THE
CATHOLIC WORLD.
AP
2.
C3
A V'fO
MONTHLY MAGAZINE
OF
PUBLISHED BY THE PAULIST FATHERS.
VOL. CVI.
OCTOBER, 1917, TO MARCH, 1918
NEW YORK:
THE OFFICE OF THE CATHOLIC WORLD
120 WEST 6oxH STREET
1918
CONTENTS.
Aguecheek : A Yankee Hagiogra-
pher. — Michael Earls. S.J., . . 519
Aims and Methods in Social Insur-
ance.— John O'Grady, Ph.D., . 91
Alcohol in Medicine Fifty Years
Ago and Now. — James J. Walsh,
M.D., Ph.D., Sc.D 371
Ancient Vision and the Newer
Needs, An. — George Nauman
Shuster, 733
Apple of Discord, The. — Clio
Mamer, 62
Aspects of Recent Drama in Eng-
lish.— Katherine Bregy, 445, 654, 764
Benedictines of Caldey, The. —
Katharine Tynan, 528
Cambridge History of English Lit-
erature, A Page of the. — A G.
Brickel, SJ., 589
Canon Sheehan and Public Events.
— P. J. Lennox, 508
Carlyle and the Nineteenth Cen-
tury.— Moorhouse I. X. Millar,
SJ.,
Cardinal of Spain, The. — Anna T.
77*
633
Sadlier,
Case of Socialism v. The Catho-
lic Church and the United
States, The. — Henry Churchill
Semple, SJ., 646
Catholic Church, The Glories of
the. — F. Aurelio Palmieri, O.S.
A., Ph.D., 196, 313
Centenary, of the Society of Mary.
— John E. Garuin. S.M., ... 26
City Beautiful, The Saint of the. —
Joseph H. McMahon. Ph. D.. . 179
Comic Spirit, Jane Austen and the.
— Brother Leo, 752
Classical Element in Shakespeare,
The. — Julian E. JoKnstone, . . 38
Dante and His Times. — Thomas
O'Hagan, M.A., Ph.D., Litt.D., 327
Discord. The Apple of. — Clio.
Mamer, 62
Distributive State, The. — Hilaire
Belloc. 302, 462
Drama of the Nativity, The. —
Charles Phillips, 289
Echoes of the Canticle of Canti-
cles in Mediaeval Literature. —
May G. Segar, 782
Edward Lee Greene. — Margaret B.
Downing, 13
English, Aspects of Recent Drama
in. — Katherine Bregy, 446, 654, 764
"Fair Maid of February." — Har-
riett e Wilbur, 671
Francis Ledwidge. — Katharine
Tynan, 185
Freedom of Speech in War Time.
— John A. Ryan, D.D 577
French Priests in Literature. —
William P. H. Kitchin. Ph.D., . 462
Glories of the Catholic Church,
The.— F. Aurelio Palmieri, O.S.
A.. Ph.D., 196, 313
Glory of Padua, The. — Joseph
Francis Wickham, . . 811
Greene, Edward Lee. — Margaret B.
Downing, 13
Grievance of the Spring Wheat
Growers, The. — Frank O'Hara,
Ph.D., 380
Guild Idea, The.— Theodore May-
nard,
History, A Paradox of. — Joseph V.
McKee, AM .
Holly Lore. — Harriette Wilbur. .
Idea, The Guild.— Theodore May-
nard,
Italian Art and the War.—/. F.
Scheltema,
721
82
346
721
361
Jane Austen and the Comic Spirit.
— Brother Leo, . . . . . 752
Julius Caesar, The Play of. — Emily
Hickey, 216
Literature, French Priests in. —
William P. H. Kitchin, Ph.D., . 462
Misfortunes of Mr. Jones, The. —
G. K. Chesterton, 599
Myth of Soulless Woman, The. —
Charles F. Aikin, S.T.D.. A.B., . 804
Nativity, The Drama of the. —
Charles Phillips, 289
Newer Needs, An Ancient Vision
and the. — George Nauman Shus-
ter, 733
New Theory of Political Sov-
ereignty, A. — John A. Ryan,
D.D., 237
Nineteenth Century, Carlyle and
the. — Moorhouse I. X. Millar,
SJ 772
Novel, The Retreat of the Ameri-
can.— George Nauman Shuster, . 166
"Our Maurice Francis." — Charles
Phillips 227
Padua, The Glory of. — Joseph
Francis Wickham, . . . .811
Paganism, The Propaganda of. —
Dudley G. Wooten, . . . i, 152
Page of the Cambridge History of
English Literature, A. — A. G.
Brickel, SJ 589
Paradox of History, A. — Joseph V.
McKee, AM 82
Parousia, St. Matthew and the. — •
Edmund T. Shanahan, S.T.D.,
433, 618, 790
Play of Julius Caesar, The. — Emily
Hickey, 216
Political Sovereignty, A New
Theory of. — John A. Ryan, D.D., 237
Propaganda of Paganism, The. —
Dudley G. Wooten, . . . i, 152
Recent Events,
129, 269, 416, 557, 700, 846
Re-education by War. — William J.
Kerby, Ph.D., 45 1
Retreat of the American Novel,
The. — George Nauman Shuster. 166
Russian Church and the Revolu-
tion, The. — F. Aurelio Palmieri,
O.S.A., Ph.D., D.D., . ... 661
Saint for Soldiers, A. — Charles
Phillips 483
St. Matthew and the Parousia. —
Edmund T. Shanahan, S.T.D.,
433. 618, 790
Saint of the City Beautiful, The.—
Joseph H. McMahon, Ph.D.. . 179
Science, Vagaries of Modern. — J.
Godfrey Raupert, K.S.G., . . 337
Shakespeare, The Classical Ele-
ment in. — Julian E. Johnstone, 38
Shakespeare's Sonnets : To Whom
Dedicated ? — B. Frank Carpen-
ter, Ph.D., 496
Social Insurance, Aims and Meth-
ods in. — John O'Grady, Ph.D., 91
Socialism v. The Catholic Church
and the United States, The Case
of. — Henry Churchill Semple,
SJ., . . 646
Society of Mary!, Centenary of
the.— John E. Garvin, S.M.. . 26
Soldiers, A Saint for. — Charles
Phillips -483
Some Notes on War Poetry — Sur-
sum Corda ! — "harles Phillips, . 606
"Special Creation." — Sir Bertram
C. A. W indie, LL.D., .... 14$
Superstitions Old and New. —
James J. Walsh, M.D., Ph.D.,
Sc.D., S3
CONTENTS
in
State, The Distributive. — Hilaire
Belloc, 302,
Sursum Corda ! — Some Notes on
War Poetry. — Charles Phillips, .
Vagaries of Modern Science. — /.
Godfrey Raupert, K.S.G.,
War Conditions, Woman and Child
Labor Under. — Joseph V. Mc-
Kee, A.M.,
War in the Villages. — Thomas
Alexander Baggs, ....
War, Re-education by. — William J.
462 Kerby, Ph.D., .451
War Time, Freedom of Speech in.
606 — John A. Ryan, D.D., . . . 577
With Our Readers,
337 137, 281, 427, 569, 714, 857
Woman and Child Labor Under
War Conditions. — Joseph V.
McKee, A.M., 742
Woman, The Myth of Soulless. —
-Charles F. Aiken, S.T.D., A.B., .
Father Denis Takes a Holiday. —
Katharine Tynan,
The Portrait. — Anna T. Salier, .
A Ballad of France. — Michael
Earls, S.J., • • •
A Great Mystery. — Violet O'Con-
nor
All Things Unto Good. — Francis P.
Donnelly, S.J
A Song. — Charles J. Quick. S.J., .
