St. Cecilia’s Day, November 22nd, 1928, will be the twenty-fifth anniversary of the promulgation by Pope Pius X of his edict upon liturgical music. To those who have the duty of putting its provisions into force it is too well known to warrant recapitulation. Its essential features, however, may be briefly summarised. As there was nothing in the economy of the private chapels of religious institutions to call for animadversion, the Motu profrio had no reference to them; it concerned only public churches. Upon the latter were laid three charges, light and unimportant in themselves, but, in the anaemic liturgical conditions of the time, so heavy as to create something of alarm. It was ordained that:—

(1) The ancient melodic chant should be restored; first for the reason of its appropriate and intrinsic excellence ; secondly, as the most congruous means to a more serious end, namely that the faithful might once more resume the right, filched from them at the Reformation, to sing the music assigned to them from the beginning;

(2) Where it might for good reasons appear desirable that the harmony of a select choir should continue to be substituted for the collective singing of the congregation, while a guarded permission might be given for more recent compositions, good and serious enough to be worthy of liturgical use, the classical polyphony of the Roman school should be preferred;

(3) On no account should women be admitted as members of such a select choir.

Robert Keable’s death requires a remembrance in Blackfriars, where almost first of anywhere, the writings of the new Keable found place. It was at the time of the founding of Blackfriars that he came in contact with those who were busy with its beginnings. He welcomed it, and was always its friend.

The friendship began in this way. His book, Standing-by, had been given me, and had captivated me, being, so I thought at the time, so I still think, the most admirable study of the War from the standpoint of religion, with its insistence on the two types of Christianity, Catholic and the Y.M.C.A., that is, the priestly religion, authoritative and sacramental, and the religion of clubs, libraries, gramophones, and cups of tea. Under the spell of the book, I wrote to thank the author in a letter of gratitude, addressed to him care of his publishers. For a couple of months I heard nothing. When I had forgotten all about my letter, written, it must be confessed, under the first emotion of the book’s beautiful style and exquisite language and delicate austerity of idea, I was pleasantly reminded of it by a very long answer, full of personal explanation and dated from Basutoland, whither Robert Keable had returned with his labour battalion when the War was done. In that letter one phrase of it may bear quotation: ‘Please pray, that I who have had the light to see the Vision may have the courage to follow it.’

At seventy-eight Father Fletcher, constrained by the infirmities of age to the retirement of Twyford Abbey, was persuaded to set down his recollections. It was forty years since he and Lister Drummond had started the Guild of Ransom—taking for their models ‘two old orders for the redemption of captives from the Moors, viz., that of Our Lady of Ransom (de Mercede) and that of the Trinitarians, both founded in the thirteenth century. . . .’ For forty years Father Fletcher had been identified with the work of the redemption of England from heresy. It is appropriate that his autobiography should be called the Recollections of a Ransomer ; appropriate, too, that the responsibility for the book, since its author did not live to see it through the press, should be upon two of Father Fletcher’s old friends—Mr. G. Elliot Anstruther (‘one of the best speakers, indoors and out, that the Catholics of this country possess’), and the Rev. William A. Spence. Simplicity, our editors note, and rightly, as the distinctive quality of Father Fletcher’s style; Le style, c'est l’homme même. It is the simplicity of a large-hearted man, a great lover of England and its people, of Ireland, of little children and the poor, that is revealed in these recollections, as it was revealed to all who knew him. Preeminently a man of prayer from boyhood : at sixteen, at his confirmation in the Church of England, ‘prayer and praise became a delight to me, and religion took possession of me and became first, instead of a long way behind.’

Why do these names come to me, ‘giving me short sighs,’ when I try to recall the romancers and novelists I have known or encountered, loved, liked, disliked? Is it because the haze of the Defence of Guenevere floated, drifted autumnally through my youthful dreamland just at the moment I met novelists of my own selection?

I had often seen Hector Malot (sixty of whose volumes are on the shelves of the London Library) with my parents. I knew his beard, his Sans famille, and I had wondered why his Romain Kalbris had never been given to me. His Bohème tapageuse, his Héritage d’Arthur (oddly connected in my first impressions with my elder brother’s prospects), and his Belle Madame Donis were not for the young, I was well aware.

