bishopric because of his sturdy patriotism as a citizen of France. The facts were actually the direct opposite.

The English Martyrs are, for the majority of English people, the men and women burnt under Mary; in especial the Protestant bishops, Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer and Hooper. So the history books have it. Our Protestant historians know nothing of Catholic martyrs—in England. The Protestant martyrs are the English martyrs. Foxe with his Book of Martyrs settled the matter a long time ago. Why re-open it? Foxe decided for the Church of England, and therefore for the English people, who were to be accounted martyrs; his decisions were not to be gainsaid. After all to accept the authority of Foxe is a much simpler process than to seek the decision of Rome. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs was the Anglican martyrology; it was set up in parish churches, side by side with the Bible, for all to read. Its literal accuracy and complete truthfulness were no more questioned than the accuracy and truthfulness of the Bible itself.

The influence of Foxe, then, largely accounts for the refusal of Anglicans, and English people generally, to receive as martyrs the Catholics who died for their faith in England between 1535 and 1680.

Very broad-church historians, it is true, in their desire to be fair all round, freely award the martyr’s crown where death for conscience’ sake can be detected; and so will not deny a small percentage of martyrs to Catholics.

J. R. Green, for instance, in his Short History of the English People really does apply the word martyr (once) to the priests who suffered under Elizabeth :—’ The torture and death of the Jesuit martyrs sent a thrill of horror through the whole Catholic Church and roused at last into action the sluggish hostility of Spain.’

Mgr. Walsh has added one more to the small number of volumes which provide the authentic materials from which the history of the Catholic Church in England and in Ireland during the past hundred years will have to be written. He promises a second volume to deal with the pastoral work of the great Archbishop who, during nearly forty years of rule in Dublin, played an important part in obtaining the reform of the Irish land system, and after many years of patient effort against innumerable discouragements helped to win for Ireland its National University. He became its first Chancellor, and the photograph of him taken at the time, which is reproduced in Mgr. Walsh’s biography, shows him still vigorous. But his labours on the Statutory Commission of the University brought on a nervous breakdown, which left him a physical wreck for the remainder of his life. For the last ten years he took very little active part in public affairs. He died when the Black and Tan regime in Ireland was still rioting unchecked; and when the first tentative efforts of Sir Alfred Cope to bring about a settlement by negotiations, in which Archbishop Walsh himself took part, had not yet shown any hope of peace.

But though the Archbishop died a broken and disillusioned man, he had seen great improvements in the position of the Irish Catholics during his own lifetime, and no man had done more to bring them about Not only because of his ecclesiastical position, but by his intellectual abilities and courage, he was one of the most important public men in Ireland during the nineteenth century.

Madame Blavatsky, purple-lilac (I thought her colour that of a certain type of stout female foreigner, red and white blended into violet, but as her most vivid chronicler insists on her livid earth-grey skin, it must have been the purple-lilac of wrath) sat on the great sofa in the great drawing room in Richmond Terrace, Whitehall. Her unwieldy girth obscured her colossal height. She wore a black sacque, not her familiar red flannel wrapper. She smoked. Her small boneless hands, her many rings, her pale turquoise eyes—how they have been described, how they have cheated, flashed, deceived. I would call her the Thérèse Humbert of Theosophy if Theosophy contained as much as the empty safe of Madame Humbert. She was attacking Frederick Myers, the Zelator of the Phantasms of the living, as I came in : no doubt the S. P. R.’s adverse report, though not yet published, was known to her. She was afraid and indignant. Her hostess, who had patted and fed so many lions, so many lambs, in Paris and in London, who had figured so romantically in Flaubert’s life, so unforgettably in Mérimée’s reminiscences, could not shield her son-in-law from the outraged Priestess of Isis. She could not, as once in the Place Vendôme, decapitate all Oscar Wilde’s stories with hospitable interruptions : Encore un biscuit, chère Princesse! Encore un verre d’orgeat, chère Princesse! Madame Blavatsky was no mere Danubian (no Nubian even like Anatole France’s minuscule adorer), and she cried out: ‘Mr. Myers, if you had not made me so angry I would cause all the bells in this house to ring’ (we all held our breaths —would she relent?), ‘but I will not do so.’