My Lesson. — Mary Reeves,
Christmas. — Franklin C. Keyes, .
His Way.— Hugh F. Blunt, . . .
NEW
A Father of Women and Other
Poems,
A Glory of Maryland, ....
A Green lent in Flanders, .
A Handy Companion, ....
A Harmony of the Synoptic Gos-
pels,
A Short History of England, .
Alaska the Great Country, .
A Literary Pilgrim in England, .
A Manual of the History of Dog-
mas
American Civil Church Law,
A Naturalist of Souls, ....
A New Basis for Social Progress,
A Treasure of War Poetry,
Anthology of Magazine Verse for
1917.
Army and Navy Information, .
Arthur Stanton,
A Scallop Shell of Quiet, . . .
A Social History of the American
Family
A Young Lion of Flanders, .
Ballads of Peace in War, .
"Blessed Art Thou Among Wom-
en,"
Boys and Girls from Storyland, .
Britain in Arms,
Canada the Spellbinder, .
Cardinal Me*cier,
Catholic Churchman in Science, .
Cecilia of the Pink Roses, .
Charred Wood
Children's Book of Patriotic Stor-
ies,
Child's Life of Abraham Lincoln, .
Christine
Day and Night Stories, ....
Devotion to the Sacred Heart of
Jesus
Dreams and Realities, ....
Dunsany the Dramatist, .
England and the War
English Literature,
Epistemology or the Theory of
Knoiwledge
Essays on the Reform and Revival
of Classical Studies, ".
Evenings with Great Authors, .
Faith, War and Policy
Fairies and Goblins from Story-
land,
742
Woman, The Myth of Soulless. —
234 -Charles F. Aiken, S.T.D., A.B., . 804
STORIES.
The Second Drowning of Lishus
350 Doe. — Jaques Busbee, .... 72
206
POEMS.
Knights Errant. — 5". M. M., . . . 52
24 Pax. — Helen Haines, .... 444
The Homeless God. — George Ben-
653 son Hewetson, 81
Saints' Gold. — John Bunker. . . 598
771 The Reyealer. — Caroline Giltinan, 803
205 The Vision and the Deed. — Ed-
527 ward F. Garesche, S.J., . . . 369
336 The Writings of St. John of the
184 Cross. — Mary T. Waggaman, . 151
PUBLICATIONS.
French Windows 683
698 From Moscow to the Persian Gulf, 108
835 Garden Overseas and Other
390 Poems, 696
415 God and Myself 837
Gone to Earth 842
548 God's Armor, 415
818 Great French Sermons, . . . .39'
545 Harry Butters, R.F.A 535
689 Hell and Its Problems 836
History of the Spanish Conquest
245 of Yucatan and the Itzas, . . 104
830 "Honest Abe," 693
540 Hospital French, 555
820 How to Debate 938
825 In Happy Valley, 694
In Spite of All 843
Innocence and Ignorance, . . . 691
Inside the British Isles, 1917, . . 261
Is There Salvation Outside the
Catholic Church 837
Italy Mediaeval and Modern, . . 267
263 Joy 556
548 Life and Letters of Maggie Ben-
840 son 404
Life and Letters of Sister St.
107 Francis Xavier of the Sisters of
413 Providence of St. Mary of the
833 Woods, Indiana 690
546 Life and Letters of Thomas- Hodg-
681 kin, 826
551 Life of Robert E. Lee for Boys
841 and Girls, 694
697 Lilla . . . 1 06
Little Pilgrims to Our Lady of
551 Lourdes, 692
839 Long Live the King, . 552
251 Lord Northcliffe's War Book . . 833
407 Lucky Bob, 845
Luther 247
699 Main Street, and Other Poems, . 405
249 Manna of the Soul 552
544 Martie the Unconquered, . . . 555
397 Merlin, 255
408 Militant American and Jesus
Christ, 687
821 Moseteno Vocabulary and Treat-
ises 839
544 My Little Town 413
402 My War Diary 697
266 Notre Dame Verse, 262
On the Slopes of Calvary, . . . 119
413 Operative Ownership 102
A, A <">•,,.<>,• tV.» Tnn 2S.S
IV
CONTENTS
Poems and Parodies, .... 393
Poems of Conformity 679
Prolegomena to an Edition of the
Works of Decimus Magnus An-
sonius 554
Reality and Truth 822
Red Pepper's Patients .... 842
Reed Voices 831
Rhodante, or the Rose in the Gar-
den of the Soul's Delight, . . 838
Running Free 412
Sister Rose and the Mass of Rep-
aration, 698
Socialism and Feminism, . . . 685
Soldier Songs, 408
Solution of the Great Problem, . 118
Somewhere Beyond, 839
State Socialism, 53<>
Straws from the Manger, . . . 403
Successful Canning and Preserv-
ing, 268
Summer, 127
Tell Me a Story Picture Book, . 413
Tertullian's Apology, .... 245
The Adventures of the Greyfur
Family, 4*3
The American Soldiers' and Sail-
ors' Diary for 1918, . . . . 698
The Ashley-Smith Explorations
and the Discovery of a Central
Route to the Pacific (1822-29), . 684
The Basis of Durable Peace, . . in
The Boyhood of a Priest, . . . 699
The British Navy at War, ... 265
The Case is Altered, .... 394
The Catholic Encyclopedia and Its
Makers 414
The Catholic's Work in the World, 541
The Church and State, . . . 114
The Church and the Hour, . . . 844
The Church and the Sacraments, . 829
The City Worker's World, . . . 264
The Coming, 4"
The Coming Democracy, . . . 389
The Continuity of the Church of
England 828
The Cruise of the Corwin, . . . 827
The Cycle of Spring, .... 247
The Destruction of Merchant
Shies 112
The r'-'ine Image, 403
The D .lling Place of Light, . . 694
The Discovery of America, . . 835
The Eastern Question 388
The England of Shakespeare, . 396
The Expansion of Europe, the Cul-
mination of Modern History, . 834
The Expository Value of the Re-
vised Version 553
The Externals of the Catholic
Church, 836
The Foes of Our Own Household, 543
The Greyfur's Neighbors, . . . 413
The Heart of the Gospel, . . . 836
The Holy Scriptures According to
the Masoretic Text 116
The Honan Hostel Chapel, Cork, 685
The Hostage 682
The Inner Door, 410
The Journal of Submarine Com-
mander Von Forstner, . . . 843
The Ladies of Dan Lyrics, . . 827
The Land of Dee. ng Shadow :
Germany at the ihird Year of
War 832
The Life and Poetry of James
Thomson (B. V.) 253
The Land of Enough 412
The Life of Algernon Charles
Swinburne, 259
The Life of Henry David Thoreau, 398
The Life of Mother Pauline von
Mallinckrodt 250
The Lily of Israel 112
The Livine Present, . 124
The Martyr of Futuna, .... 554
The Mediator 553
The Method in the Madness, . . 252
The Mexican Problem 392
The Mississippi Valley in British
Politics, 119
The Mystery of Gabriel, . . . 841
The Mystical Knowledge of God, . 838
The National Budget System and
American Finance, . . . . 257
The Nature and History of the
Bible 402
The New Archeological Discover-
ies and Their Bearing Upon the
New Testament and Upon the
Life and Times of the Primitive
Church, 244
The Origin and Evolution of Life, 831
The Parish Theatre, .... 550
The Party and Other Stories, . . 689
The Poems of Joseph Mary Plun-
kett, 246
The Poetic Year of 1916, . . . 125
The Poetical Works of Thomas
MacDonagh, 246
The Prophecy of Micah, . . . 553
The Quest of El Dorado, ... 546
The Rebirth of Russia 394
The Red Planet, no
The Religious Education of an
American Citizen, . . . . 113
The Religious Poems of Lionel
Johnson, 826
The Riddles of Hamlet and the
Newest Answers 691
The Right to Work 542
The Royal Outlaw 693
The Ruby Cross 549
The Russian School of Painting, . 108
The Sisters of Charity of Naza-
reth, Kentucky, . . . • . . 249
The Social Teaching of the Pro-
phets and Jesus, 401
The Soldiers' and Sailors' Prayer
and Song Book 556
The Soldiers' English and French
Conversation Book, . . . . 556
The Soldiers' Service Dictionary, . 556
The Sorry Tale, . . ... .550
The Soul of a Bishop 695
The Spires of Oxford, and Other
Poems, ......... 402
The Story Book of Science, . . 830
The Story of Bible Translations, . 117
The Substance of Gothic, . . . 389
The Tender Pilgrims, .... 835
The Voice of Belgium, .... 541
The Wages of Honor, and Other
Stories, 413
The Wanderers, 400
The Water Babies 549
The What? Why? How? Plan
for Writing an Essay, . . . 556
The Women of Belgium, . . . 105
The World's Debate 819
Those Times and These, . . . 109
Three Plays, 406
Thrice Through the Dark Conti-
nent 823
Thursday With the Blessed Sacra-
ment, 699
Tomorrow and Other Poems, . . 840
Under Fire 409
Unmade in Heaven 844
Utopia of Usurers, 539
Various Discourses 547
Very Reverend Charles H. McKen-
na, O.P., Missionary and Apostle
of the Holy Name Society, . . 538
Wessel Gansfort, Life and Writ-
ings, 829
Wild Earth, and Other Poems, . 406
Word-Book of the English Tongue, 268
Workmen's Compensation, . . . 256
Your Part in Povertv. . 2^6
THE
CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. CVI.
