When it was known that His Honour Judge Parry had written a new volume on The Bloody Assize, it seemed that at long last we should have a really judicial and temperate record of events that until now had been presented from no satisfactory point of view. Writers hitherto have generally been biassed by party feeling or swayed by modern prejudice; they have regarded the seventeenth century through the eyes—and the conventions—of the nineteenth, and they have been content (worst sin of all in a historical writer) to reproduce earlier statements without any honest endeavour to authenticate them or trace their origin. That they were clever men only made matters worse; who of us has not been swayed by Macaulay or Campbell, till we began to examine their ‘facts’ and enquire into their authorities? We find in them—and still more in lesser writers copying them—the same old suggestions, the same old stories, the same old accusations repeated time and again; often without acknowledgement, generally without question, and almost always without any judicial balance. But now that not only a lawyer but a judge, a man of our own days of cooler tolerance and understanding, was to tell the story once again it seemed that we might hope for a very different treatment. Unfortunately, in the book that lies before me now, we do not get it.

It is a pleasantly-written volume, light enough to interest the casual reader, serious enough to deserve attention. It is intended to appeal to a wide public, and is, therefore, the more dangerous. Frankly, it contains no new matter, and does not, I think, fairly or judicially present the old; once again we are given what we know already—and once again we are given it all on one side.

For the Catholic Church in England the year 1829 stood perceptibly for the opening of a new epoch. For the Catholic Church in Europe at large, on the other hand, it meant (although not so realised at the time) the closing of an old one. 1830 indeed was to usher in an era of Revolution. Thrones were to be shaken and dynasties disappear, wild political theories were to be acted on, the map of Europe re-arranged, and the balance of power shifted. Religion was to be insulted, cathedrals sacked, monasteries burned, priests attacked, the Church plundered and cast from her high estate. But in 1829 there was as yet little thought of all this, and on the surface of things there was only an ordered tranquillity. Yet 1829 was to be the very last of those fifteen years of peace which followed on the downfall of Napoleon, and were the outcome of that European settlement so skilfully and (as it was vainly hoped) so lastingly engineered by the statesmen of the Congress of Vienna.

Avery interesting book was once written by an American doctor on the authors and heroes of modern fiction. He submitted the writings of certain novelists of the United States and of these islands to an elaborate study, showing in the light of recent experimental psychology the various complexes of these authors and the public confessions which they involuntarily displayed in their books. Just as nowadays a man should be cautious about telling his dreams at the breakfast-table (an early amusement of the Victorian epoch) since dreams have been now Freudianly tabulated and will reveal at once his inhibited desires; so equally a modern author should be extremely careful how he writes and of what he writes, since inadvertently he is revealing not so much what he does, as what he would like to do if he dared.

Of all human situations, that perhaps which marks the end of a visit is the most difficult to define. Its ceremonial contains elements which cannot have varied greatly since the beginning; and yet it must, and does without hypocrisy, appear to be special to this leave taking, isolated from all others. Upon humble door-steps, and where even neither door nor step has been, ritual which is forever associated with ancient breeding observes its due development, the note of slight fatigue, the scarcely perceptible smile. There is no margin for criticism; for all that is evil or less perfect has been eliminated, while reticent benevolence pervades the rite.

A barrier as of golden gossamer, exquisite in its tenuity, descends; and it is at the same time a mutual screen to cover the nakedness of whatever regret, awkwardness, relief might humanly be present; restoring solemnity; preserving the sacredness of hospitality, recalling its noble etymology. Sooner or later, seldom or often, each has stood on one side or the other of this imagined partition.

The arresting phrase occurs in one of the rich crop of paragraphs called up by the recent return of Italian recognition of the Temporal Power. The pre-1870 Papal Railway, the old Papal Coach, the States of the Church Navy, and of course the famous Foreign Legions of the little Roman Army, each has served as a convenient peg on which to hang some sort of an article. Wonderfully interesting many of them have been. Only if we get some real facts down in black and white, they may prove scarcely less interesting.