Those two five-letter names have meant much to thousands, from the time they were children until they were middle-aged, or past middle-age. Macaulay’s nephew and biographer wrote of Kate Terry (the eldest of the Terry sisters) in 1852 : ‘It is almost worth while to be past middle life in order to have seen Miss Kate Terry in Arthur’ : countless others, born in mid or later Victorian times, feel the same, in regard to Ellen Terry, as they recall the beautiful voice and acting which made real and living to us Ophelia, Portia, Juliet, Beatrice, and Desdemona, and it is pleasant to reflect that those of a much younger generation have had the advantage of enjoying the greatness and variety of her gifts in the parts of Lady Macbeth (when she made us understand the relentless conscience and the human element yet alive in Lady Macbeth), of Cordelia, of Imogen, and of Volumnia.

To very many of us, her acting was not only a first revelation of Shakespeare, but, often, a realising of human character one could never have realised or found out for oneself. It is difficult to believe she could ever have had such far-reaching influence as an actress, if she had not been the woman she was; for none other of the Fine Arts so much as the art of acting seems to call for such a keen perception of the tragedy and the humour of life, of the sorrows of the world, its happiness, and its mirth, for all that we mean by the vague terms sensibility, and imagination.

The event in which Araunah’s threshing-floor figures is narrated in II Samuel xxiv, and again in I Chronicles xxi. We are there told that, because David had numbered his subjects, ‘the Lord sent a pestilence upon Israel and there died of the people from Dan even unto Beersheba seventy thousand men.’ But when the destroying angel had begun to strike Jerusalem, David saw him, and he humbled himself and confessed his sin. And ‘the Lord repented him of the evil, and said to the angel that destroyed the people: It is enough; stay now thine hand. And the angel of the Lord was standing by the threshing-floor of Araunah the Jebu-site .... And Gad came that day to David, and said unto him : Go up, rear an altar unto the Lord in the threshing-floor of Araunah the Jebusite.’ So David went up and asked Araunah, who happened to be there threshing, to sell him the threshing-floor so that he might build there an altar to the Lord. Like a true Oriental Araunah begs David to take not only the floor, but also the oxen he was threshing with for the burnt sacrifice and his threshing-drag for wood; he makes him a present of them all. But David knew what he was meant to understand, and paid Araunah the full value. ‘So David bought the threshing-floor and the oxen for fifty shekels of silver. And David built there an altar unto the Lord, and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings.’ (I Samuel xxiv, 15-25).

The problem of this book is important, and the solution given one we are unable to accept. James II, we are told, pursued two aims, the restoration of popular monarchy and toleration. He was defeated by the newly rich. He died virtually a martyr for the faith. With almost the insistence of a litany Mr. Belloc warns us that the ‘academic historians’ have very much erred in their ways. They are not denounced by name—a curious mercy in view of the fact that on this reign both Catholic and Protestant writers are in substantial agreement. Even the psalmist felt it excessive when he said all men are liars.

We learn that in spite of foreign parentage James was intensely national. It is indeed touching to know how much British bravery appealed to him. The sentiment, however, cannot have been overwhelming. It was not sufficiently strong to stay his feverish de money from Louis XIV at the beginning of his reign, on his humble excuses to that monarch for summoning a Parliament, or his resolve to regain his throne with the aid of Frenchmen. It did not preserve him from a ruthless disregard of the law of the land. In the Hales case, for example, he removed four indocile judges and the Solicitor-General. To secure the repeal of the Test Act he obtained the resignation or dismissal of half the Lords Lieutenant and eight hundred magistrates and filled their places with his own nominees.

In a useful work on the doctrine of the Incarnation published last year, Dr. Arendzen, speaking of the Agony in the Garden, writes as follows: ‘It would be a mistake to regard “this chalice” as the torments and death on the Cross, and to think that He prayed to escape crucifixion and was refused. The Chalice was the agony in the Garden. He asked it to pass away and it passed away.’ Readers of this passage would be naturally led to suppose that an opinion so confidently expressed was in no way open to question. An attempt is here made to show that it is open to question, and that there exists another, and much better founded, interpretation of this prayer of Our Lord.