OCTOBER, 1917.
No. 631.
THE PROPAGANDA OF PAGANISM.
BY DUDLEY G. WOOTEN.
I.
MONG the memories of school days there lingers in
the minds of some of us the recollection of a certain
river in Gaul, described by Caesar in his Commen-
taries, which he says flowed with such swiftness and
smoothness that one standing on its banks could not
tell in which direction it really ran. The rapidity and ease with
which the course of public sentiment upon social, political, religious
and moral questions, especially in the United States, has wrought
startling changes before the eyes of men yet in middle life, and the
increasing readiness with which landmarks and safeguards deemed
valuable and venerable a generation ago are being swept away1, may
well provoke a bewilderment akin to that of the Roman conqueror as
he gazed upon the mountain torrent in the Gallic wilderness. It is
hard to know whether the merciless movement of innovation is one
of advancement, of retrogression, or of that recurring decadence
that heretofore uniformly characterized the destinies of men and
nations.
True, all of this change and chaos of old order is justified
in the name of Progress. " Progressivism " has become the fetish
of the land and age, and the modern reformer worships at the
shrine of his iconoclastic cult with the folly and fanaticism of
heathen idolatry. We hear continually of " forwai; 'joking men;"
the air is thick with the mists of visionary altruism; the din and
Copyright. 1917.
VOL. CVI. — I
THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY OF ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE
IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK.
2 THE PROPAGANDA OF PAGANISM [Oct.,
drivel of the " uplifter " are distressing to normal ears. We are
promised a system of life and law and morals under which all that
is old and honored and crowned by the tests of time and experience
shall be rejected as obsolete, whatsoever is radical and revolution-
ary be acclaimed as the triumph of new freedom, and it is said
the world will grow young again and transcendently lovely in the
light of the gospel of desecration and destruction. The prevalent
obsession is not confined to the emotional populace nor championed
chiefly by rabid agitators among ignorant enthusiasts. It sits in the
seats of the mighty and finds its boldest apostles among those who
claim to voice the culture, the aspirations and the ultimate policies
of both the government and the people. Even the titular head of
the nation lends it the prestige of official sanction, giving currency
to its favorite cant by a scholastic sneer at " those whose heads are
twisted over their shoulders in vain contemplation of the past."
The characteristics of this nihilistic cult are irreverence, un-
limited arrogance, reckless audacity, egotistic contempt for prece-
dent, tradition and established methods. Antiquity, the acquiescence
of immemorial custom, the long continuance of an ideal or an insti-
tution are in themselves offensive to its ruthless creed. Its funda-
mental tenets — if it can be said to possess anything so permanent
as a tenet — are defiance of authority, repudiation of fixed principles,
rebellion against the discipline of superior standards. Herein lies
the difficulty, almost the hopelessness, of combating the heresies of
the new philosophies. They forestall and forbid argument by de-
stroying or denying the bases of right reason and intelligent judg-
ment. The mere agnostic is a passive menace to faith and vital
truth. He refuses to affirm any belief or to accept any doctrine as
proven. Under favorable conditions his mind is open and there is
a chance to change his attitude of exasperating negation to one of
receptive tolerance and perhaps of final conviction. But the nihilist
defies all reasoning by rejecting all premises and advocating the
abolition of the fundamental facts of history and humanity. Archi-
medes could have moved the earth if given a place to stand, but a
Titan could not stir a clod if lifted into mid-air.
For want of a better name, it is customary to classify the dev-
astating doctrines of the new school of thought and experiment
under the general term, Paganism. In the sense of being amti-
Christian, this designation is fairly descriptive, but as an accurate
definition it is misleading and to a degree unjust. Paganism in its
prime was a healthier and a wiser system than the chaotic and
I9I7-] THE PROPAGANDA OF PAGANISM 3
desolating propaganda that today attacks the foundations of social
order, despises the limitations of moral law, derides the sanctions of
political tradition, and predicates its popularity upon the automatic
solvency of human judgment. There were gods in Pagan-land,
faith in the divinity of loftier beings, immortal standards of right^
thinking and heroic achievement, the authority of a moral code
having its putative source and spirit outside the bosom and brain of
man. The Paganism of the classic world produced a philosophy
profound and inspiring in the very futility of its solutions ; it evolved
a literature whose brilliancy has outlived its blemishes and remains
for all time as the loftiest and least convincing evidence of intellec-
tual sufficiency; it transmitted to after ages and to all mankind
artistic ideals that glorified the beauties of the material sense, and
kindled while they disappointed the aspirations of the human soul.
The modern Paganism holds no such prospects. Stripped of
its specious sophistries and incredible presumption, it is a sordid and
unsatisfying creed of lawless negations, affected with all the im-
perfections and possessing few of the sincerities of the ancient faiths
of the non-Christian era. There is in reality nothing novel or un-
tried in most of the proposed innovations of the present propaganda.
Its futilities are as old as that primeval experiment on the plains
of Shinar, that begot the dispersion of races and the confusion of
tongues; its dominant fallacy is denounced in Christ's warning to
the multitude : " Which of you by taking thought can add to his
stature one c"ubit?" But considered as a system and in historical
sequence, this paganizing propaganda is exactly four centuries old
in this year of Our Lord. A considerable number of good people
are preparing to celebrate the quadricentennial of its inauguration,
although to thoughtful students of history a formal festival is
unnecessary and somewhat belated, besides being totally inadequate
to attest the colossal consequences of the event. Already, for al-
most three years past, the logical results of the movement have been
in process of celebration amid the roar of the world's guns and the
slaughter of European civilization, while the final tragedy of its
consummation threatens to envelop all humanity in the awful cata-
clysm.