Let us begin, then, with’ the Papal Army of to-day. First comes the famous Swiss Guard. Only it hardly concerns us English. For nobody but a Swiss may join it, and incidentally no Swiss may outside his own Army join anything else. It is his Government’s solitary exception to its Foreign Enlistment Act. Next comes the Noble Guard, the Corps to which Pope Pius IX was in his youth refused admission through a bodily weakness. With the exception of the war years, enlistment has always been rigorously confined to the Roman aristocracy, and our only thought for it need be that next to our own Life Guards at Whitehall it provided until recently the world’s last remaining instance of a mounted guard. There used to be five— at Petrograd, Potsdam, Paris, the Vatican, and Whitehall. To-day, our pageant of a guard over a Palace which is not there stands magnificently solitary in its class. Next in the Papal Army comes the Palatine Guard of Honour, a force of volunteers, whose only function is a parade order on occasions of great ceremony, and last of all we have the Pontifical Gendarmerie, really the Vatican Police.

Man, paddocked in a narrow garth Of earth,

Hath only towards the sky Infinity.

(Vincent McNabb, O.P.

Though the history of Catholic Emancipation in England is a long one, and though the names of those who helped forward its achievement are many, the actual passing of the Bill was due entirely to oiie man, Daniel O’Connell. It was his plan that was accepted by the Catholics, his form of Bill that was accepted by the Government and Parliament, and his personal energy and political sagacity that carried the movement and guided it, till its success was attained. To him more than to any single man these Centenary celebrations should do honour.

Born in 1775, he was a humble Catholic lawyer, with a burning enthusiasm and a stirring and inflammatory eloquence; he lived through and watched carefully the events that preceded and followed the troubles of 1798. From his consideration of these, he learnt as his own lesson, a disbelief in physical force, a hatred of the French Revolution, and a distrust of secret conspiracy. Hence, his own methods were founded upon a very different philosophy than that of the heroes of ‘98. His political plan was to concentrate upon every sort of agitation, as violently as possible, but without bloodshed. His eloquence was able to produce the agitation and his personal dominating power was able to keep that agitation perfectly within bounds.

One of the most ancient cities of the New World, a tribal centre from time immemorial, a seat of government long before the coming of the Spaniards, witness its ruins of the buildings of the Incas, San Francisco de Quito, to give it its full title, is one of the highest-placed capitals in the world. It lies at an altitude of over 9,300 feet, at the foot of the volcano of Pichincha and is almost on the equatorial line. The name Quito is said by some to be derived from the term Quitu given to the chief or cacique of the tribe of the Quichua who. inhabited it. Since their evangelization by Spain—it was annexed to the crown of Charles V in 1534 by Sebastian de Benalcazar, a lieutenant of Pizarro, and erected into a bishopric some nine years later—the inhabitants have ever been conspicuous for their loyalty and devotion to Holy Church. Its university rivalled that of Lima; its beautiful churches and monasteries are still remarkable. When that glory of the Western Hemisphere, Saint Rose of Lima, was called to her heavenly home, she would seem to have cast her mantle on the neighbouring capital, for shortly after was born there Blessed Mariana of Jesus, the ‘Lily of Quito,’ who spent her twenty-six years of heroic charity among its favoured people. During the last century it was a veritable beacon of light to the whole of Christendom. In the October number of Blackfriars reference was made to the official protest which, alone among nations, the Government of Quito issued against the unjust usurpation of Rome in 1870.

In the last two numbers of Blackfriars we have been considering the use that St. Thomas makes of the New Testament in the Summa contra Gentiles—that is, when defending the Christian Faith against unbelievers. Since writing those articles we have read, for the first time, a lecture in which the late Dr. Wicksteed deals with the same subject. The work of which the lecture forms a part has been highly praised in Catholic, as well as in non-Catholic, reviews for its presentation of St. Thomas’s doctrine. We wish to pass no judgment on the book as a whole, but concerning this particular lecture we think that there can be no doubt that it utterly fails to do justice to St. Thomas’s thought. As the point is an important one, and Dr. Wicksteed’s account is likely to be taken as satisfactory, we propose to attempt to justify our criticism of him. In doing so we may perhaps supply some of the deficiencies in our previous treatment of the question.