Saint Mark gives the prayer in these words: ‘Abba, Father, all things are possible to Thee. Remove this chalice from me. Yet not what I will, but what Thou wilt’ (xiv, 36).

The first point to be decided is the meaning of the words ‘this chalice.’ We say, then, that Our Lord means by this phrase His passion and death on the Cross. First of all, this meaning is clear from a comparison with St. John xviii, II: ‘Jesus therefore said to Peter: Put up, thy sword into the scabbard. The chalice which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?’ Here, certainly, ‘the chalice’ stands for His passion and death. The Agony in the Garden was already over, the soldiers were about to arrest Jesus and to lead Him away, and Peter draws his sword in an attempt to save Him by force from the death which, he fears, awaits Him.

It was the twenty-ninth of January, 1577. The city of Salamanca, that Athens of sixteenth century Spain, showed no signs of unwonted animation. The students of its famous University prepared to attend their classes apparently unconscious of any untoward happening. Nevertheless an historic scene was about to be enacted in their midst. One of their professors, that valiant fighter, Fray Luis de Leon, was about to resume among them his interesting and instructive lectures after an interruption of five years. The ignorance of some, the malice of others, the impetuosity of his own temperament, had condemned him to pass that period in a harsh prison. Now at length, the Holy Office of the Inquisition had given sentence, exculpatory, even honourable for the accused, establishing his innocence and putting an end to his confinement, as was the invariable custom of this Tribunal in its dealings with those who had been found blameless.

The throng of hearers who knew full well the passionate nature of our hero were in eager expectation of hearing from his lips either some virulent denunciation of his enemies, some biting allusions to their attacks, or at least a lively, animated and at the same time harrowing exposition of the sufferings he had been compelled to undergo. But what was not their astonishment when their revered professor opened his lecture in these memorable terms: Dicebamus hesterna die; as we were saying yesterday.... just as if the five years spent in prison had been completely blotted out from his memory, leaving not the faintest trace of bitterness against the authors of his punishment, This lofty and noble attitude won for him the respect and admiration of his contemporaries whilst bringing into relief his ardent and impetuous, withal generous and magnanimous disposition.

Readers of The Daily News were recently given a scare in an article on a book which treats of the world’s food supply and the increase of population. The alarming conclusion was to the effect that within a measureable space of years the world would be faced with the prospect of starvation for many of its inhabitants, unless remedies were immediately devised to avert the danger. It is hardly necessary to say that ‘a constructive method of birth-control’ was among the suggested remedies.

Now this is the sort of scare that has an influence on the minds of many to-day who, through unavoidable ignorance of the true facts, are overawed by any quack who claims to speak in the name of what is called Science—a much abused word ! Science, if it be really science and worthy of our acceptance as representative of objective truth, ought to be a sure and evident knowledge of things. But many of the statements and conclusions of your modern scientist are nothing of the kind. They are, to say the best, no more than theories or hypotheses : to say the worst, they are often no better than myths which the scientists of to-morrow will throw aside as childish.

And in the case of the problem of the food-supply and the population, the scare-mongering scientists cannot even claim the support of their fellow-scientists. The fact of the matter is that there is plenty of evidence, theoretical and experimental, to prove that the feeding of the world, both present and future, in itself presents no extraordinary difficulty, provided that the artificial restrictions induced by modern financial control be removed.

As the time for the general elections in France at the end of April approaches, the Catholics are once again faced with a situation of real anxiety; and several recent indications of the attitude which they are adopting in regard to the elections deserve close attention. There is no denying the seriousness of the danger to which the Church may be exposed if the elections should produce results at all resembling those of four years ago—when the Bloc National was overthrown and M. Herriot came into office, pledged to revive immediately the old campaign of persecution against the Church. Much has happened in the meantime, and it may be useful to summarise briefly the main factors which have altered the situation.