Whatever is disquieting, disorganizing and destructive in the
present conditions and tendencies of social, moral, religious and
political affairs, in our own country and in all the countries of the
Christian world, can be traced back, step by step, and with unerring
certainty, to the politico-religious revolution that began in Germany
4 THE PROPAGANDA OF PAGANISM [Oct.,
and other Protestant lands in the sixteenth century. Fundament-
ally and primarily a revolt against the mediaeval Church, that move-
ment soon involved in its legitimate scope and inevitable conse-
quences every vital interest of. both Church and state. It was called
a Reformation, but in truth it was a revolution against the accumu-
lated achievements of human wisdom and piety for the previous
fifteen hundred years, and to a considerable degree against the ex-
perience and judgment of the civilized nations since the dawn of
history. It announced the repudiation of the bases upon which both
religion and politics had conducted their cooperative efforts for so-
cial amelioration during the whole formative period of Christian
civilization. Ostensibly a triumph of religious freedom and spirit-
ual independence, it marked the supremacy of secular over sacred
authority, and obliterated at once the landmarks and safeguards of
both civil liberty and religious toleration.
Prior to the Lutheran defection, the relations between Church
and State throughout the Christian world had been well defined and
mutually beneficial. The first Christian emperor, in the fourth
century, had declared that the ecclesiastical authority had the right
to decide all questions between sovereign rulers and between each
ruler and his subjects; but the Church declined to assent to this
sweeping concession of Constantine or to assume the responsibility
of so wide a jurisdiction. She preferred to stand upon the canon
of her Divine Founder, rendering " unto Caesar the things that are
Caesar's and to God the things that are God's." Two centuries
later Gregory the Great reaffirmed this position of the Church, and
thereafter, for nearly a thousand years, the fundamental tenet of
both the Papal and the imperial governments of Christendom de-
manded the absolute separation of the secular and the ecclesiastical
powers, each independent and supreme in its own sphere, but coor-
dinating and cooperating with each other in their respective fields
of authority. That was the original Catholic conception, and after
the lapse of all the centuries that have rolled between, that is today
the attitude of the Church in her relations to our own government
and to all other temporal sovereignties. In the exigencies of cer-
tain crises in the affairs of Europe and under the peculiar circum-
stances of individual rulers of both Church and state, there have
been infractions of this established rule, and the disciplinary inter-
vention of the Papacy to correct or to restrain flagrant abuses has
sometimes been invoked ; but the historic and accepted standard of
action on the part of the Church has not changed since it was first
1917.] THE PROPAGANDA OF PAGANISM 5
proclaimed in the infancy of the struggle between civil and reli-
gious jurisdiction.
But this separation did not imply or permit the absolute emanci-
pation of secular rulers from the universal sway of those canons of
justice and righteousness which the Church, as the representa-
tive of divine authority, administered in the forum of conscience
and as the custodian of public and private morals. Christianity was
the religion of all the great nations of that era, and the Catholic
Church was the only source of Christian faith and practice. The social
and political structure of European institutions under feudal or-
ganization made the Papacy the religious over-lord of Christendom,
and the proudest sovereignties of that age acknowledged fealty and
service to the suzerainty of the Holy See in the moral government
of the nations. Independent and supreme in his own dominions as
to the temporal interests of his people, each royal ruler yielded
homage and obedience to the Church in the realm of religion and the
forum of morals; nor did this subordination of the secular to the
sacred authority in such issues cease as between nation and nation —
it extended to the administration of the internal affairs of each
government and secured the rule of righteousness between the sov-
reign and his subjects. Thus there was created a system of re-
lated responsibilities between Church and state, in which the fonner
became the spiritual teacher, the moral guide and the political arbi-
trator of the latter, without at all impairing the supremacy of either.
It begot the sentiment of Christian unity, the recognition of a uni-
versal code of moral law, and it established a uniform and stable
basis of public policy and social advancement. Likewise, it in-
spired in men's minds the ideal and the desire of one great Christian
fellowship — a conception that disappeared with the advent of the
Protestant view of human destiny — :and it foreshadowed that
world-wide league for controlling the selfish ambitions and despotic
tendencies of human rulers, which has latterly become the dream of
those who yearn for universal peace and the adequate means to
enforce it. Under the operation of this admirable organization
of forces, despite the hindrances and miscarriages due to the in-
eradicable vices of all mortal agencies, modern civilization was
nurtured, all that is really valuable in modern culture was begotten
or conceived, and the Middle Ages — so falsely named the Dark Ages
by bigotry and ignorance — became the brooding period of knowl-
edge, invention and discovery for all the ages that were to come.
The " Reformation " changed all that. It did, indeed, r^-form
6 THE PROPAGANDA OF PAGANISM [Oct.,
Europe in more ways than one, but in the perspective of the four
hundred years that have since elapsed, in the light of present con-
ditions and tendencies, who shall pronounce a categorical approval of
the motives, the methods or the consequences of so radical a re-
versal of the religious, moral and political constitution of the Chris-
tian world? It is not too late nor too soon to question both the
proximate and the ultimate results of the change, for " We are
-ancients on the earth and in the morning of the times."
The fundamental dogma of Protestantism, that asserted the
right of private judgment in matters of faith and conscience, nec-
essarily implied a like liberty of decision in matters of morals, of
justice and of social duty. It is not thinkable that man may claim
a latitude of opinion and action in his relations to God and eternity
that is denied to him in his relations to this temporal life. We may
pass over, as both too paradoxical for analysis and too theological
for a layman's skill, that companion dogma, so dear to Lutheranism,
that in the exercise of this indispensable right of personal judgment
man neither enjoys the privileges nor incurs the penalties of free
will. Starting with the doctrine that each individual is the judge of
his own religious belief and the sole arbiter of his moral responsi-
bility, the evolution of the Protestant attitude towards all questions,
both secular and sacred, became merely a matter of time and logical
development. If each person may thus investigate and decide for
himself, it must be that every group of individuals similarly situated
and related may choose for itself and establish by law its particular
creed of worship and the resultant moral and social code. This, of
course, at once transferred the controversy between the Reformers
and the Church from the domain of religious dialectics to the realm
of politics and diplomacy, which well served the designs of the
leaders of the movement. Racial antagonisms, national prejudices
and international rivalries were invoked to aid the revolt against
Rome, and a series of politico-religious wars speedily ensued, shat-
tering the Christian unity of Europe, tearing " the seamless garment
of the Faith " into fragments, destroying the uniformity and stabil-
ity of the standards of national and international comity and moral-
ity, and releasing every government from a common ethical re-
straint, to pursue that course of selfish ambition and imperial ag-
grandizement which its own rulers might select or the caprice of
dynastic fortunes might contrive. The last of those " holy " wars
ended in 1648, in the Treaty of Westphalia, which historic document
contained the triumphant synthesis of Protestant principles, in the
1917.] THE PROPAGANDA OF PAGANISM 7
fateful words: " Cujus regio, ejus religio " — " The Religion of the
Prince is the Religion of the land." Thus, at last, Imperialism van-
quished Ecclesiasticism, and the yoke of the state was set upon
the neck of the Church. For the first time in Christian history, the
government was declared to be the source and centre of religious
authority and spiritual guidance; kings were invested with divine
prerogatives, not by right of wise and just rulership, as Rome had
always taught, but by reason of being at once potentates and pon-
tiffs; and the Church of Christ was converted into a hydra-headed,
human institution, changing her doctrines with the variations of race
and climate, and subject to the frail and fluctuating sovereignty of
as many jurisdictions as there may be lands to govern and rulers to
govern them.