The success of the recent Ninth National Catholic

Congress, held at Westminster, marking as it did the celebration of the Centenary of Catholic Emancipation in this country, lends an added interest to this handy little volume, which contains the pith and kernel of those principles so steadily upheld and so well expounded on innumerable public occasions by His Eminence of Westminster.

Catholics in this country have come to look with confidence and affection towards Cardinal Bourne during the twenty-six years in which he has occupied the chief ecclesiastical position amongst them. They can safely look to him not only for the maintenance of Christian principles, but also for opportuneness in the statement of them and wisdom in their application. To these qualities His Eminence adds others peculiarly suited to his position in this country, strong but intelligent feeling for England and the British Empire, and a thorough sympathy with the English character. He is a thorough Englishman, most suited to guide the destinies of the Church in England at a time when Catholics are becoming increasingly numerous and increasingly free to take an active part in the life of their country and of the Empire. To start from this trait, we cannot fail to notice in the volume before us how His Eminence identifies himself throughout with the national life in its widest manifestations, whilst on the other hand his international outlook and above all his position in the Universal Church do not permit him to remain blind to the particular limitations of the British race and to the dangers to Catholic principles which have arisen at the present stage of British civilization.

From a German Dominican, Fr. Franziskus Stratman, O.P., comes ‘the first complete examination of the problem of Peace and War by a Catholic theologian since 1914’—so the publishers tell us. The result of this examination—conducted most gravely and dispassionately—is not only unfavourable, severely unfavourable, to war in general, it leaves all the wars of history, ancient and modern, condemned by the theologians and finds the makers of war guilty of doing violence to Christian principles. The clear statements of St. Augustine and St. Thomas, of Francis de Victoria, O.P., of Bellarmine and St. Alphonsus Liguori, quoted amply and relevantly by Fr. Stratman, prove fatal to proposals for the justification of war. No government in Europe of the nations called to war can be acquitted of offending against justice; so stringent are the conditions of a just war, so many are the rules laid down by theologians to bind mankind in the ways of peace.

It would be regrettable if the present year were allowed to pass without some mention in these pages of the centenary of Léon Harmel, born in 1829, that great lover of social justice whose name is connected with the issue of the Rerum Novarum. The great encyclical of Pope Leo XIII, which may well be called the workman’s charter of liberties, is a doctrinal expression of the principles which Harmel strove during his long life of eighty-six years to put into practice among his own employees.

His fellow-countrymen held the celebrations of his centenary in Paris in February last, and in May similar celebrations took place in Rome. It is greatly to be desired that we also in England may find some fitting means during the course of this year to bring back to the public mind the principles and work for which the name of Léon Harmel stands. At present his name and work are almost unknown even among Catholics in this country, where, much more than in France, we are reaping the evil harvest of social injustice which he prophesied with such a certain voice. The French celebrations have produced a fruit of lasting worth in the brochure published by Père Guitton,

S.J., with its title significative of the life-work of Harmel, Léon Harmel et L’ Initiative Ouvrière. Liberty and enterprise of the individual—that is the type of teaching so much needed in these days of insane monopoly and centralisation which are fast bringing into existence the Servile State—the organised exploitation of the work of the masses for the private advantage of the few.

It is always difficult to see a situation from a point of view which has never been ours, and it is sometimes more difficult to recapture, in imagination and sympathy, a point of view which is ours no longer. The more ardent our conviction the more difficult is the task of approaching a situation with the eyes and hearts of those who differ from us. Yet normally the accomplishment of this task is a necessary preliminary to all fruitful controversy. If you attack a man’s strong convictions and, in attacking them, betray your blindness to their influence over his heart and mind, or to the real truth implicit in them, you will produce nothing but irritation and a stronger loyalty to the error you are trying to dislodge. To be able to understand and to show that you understand what his convictions mean to him; to be able to separate in your own mind the true from the false in the things that claim his allegiance, is the only sure way of securing from him a fair hearing for the truth which he lacks and you possess.