Four years ago M. Poincaré went to the country after he had successfully carried out the threat of occupying the Ruhr—which other Governments had not dared to enforce, in their efforts to make Germany shoulder the costs of war damage. M. Poincaré put the threat into effect, with the backing of a great majority of the Bloc National Parliament, in much the same spirit in which last year he succeeded in restoring the value of the franc, by strong action and by a bold appeal for patriotic support, when all other politicians had failed to control the situation. But whereas M. Poincare’s efforts to save French credit have for various reasons succeeded, his policy in the Ruhr was disastrous not only to French finance, but to his own political position.

‘Le chacal, monté sur un piédestal vide, allonge son museau de loup derrière le buste d’un Pan à tête de bélier; la gazelle, l’autruche, l’ibis, la gerboise, sautent parmi les décombres, tandis que la poule sultane se tient immobile sur quelque débris, comme un oiseau hiéroglyphique de granit et de porphyre.’

We search in vain Brunetière’s History of Classical French Literature for a chapter on St. Simon; George Saintsbury deliberately omits Les liaisons dangereuses from his French Novel. Brunetiére and Saints-bury give their reasons, good or plausible; but who can tell us why Madame Gabrielli in hitherto published memoirs shares the fate of the due de St. Simon and Choderlos de Laclos?

She may haunt the manuscript pages that will delight and amaze the first quarter of the twenty-first century, if there are still readers to be delighted and amazed in those scarce imaginable years : in white, always, white boots, white gloves. She will trip or stumble, high-heeled, short-sighted, with her white silk bag containing sometimes diminutive white shoes (in rainy weather), with her wig frankly like a night cap. ‘In my youth they called me the lily,’ she declared at some dinner table, and the foreign butler tittered. When reproved the following day, he defended himself :’ Yes, I know, Miladi, mais le nez.’

Her hair was never white. In my time it was the colour of fuller’s earth. I saw her first at Mrs. Singleton’s. I thought her copper-coloured : but it must have been, a lighting effect.

For many reasons a whole-hearted welcome will be given to Father Brodrick’s Life of Blessed Robert Bellarmine. The profound sanctity of the great controversialist was a legacy to the Church which has long called for recognition and acclamation; and all Catholic students have felt deep gratitude to the Holy See for raising this great member of the Society of Jesus to the altars of the Church. The new Beatus will rightly become a fitting patron in these days of missionary need. The period of his life was, roughly speaking, the hour when the great schism in modern Europe was becoming stabilised. Looking back now over the intervening centuries, we see him as one of the last great warriors in defence of the old Church of Christendom, before the night of the Reformation had settled down upon us. After his day the Church withdrew in large measure from the guidance of Northern Europe, and a situation arose in which Catholicism stood enclosed and in a state of siege. Even into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the siege had to some extent been raised, the Church seemed to have been passed by, and half Europe stood determined to forget it. During this long period intermittent warfare has continued, and in the ephemeral and local controversies Catholic writers have mainly drawn on the armoury fashioned by Robert Bellarmine.

Mr. Coulton is consciously out to break idols, and he does so effectively. In moderation it is healthy and exhilarating; pursued for long stretches, it leaves one a little weary, invites reaction and confuses issues. A more eirenic perusal, for instance, of M. Maritain’s Art et Scholaslique—the contents of which he realises so inadequately—would have shown him that the scholastics held art to be a contemplative activity in the natural order, entirely engaged in the right way of making things. It may use religious symbols for material; it does not ‘express’ religion. The only thing it expresses is the form in the artist’s mind. If the artist happens to be a mystic, his work, however secular the subject, will be religious art: it results from his being. In any given civilisation the artist will use the symbols common to it. During the Middle Ages these were religious. It by no means follows that specifically Christian art was abundant. Indeed, it becomes increasingly rare as we descend from the Byzantine heights to the dreary flats of naturalism.

We think also that Mr. Coulton has not escaped confusing a discussion of medieval civilisation—that brief period in the history of the Church of Christ— with a polemic against, or an apologetic for, the truths of the Catholic Faith. This imperils judgment, evokes unnecessary passion, and fogs objective vision.

‘It would be a mortal error,’ M. Maritain has written, ‘to confound the universal cause of the Church with the cause of a particular civilisation….