That this is not a strained or theoretical interpretation of the
new law of nations, may be demonstrated by the solemn adjudica-
tions of the learned judges and lawyers of Protestant England in
the time of Elizabeth. Discussing the famous statute regulating be-
quests to charitable and religious uses, Sir Francis Moore, a leading
authority on English law, said : " For religion being variable, ac-
cording to the pleasure of the succeeding princes, that which at one
time is held for orthodox may at another be accounted supersti-
tious."1
By this strange and revolutionary transformation of the di-
vine order of government in human affairs, religion became the
spoil or the sport of politics; morality as her handmaid was made
the slave rather than the mistress of man's perversity or passion,
and the whole fabric of society was turned into a house of cards,
to be constructed and reconstructed as the vicissitudes and vagaries
of intellectual and material speculation might determine. The his-
torical and orderly processes of Christian development were prac-
tically suspended or distorted, and a variety of evil results began
to operate very rapidly, continuing with cumulative disaster to our
own day. A detailed examination of these consequences is im-
possible in an article like this, but mention may be made of a few
salient features. For example, the tyrannies and corruptions of
feudalism, which were fast being moderated or modified by the dis-
cipline and teachings of Catholicism, at once were aggravated by
the removal of that superior moral force that previously had held
•them in check and tended to their gradual extinction, and the pro-
gress towards absolutism was greatly accelerated. As each nation
*Duke on Charitable Uses, p. 131.
8 THE PROPAGANDA OF PAGANISM [Oct.,
was encouraged to adopt its own career of separate and selfish
autonomy, the great monarchs of that era, with their groups of aris-
tocratic feudatories, assumed to dictate both the political and the
religious destinies of their kingdoms, without the restrictions of
Christian piety and justice. The people at large had as yet no voice
in the determination of public policies or in the protection of their
own rights and interests, so that autocracy, freed from the former
religious and moral suzerainty of the Church, ruled every vital
concern of Europe. Inasmuch as the secular sovereigns were like-
wise the heads of the religious establishments of their respective
countries, under the new relationship of Church and state, what-
ever of despotism at home or rapacity abroad characterized the gov-
ernment, naturally and inevitably became a part of the responsibility
of the state religion, and the odium of political abuses was visited
upon the ecclesiastical system as partner in the business of govern-
ment. It was a degrading alliance for Christianity and one from
which it has taken and will take many generations to recover. Con-
ditions were different in the countries in which Catholicism and
Protestantism became the dominant religions, leading to a marked
difference in the consequences. This difference and the reasons for
it cannot be fully gone into here, but rightly analyzed it furnishes
the key to nearly all that happened to the Church in the centuries
following the Reformation, as well as much that is still happening
to her in our own and other countries.
The Reformation did not weaken the loyalty of devout Cath-
olics in any of the distinctly Catholic countries, and several of the
most powerful nations on the continent remained steadfast in their
allegiance to Rome, Catholicism continuing to be the religion of both
government and people; while masses of the population in other
lands still adhered to their ancient Faith. The Church, though
sadly shaken in her integrity and world- wide jurisdiction, never
for a moment lost her corporate and consistent entity as a divine
institution; she retained her hold upon the fidelity and affection
of her children, and the marvelous perfection and efficiency of her
organization were not impaired by the blow which shattered the
unity and harmony of Christendom. The world — even those who
denied and defied her authority — still knew her for the living wit-
ness and invincible champion of authentic Christianity. The non-
religious and the irreligious, then as now and as ever will be, recog-
nized in her individuality and immutability the spirit of vital, super-
natural religion among men. But the princes of this world have
1917.] THE PROPAGANDA OF PAGANISM 9
never been exempt from the limitations and temptations of human
nature, any more than the masses of the people are endowed with
uniform and enduring wisdom and justice. Wherever a Catholic
monarch sought to establish absolutism in state and Church, he
used the matchless machinery of the Catholic hierarchy and the tra-
ditional loyalty of his Catholic subjects as instruments, ready-made,
for his despotic designs. The Church, under the new regime, was
powerless to prevent the usurpation of her functions or the intimi-
dation and corruption of her officials, and she suffered the degrada-
tion of this unholy subordination, both in her own person and in
the eyes of the world. When at last the reaction set in against
absolutism and the awakening sense of oppression and wrong
stirred the peoples of modern Europe to rebel against the age-long
tyranny of feudal institutions, the frenzy and fanaticism of popular
rage included the Church in the universal radicalism that demanded
the utter destruction of all the agencies of governmental abuse.
In fact, the very sanctity of her prerogatives and the potency of her
influence in the constitution of the existing system singled her out
as the especial object of revolutionary hatred. The hostility to the
Church, born of her enforced partnership in political oppression,
was taken advantage of and its fury enhanced by all the forces of
unbelief, and the " powers of darkness " concentrated their attacks
upon the fortress of religion, as they fully realized the Catholic
Church to be. Hence came about that anomalous and sinister con-
dition of mind in the great movement for free government and
popular sovereignty, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
that identified love of liberty and the championship of democracy
with the spirit of infidelity, rationalism and rabid radicalism.
" Free-thought," so named by its votaries, too often became synony-
mous with devotion to the ideals of intellectual and political free-
dom, and the cunning foes of all religion made common cause with
the misguided friends of republican enlightenment and emancipa-
tion, in a fierce and unrelenting war upon Catholicism.
The history of France furnishes a striking and concrete illus-
tration of a Catholic country subjected to this process. The Revo-
lution of 1789 was the culmination of such forces, and its anarchi-
cal heresies in politics, religion and social morals have not yet
ceased to curse that people, while their pestilent fruits have poisoned
other lands in both the Old and New Worlds. In the two
hundred and fifty years between the time of Luther and the reign
of Louis XVI., the centralization of power in the monarchy enabled
10 THE PROPAGANDA OF PAGANISM [Oct.,
the king to say with truth: "I am the State;" and the French
hierarchy was weakened by its connection with this odious system.
The arbitrary and artificial despotism of French feudalism,
issuing in the dissolute autocracy of the later Bourbons, and
involving the national religion in its disgraceful downfall,
gave rise to that school of intellectual radicals whose doc-
trines substituted the absolutism of the mob for the absolut-
ism of the monarch, and enthroned the infallibility of the
populace instead of the divine right of kings. Rousseau and his
fellow doctrinaires based their cult of atheistical democracy upon
the utter repudiation of the supernatural element in human affairs,
the destruction of the existing social order, and the reorganization
of society and government upon a basis of rationalistic and material-
istic speculation. As the ablest exponent of this disorganizing
propaganda, he exhibited his penetrating comprehension of the sit-
uation and recognized the necessary effect of his doctrines, in his
declaration that the Catholic Church had been the foundation and
indispensable support of all the moral, religious and political ideas
and traditions that had constituted the fabric of civilization up to
that time. Arguing logically that Christianity, as represented by
the Church, for centuries had been the only sure bond of social
union and the source of order, discipline and regulated liberty, he
boldly sought the destruction of that system, and openly and avow-
edly directed his chief efforts towards defying the authority and
reviling the teachings of Catholicism. The fundamental tenet of
his brilliant philosophy was the dogma of popular sovereignty and
infallibility. He taught that the people are the absolute source of all
authority on all subjects, bound by no ties of reverence for the past
and owing no duty of providence to the future; to use his own
words : " The People is God." From this impious origin sprang
much of the cant and casuistry that are current to this day and even
in our own country, in the perpetual exaltation of humanity, fra-
ternity and equality. The essential postulate of this theory of social
and political organization is the absolute and irresponsible sover-
eignty of the masses of the people, without the restraint or guid-
ance of any superior, external criterion of truth, morals or justice.