In our relations with Anglo-Catholics we are generally conspicuously remiss in acting upon these first principles of fruitful controversy, and our failure arises in part from a quite natural inability to understand a point of view very different from our own. The result is an inevitable feeling, generally inarticulate, that an Anglo-Catholic must be either a knave or a fool. Even when unconsciously present in the mind this presupposition does not make for success in controversy, when we are faced by opponents whose learning and honesty are probably not less than our own.

From Irish and Scottish books on architecture and Irish and Scottish archaeological writings in general, one is apt to take a very erroneous impression concerning the ancient ecclesiastical buildings of these two countries. This impression is not, of course, deliberately produced by the writers responsible for the literature spoken of; but it is apt to form in the ‘average reader’s’ mind, nevertheless, and to tincture all his thoughts and comments that have to do with this subject. The matter turns on the employment of the word ‘primitive’ to describe the type of stone building associated with the planters of Christianity in Ireland and Scotland. The use of this word in connection with these structures is quite correct, but the circumstances under which it has become so ought to be explained to the lay reader, who, without any such explanation, and so far as my observation extends none gives it, is apt to draw very erroneous conclusions touching these same ‘primitive’ ecclesiastical erections.

Including the Editors, some fifty-six writers have contributed to this bulky volume. Their object is thus stated : ‘Though the historical and archaeological importance of the books is immense, it is the spiritual use of them which is their proper use, and it is principally to this spiritual use of the Bible that we intend our Commentary to minister.’

The commentary itself is, in general, brief and to the point. But the prime feature of the work lies in the various Prefaces, beginning with Dr. Gore’s opening chapter on The Bible in the Church. Needless to say that in the space of a brief review we can but single out certain points for consideration, and we shall confine ourselves to the Old Testament.

First of all let us take at random some of the pronouncements formulated in these pages : ‘Chronicles is very bad evidence for the truth of what happened in the reign of David, but it is excellent evidence for the opinions held in priestly circles at the beginning of the third century b.c.’ (p. 19). Again, Chronicles is described by Wellhausen—and his words are endorsed in the Commentary—as a transparent mutilation of the original narratives as preserved for us in the Books of Samuel.’ And the Commentary adds: ‘He (the chronicler) gained his objective at the cost of historic truth, and Nemesis followed on his success. Certainly we do not find here the gift of inspiration at its highest,’ but, ‘in spite of his lack of the sense of historical veracity (he), must be recognised as really inspired to write’ (p. 275).

A Noble Style in Architecture

The art which endures is that which is greatly distinctive, besides being beautiful. Waiving the first endeavours of primitive man, for these doings are far too remote to be seen clearly, it may be asserted with complete assurance, that never yet did a school of artists ply their craft, who did not begin by relying on a senior school. A very long page would be needful, whereon to show forth the debts which France owed, on the one hand to Italy, on the other to the Low Countries. And if the Greek achievement was fully as individual as the French, in its early stages Hellenic art tells clearly of discipleship of Egypt and Assyria. The architecture called Scottish Baronial is notably among those things, which combine distinctiveness with beauty. But in approaching a tribute to this work, it behoves to remember that it could not have from the start its markedly idiosyncratic temper. Who were the preceptors of the initial artists in the formula?

There is widespread the idea that the Franco-Scottish alliance originated with the marriage of Mary, Queen of Scots, to the Dauphin. But the league was ancient on that event, and it would seem to have been David I, crowned King of Scots in 1124, who first brought about intimate relations between his compatriots and the French. Caring before all else for things ecclesiastical, he was founder of most of the Scottish abbeys; and one of his actions was to bring to his dominions a group of French monks who were skilled in building. Thus it was normal that soon there should stand revealed, alike in churches and castles in Scotland, an affinity with French architecture.