From the narrow majority by which the House of Commons lately rejected the Revised Book of Common Prayer it has been argued—by Bishops Barnes and Welldon and Sir William Joynson Hicks—that the English nation still remains Protestant at heart and loyal to the Reformation.

The conclusion may or may not be true; the argument is manifestly unsound. The Times, in its grief, has been at pains to analyse the voting by which the Commons reached its decision. It finds that the New Prayer Book was favoured by a considerable majority of the Members representing English constituencies. The groups representing Ulster, Scotland and Wales all disapproved of the new Book with overwhelming majorities.

There is a well-known passage in Lord Macaulay’s History, in which he describes the Catholic country gentleman of penal days. The typical Catholic squire (so he tells us) ‘if he differed from the neighbouring squires, differed from them by being somewhat more clownish than they. The disabilities under which he lay prevented his mind from expanding. His fields, his greyhounds, his gun occupied almost all his thoughts.’ This has always struck us as an entirely mistaken idea. For, so far from the Catholic squire being more insular than his fellows, he was from the very nature of the case usually far less so. In most instances he had had a foreign education, and consequently some opportunities for foreign travel. His uncles or younger brothers (denied a career in their own land) might be in the service of the Catholic princes of France, Spain, or Austria, while sisters and cousins would perhaps have entered English religious houses on the Continent. Among his correspondents would probably be relatives whose Jacobite proclivities had made them exiles abroad. He could hardly help being something of a linguist, and from time to time would receive parcels of foreign books and journals and scraps of international gossip; and (more likely than not) his domestic chaplain and family tutor—a daily companion—would be a man of scholarly tastes and literary ability. His outlook would as a natural consequence be altogether wider and more cosmopolitan than that of his neighbours.

One Catholic family of penal days in which the characteristics we have in mind were markedly prominent in many of its members was that of the Swinburnes of Capheaton in Northumberland.

Hester (Tottie) and Clara Pater gave me their brother’s Rituate. The white and violet volume is now in the library of Blackfriars, Oxford. He would have been pleased, no doubt, had he been told that his house in St. Giles (’ with a plastered front of some antiquity, with a pleasant row of trees in front of it; at the left .... a little passage leading to the back of the house, the inner arch .... surmounted with a quaint carved face’ ) was fated to be occupied by Dominicans and that learning and sanctity would dwell where his learning and his aspirations had stretched imploringly towards holiness.

His aspirations: hear him (how unlike the Mr. Rose of Mallock’s New Republic) as he meditates on the Discobolus at rest: ‘With the heavy discus still in his left hand, he is preparing for his venture, taking stand carefully on the right foot. Eye and mind concentre, loyally, entirely, upon the business in hand. The very finger is reckoning while he watches, intent upon the cast of another, as the metal glides to the goal. Take him, to lead you forth quite out of the narrow limits of the Greek world. You have pure humanity there, with a glowing, yet restrained joy and delight in itself, but without vanity; and it is pure. There is nothing certainly supersensual in that fair, round head, any more than in the long, agile limbs; but also no impediment, natural or acquired. To have achieved just that, was the Greek’s truest claim for furtherance in the main line of human development.

It is never safe to take it for granted that you are loved for yourself alone in this world. After all, why should you be? Even Rustiquel the Rat-Catcher had to be disillusioned upon this point. He thought he was the hero of his own story—he who shone only in the reflection of a hidden light. Yet who should be a hero if not a cat? How seriously and courteously he bears himself indoors, yet how freely and blithely he sallies forth to slay monsters and destroyers! And if this is true of cats in general, how especially true it is of one cat in particular: that is of Rustiquel the Rat-Catcher, who flourished in the City of Paris in the reign of Philip the Fair.

I say ‘flourished,’ but, to tell the honest truth, Rustiquel the Rat-Catcher, though destined to a snug and creditable lot, had a kittenhood as dangerous and obscure as any cat in Paris. In fact, it was not until he reached die lanky, introspective age, when the chasing of his own tail offered more physical difficulties and fewer imaginative attractions every day, that he was rescued from death by Master Robert the Scrivener, and presented by way of a love-token to Alis, daughter of Ernoul the Crossbow-maker, which was the foundation of his subsequent fortunes.