It lodges the arbitrament of all questions, sacred and secular, in the
mind of the multitude, and commits the destiny of mankind to the
caprice of human fancy or the vicissitudes of human reason. It
involves, and at intervals has espoused, one or the other of two
equally false and fatal propositions : the unlimited power of the
1917.] THE PROPAGANDA OF PAGANISM n
majority to rule upon all subjects, which is social despotism, or the
unrestricted right of the individual to do as he pleases, which is
anarchy, and from which there is no escape but the tyranny of a
master. It is founded upon a fallacy as old as the Pythagoreans,
that " man is the measure of all things " — that inasmuch as we
can know nothing except as it is present to our own consciousness,
there can be no standard of truth and knowledge outside the mind
and opinions of men. Of course, such a creed is the complete nega-
tion of faith, whose foundation is the " substance of things hoped
for, the evidence of things not seen;" and with the loss of faith
in spiritual things there must come inevitably the loss of faith in
any secure or stable principle of action upon any subject whatso-
ever. In fact, the idea of faith is incompatible with the doctrine
that the people are infallible and that private judgment is the test
of truth. It may be possible to make the world a safe habitat for
that kind of democracy, but no amount of academic assurance will
persuade a sober reflection that such democracy can long remain
a safe thing for the world.
It is worth mentioning that at the height of Rousseau's de-
structive teachings, the most practical man of that age, and per-
haps the greatest personality in the affairs of the modern world,
readily detected and unhesitatingly denounced the visionary schemes
and ultimate falsities of the whole philosophy. Napoleon, despite
his own offences against morality and religion, judged of the doc-
trines of the " ideologists," as he called them, by the light of expe-
rience and the plain facts of history. Sensing the real spirit of the
radical democracy as expounded by the " intellectuals," he declared
that " all the scholastic scaffolding falls, like a ruined edifice, before
one single word — Faith." Estimating the true services of the
Church in her secular relations, he championed her potency and
defended her functions as the great equilibriating force in the de-
velopment of social and political institutions; he asserted that
to Catholicism the world owed all its notions of stable authority
and orderly discipline; that without her influence there could be
no domestic life, no subordination of powers, " no respect for laws
and no permanence for governments."
The ideas of the French school of reformers promulgated
during the era of the Revolution gave place at a later day to the
milder and more mystical theories of Auguste Comte, whose Posi-
tive Philosophy embodied the vague concept of altruism, which
word he coined to express his transcendental ideal. According to
12 THE PROPAGANDA OF PAGANISM [Oct.,
his system, sociology must be founded upon biology; a civilized
community is a true organism — a " Great Being " — to which indi-
viduals are related somewhat as cells are related to an animal organ-
ism; this " Great Being" should be the object of worship by the
individuals composing its cellular structure, and the result of such
worship will produce those benevolent instincts and emotions which
he called altruism. Here we have a mixture of pantheism and ma-
terialism that is a familiar conception of the Sanskrit scriptures,
and has become popular in the present-day philosophy of such so-
cialists as H. G. Wells, who seem, to think that they have discovered
an entirely new theory of life and morals. It is a significant fact
that Comte declared that, in order to accomplish the blessings of
his altruistic scheme, the social organism should be organized and
its functions regulated after the model of the Medi&val Church;
thus furnishing another testimony from a singularly acute and
impartial mind, to the truth that all candid students of history are
nowadays beginning to recognize and to proclaim, namely : that the
age of greatest actual achievement and practical advancement to-
wards man's true happiness on earth was the period when the
Church was the dominant factor in the affairs of civilized nations.
The cumulative effects of these disintegrating and degrading
influences in France, continued now for more than a century, have
not succeeded in eradicating from the hearts of the common people
their inherited religious and moral sense, but they have permeated
the ruling and intellectual classes with the poison of atheism and
a moral idiocy that is deplorable ; they have converted the govern-
ment into a machine of materialistic ideals, whose boast it is that
it " has put out the lights of heaven " in the schools and social
agencies of the Republic; they have subjected religion to a brutal
ostracism and the Church to the spoliation of her physical proper-
ties and her spiritual dignities, in violation alike of justice and
sound public policy. And yet, the prospect is not hopeless. The
huge catastrophe of the pending War, like some desolating con-
vulsion of nature, seems to promise a purification of many pollu-
tions and the restoration of many sanities.
The evolution of Protestant principles in the lands where the
doctrines of the Reformers were established — either by being the
religion of the prince or of the majority of the population — led
substantially to the same practical results as in Catholic France,
but by different processes and in varying manifestations.
[TO BE CONCLUDED.]
EDWARD LEE GREENE.
(ALTIORA PETIVIMUS.)
BY MARGARET B. DOWNING.
HEN Edward Lee Greene died in Washington, D. C,
on November 10, 1915, an influential journal of New
York City said that the Catholic Church in the United
States had lost its most illustrious scientist since
Louis Agassiz. The organs of the scientific world
did not confine their appreciation of bereavement either to the
Catholic Church or to the United States. The California Academy
of Sciences, with which the master botanist had been affiliated for
more than forty years, wrote into the December proceedings : "The
world has lost one of its leaders in systematic botany. With sub-
lime devotion to science he gave up all he had — time, energy, what
money could be spared from his frugal needs — to carrying on his
work, publishing at his own expense a mass of original material
to be compared in extent only with that of Asa Gray. Probably no
other American botanist has published so many new species and
genera, and certainly no other has made such sacrifices to carry on
his work. His wide travels and rare powers of observation and
discrimination, gave him a personal knowledge of more living plants
than is possessed today by any other botanist." The Midland Na-
turalist of Notre Dame University in the issue of November, 1915,
carried a comprehensive sketch of the great botanist, from which
the following tribute is taken : " Scientific men in this country and
abroad realize that in the passing of Dr. Edward Lee Greene, the
world has lost one of its ablest scholars. His work was, perhaps,
more respectfully received in the old world than in America. He
was one of those courageous, unselfish men who allow no obstacle
to stand in the way of attaining truth, whether religious or scien-
tific. Critical research was so thoroughly a passion, that mere
matters of earthly gain or temporal expedience could not tempt
him from seeking the higher things." Torreya, a botanical journal
of New York, in the November number, inserted a sheet of " In
Memoriam " to the dead scholar and enumerated his contributions
to botanical literature in terms of exalted praise. According to this
I4 EDWARD LEE GREENE [Oct.,
old and esteemed organ, " The fame of Edward Lee Greene will
rest enduringly on his last publication, Landmarks in Botanical
History, of which unfortunately but two volumes were completed
at the time of his death. Easily the best classical scholar among
contemporaries, he brought to this work a certain fluent and delight-
ful style. The combination of broad scholarship and the attractive
presentation of the subjects, make it difficult to speak with restraint
of work which has already become a classic."
These are a few of the earliest tributes which followed the
announcement of the master's death. Hundreds of others, couched
in similar terms, poured in from every part of the country and from
many countries when the news was universally circulated. An ade-
quate portrait of the scientist and of the man is revealed in these
excerpts. A better picture, however, may be obtained from several
monographs, some published and some still in manuscript, which
Dr. Greene wrote during widely separated periods of his life. One
of these sketches is that exquisite bit of spiritual revelation to be
read under his name in Some Roads to Rome in America.^
Another is A Walk Through the Desert (1870), a manuscript
of absorbing interest, written after the naturalist had successfully
traversed the arid zones of Arizona and New Mexico and had
fraternized with the native nomad Indians, a feat never before
accomplished by a white man afoot. A third is a lengthy auto-
biography, entitled Botany In My Own Time; also is still in manu-
script and is the property of the University of Notre Dame.2
Those who have read Some Roads to Rome even in a casual
way, will recall without effort the clarity and the fervor of Dr.
Greene's story of his conversion. It would have been a painful
effort at any time and under any conditions, for he was reserved
and introspective and never given to confidences. In 1908-1909
he was deeply immersed in private difficulties and in arrears with
his work. But an appeal had been made to his apostolic spirit,
and when his consent had been obtained it was characteristic of
1 Edited by Georgina Pell Curtis. Some Roads to Rome in America, pp. 187-
245. St. Louis: B. Herder. 1909.
* These two documents will form the ground-work of an official life of Edward
Lee Greene, now in course of preparation by the faculty of Notre Dame, the
legatee of the renowned scholar. This material will be amplified by the enormous
correspondence maintained for nearly fifty years with his colleagues here and
abroad, by the resolutions passed by the learned societies to which he belonged
at the time of his death and letters from distinguished friends. There will be also
a sketch of his last days and extraordinarily edifying death at Providence Hospital,
and the funeral ceremonies at Notre Dame, November 13, 1915.
1917-] EDWARD LEE GREENE 15
him to set about this task with pious enthusiasm. He grilled his
memory most unmercifully, he began correspondence with relatives
long ago estranged, he plodded through fields of family letters and
through diaries dating back to his boyhood. Six times he rewrote
this chapter before his passion for scientific sequence and exactness
was satisfied. In the end he produced what is accepted as one
of the most remarkable documents of its kind, produced since the
luminous expositions of Newman and Brownson. It is utterly
devoid of polemics, and contains none of the gigantic clashings of
intellectual forces which make up the story of Newman or of the
renowned American convert. A simple and devout recital of how
God revealed His truth, without any of the usual extraneous acces-
sories, it is unique both in the spiritual and literary divisions of such
chronicles. It was an axiom of Dr. Greene's, that any history,
in order to merit the name and answer the requirements, must have
its definite philosophy. In this intimate history of the progress of
his soul towards the light, he reveals that the shining ray which
led him to a haven at last first took the form of that love of nature
and of growing things, the dominant influence of his life. He was
little more than six when his mother presented him with a booklet,
Botany for Beginners, by that well-loved writer of sixty years ago,
Mrs. Lincoln-Phelps. She read with him and explained the colored
illustrations of the plants, marked as to the parts by numbered
arrows. Furthermore, she impressed the lesson which the author
so clearly meant to convey, namely, that flowers are a gift from
the kind Heavenly Father, that all nature is but a revelation of the
Divine and a part of the revelation contained in the Sacred Scrip-
tures. And his mother, from whom he inherited not only his love
of nature, but his fine strong spiritual appraisements, repeated
again and again that he could paint a flower, could carve one from
wood, might make one from paper, but only God could make the
living plant spring from the earth. Thus at the age of six this
knight, who was to wage relentless battle for truth and beauty,
accepted the accolade.
Edward Lee Greene, born in Hopkinton, Rhode Island, on
August 20, 1843, was tne son °f William M. and Abby Crandall
Greene, both of them descendants of pioneers who pursued the
redcoats as vigorously in the eighteenth century as they had the
Red Men in the seventeenth. Original settlers in Massachusetts,
they had followed Roger Williams into the Providence Plantations,
so thus early in. their American history the progenitors of Dr.
16 EDWARD LEE GREENE [Oct.,
Greene had received a slight leaven for their stern puritanism. At
least two generations had been Baptists before Edward came into
the world. This showed a degree of independence, since Congre-
gationalism was the creed of the prosperous. As a child the future
scientist was never attracted by his visits to the Baptist meeting
house. He was in his thirteenth year when his father removed with
his family first to the virgin forests about the Sangamon River
in the prairie regions of Illinois, and later to Janesville, Wisconsin.
And in all these years, for his consciousness awoke in his sixth year,
he records but one vivid impression created by a visit to a so-called
house of prayer. His grandmother took him to a Quaker meeting
place, and though it seems unreasonable for a normal boy of less
than six to enjoy a full hour of silence and inaction, he records
that he was moved almost to tears during this ordeal and that he
repeated the only prayer he knew, " Now I lay me down to sleep,"
at least a hundred times. Previous to this experience he tells
how he loved to steal away to the deep woods and lie for hours
listening to the birds and thinking, thinking. Those who knew
Dr. Greene in the intimate sense, realized that he sought oppor-
tunities for silence and prayer as avidly as other men seek the
excitements of pleasure. He once described to a small group of
friends what he considered a perfectly happy day. He attended
an early Mass and after breakfast retired to an upper chamber to
write out some notes which he had been collecting for days. This
engaged him until long past noon. He prepared his meal and then,
feeling a little fatigued, sat at his piano and for two hours played
Beethoven and Grieg until he was as refreshed as if from an icy
bath. He then read an hour or so something light and entertaining,
then something heavy and edifying — his well-thumbed Greek Testa-
ment and his favorite edition of the Psalms. It was now evening
o
and the month was May. So he returned to the church in time
for Benediction. Supper and another attack on his writing fol-
lowed. At ten he found his task completed and prepared for rest.
" And throughout the day," he explained fervently, " not a human
being came to my door, and to and from the church I met no one
with whom I had to exchange a syllable."
In the years spent at Janesville the future master places two
milestones along the road which finally led him to Rome and to
supremacy in the field of natural science. Near his home in the
suburbs of the flourishing railroad town were many Norse and
Swedish artisans and small farmers. Working as laborers on the
1917.] EDWARD LEE GREENE 17
new roads and municipal buildings were many Irish, rude visaged
and rough-handed but full of mirth and energy. Consumed by a
desire for learning, the young naturalist was soon friendly with
all. From the Celts he learned the beauty of ritualism in re-
ligion. To quote his own words, " the beauty and sweetness of that
cycle of feasts and fasts which make up the Christian year " were
first revealed to him by an humble Irishwoman coming from the
services on Holy Saturday. She paused in what must have been a
busy time to explain what Holy Thursday and Good Friday and
Holy Saturday meant, and what Easter day should mean to all
Christians. From the Norse and Swedes he gained his first taste
of the joy of mastering an alien tongue. During this same period
he fell under the direct influence of that esteemed Swedish botanist,
Knure Ludwig Theodore Kumlein. His studies in nature were
hereafter directed by a trained scientist. Kumlein, like Linnaeus,
had been a student at Upsala and he was a man of broad scholar-
ship. His most renowned pupil, Edward Lee Greene, in one of
the most famous of the forty volumes of profound erudition left
as a legacy to the scientific world, pays his master a well-deserved
tribute.3
Having completed his elementary education at the excellent
rural school of Janesville, the young student journeyed to Albion,
Wisconsin, in the autumn of 1860, and matriculated in the college
of the same name which was established there. He was absorbed
in his studies when the academic calm was harshly shattered by
the nation-wide call to arms. His disappointment, .nay grief, may
be imagined, but it was not his nature to permit private desires
to interfere with solemn duties. He put aside his well-thumbed
books, all but one, a textbook of field work in botany, and this he
packed in his knapsack and went forth as a private in the Sixty-
third Regiment of Wisconsin. Every moment he could steal from
the military routine was spent in collecting and preserving speci-
mens, and every penny he could spare from his urgent needs went
in payment for copying botanical notes and dispatching them with
the specimens home for safe keeping. A memorable vision rises
of this noble looking young soldier, keeping his soul unsullied in
the rampant vice of war, pursuing his studies regularly and calmly
as though he were still at his desk at college — at all times holding
aloof from the riot of camps. So unceasingly did he pursue his
studies that after the peace of Appomattox he appeared before the
*E. L. Greene. Pittonia, i., pp. 256-260. San Francisco, 1889.
VOL. cvi. — 2
i8 EDWARD LEE GREENE [Oct.,
faculty at Albion and proved that he had kept apace with his
class. In the autumn of 1865 he was again admitted to the college,
and in June, 1866, received the coveted Bachelor's degree. For
the next four years he studied privately and taught at irregular
intervals in rural schools about his home.
Wanderlust was, perhaps, a legacy of the soldier days, for
after 1870 the botanist seems restless. He entered Jarvis College,
Denver, and after a year's course • received the degree of Ph.D.
He pursued his studies with consuming zeal and had commenced to
publish results as leaflets of botanical observations. All the time
he was oppressed by a sense of spiritual insecurity. Soon after
returning from the war he had realized that his soul craved stronger
food than his parents' creed offered. He quietly sought baptism
from an Episcopalian minister, for at this time, he confesses, he
had convinced himself that the heritage of faith left by Christ
with the Apostles was either in the custody of the Church of Rome
or of England. He had left his home in Wisconsin in order to
make his choice more dispassionately among strangers. To join
either would be a grief and a disappointment to those to whom he
felt most indebted, and he needed time and a wide physical separa-
tion to prepare them for the blow. It was during this interval of
acute suspense that the scholar -took his famous walk through the
desert. If this remarkable piece of writing shows deep spiritual
feeling, it portrays in every line as profound spiritual unrest. It
is a document of extraordinary interest and value, in that it is one
of the earliest specimens of Dr. Greene's sustained writings now
extant, and because though written in his twenty-seventh year it
foreshadows those powers of observation and discrimination which
have lifted him into a class apart among modern scholars. It
betokens also that a genius for plant classification may be united
to a genius for scholarship and for philology.
After a year of silent commune, without consulting anyone or
seeking light on any of the problems which blocked his way, Dr.
Greene admits that his choice of the Episcopalian faith was a com-
promise. It would wound his friends and kindred less if he entered
the Church of England than if he went over to Rome. Having
acquiesced in the suggestion of Bishop Randall of Colorado, that
he enter the ministry, he began his theological studies. On their
completion he asked for rural charges, in order that the care of
souls might be lightened by the pursuit of botanical studies. For
the next ten years he is outwardly a contented shepherd in the
1917.] EDWARD LEE GREENE 19
Episcopalian fold, at the same time striding towards national fame
in the domain of natural science. He had been taught — quite
naturally — since his first trained master was a Swede, that all mod-
ern systematic botany began, if it did not end, in Linnaeus. That
others before the era of the mighty Carolus had achieved anything
worthy or significant, was not admitted in the circle which held
intellectual sway in the West and Middle West in the seventies
and eighties of the nineteenth century. Edward Lee Greene now
bears the title of father of systematic botany in the United States.
He was a mere stripling, barely familiar with the mechanical side
of his profession, when he joined voice with some older and more
thoughtful botanists than had penetrated the West in declaring
the classes and orders of Linnaeus to be no longer adequate and
that, with the modern systematic botanist, they must fall into dis-
use. His researches led him to this truth — that claims which ardent
disciples of the learned Swede made in his behalf, Linnaeus had
repudiated early in his career. It was Dr. Greene's first recogni-
tion of the tremendous conspiracy against truth : to magnify and
proclaim to the world all things accomplished by the reformed re-
ligions ; to suppress those emanating from the ancient Faith.
He felt religious and scientific foundations alike were shaken. His
course of reading then took up the schisms which followed Luther,
and he studied in the original languages all that related to the
course of the Reformation in England, the North countries, France
and Switzerland. One day when he had just completed a service
in St. Mark's Church at Berkeley, California, as he laid aside his
vestments, he realized that never again could he wear them or
appear before his congregation as a spiritual guide. From earliest
childhood, Dr. Greene had always avoided personal influence on
the crises of his life. All his battles, spiritual and intellectual, were
fought alone. From reading, meditation and prayer he had be-
come convinced that the Roman Catholic Church alone was the
custodian of the Apostolic legacy left by the Divine Saviour. He
had applied scientific methods to the solving of theological problems.
As a result, he asked the parish priest adjacent to his rectory to
receive him into the Catholic Church and prepare him for his first
Holy Communion. He officiated as an Episcopalian minister for
the last time on the Feast of All Saints, 1884. On February 5,
1885, he was received into the Church of God, as he reverently
writes, the true home of every soul seeking truth and beauty. He
was now in his forty-third year, too old he feared to change all
20 EDWARD LEE GREENE [Oct.,
the habits of his life and enter the priesthood, but in full prime to
continue his battles for scientific truth.
Dr. Greene was now without question the most distinguished
botanist of the Pacific coast, and the University of California
eagerly sought to place him in its faculty of natural sciences.
He had, in 1883, founded the botanical journal, Erythea, and his
work on systematic botany revealed in its pages attracted the at-
tention of the scientific world. Not altogether in terms of praise,
for he had begun his thundering blows on the Linnaean super-
structure, and even at that remote period many botanists, fearing
to engage him in controversial battle, sneeringly alluded to him as
brilliant, but erratic and unorthodox. He proved, bringing the
testimony of Linnaeus himself to support the argument, that the
learned Swede was not the founder of modern scientific botany;
that the honor belonged to a pious Italian physician and university
professor, Caesalpino, who had written one hundred and twenty-
four years previously. He showed, by Linnaeus' admission, that on
the Caesalpinian foundation, namely, that in the fruit and seed of
plants is to be found the key of their affinities, he had erected his
system. On this granite principle, Dr. Greene contended, rested
securely the edifice of all later botanical geniuses. About this time
he began the publication of one of his most illustrious works, Pit-
tonia, in five volumes. He became editor of and wrote volumin-
ously in Flora Franciscana. He wrote the Flora of San Francisco
Bay, and that exquisite book, one of his classics, Some West Amer-
ican Oaks, all the time issuing volume after volume of botanical
observations. He published in detail the results of his summer ex-
peditions in the Rocky Mountain regions, where he mastered every
growing plant and won recognition as the greatest living authority
on the flora of that region. This knowledge he aftenvards put
to most useful purpose in the Agricultural Department at the
National Capital.
Dr. Greene's genius shines forth most resplendently in the
work he accomplished in the reform of botanical nomenclature.
He was made chairman of an international commission looking to
this end in 1894, and in Europe, among other proud distinctions,
he was known as the father of the neo-American school of nomen-
clature. Yet after more than thirty years of earnest effort, he
sorrowfully admitted before his death that to attempt such reform
by legislation was building a house upon sand. His stern and un-
compromising attitude in seeking good Latin names for new species,
1917.] EDWARD LEE GREENE 21
at least had the effect of discouraging the prevalent American habit,
characterized by calling a beautiful flower discovered in the great
National Park, Yellowstoniensis. It is his distinct triumph, and
throws a clear light on his phenomenal talents, that he discovered
and published more than five thousand new species to which he
gave sonorous classic Latin names. Latin, such as Cicero and
Horace used, yet luminously descriptive in every essential of the
plant named. No one can look upon a bed of those sprightly blos-
soms which he discovered and called viola late virens without
a reverent appreciation of the master's genius. Other names given
in the viola family, equally felicitous, are latiuscula, prionosepala
septentrionalis and nephrophylla. There are scores of others given
to the delphinium, ranunculus, senecio, rosa and antennaria which
he discovered, which have compelled the admiration of the scien-
tific world. A plant made known by him in his early years in the
far West is the eschscholtzia, the California poppy. It lifts a
golden cup in millions of gardens today, and for those who know
it is one of the enduring monuments to the memory of this gentle
naturalist. ,
During this time Dr. Greene was making notable excursions
into the domain of philology. Next to dissecting and classifying a
plant, his keenest intellectual pleasure came from dissecting a word.
Though he frequently mastered a language through pure love of
study, much of his work in this line was in behalf of scientific
truth. So conscientious was this scholar that he would not intro-
duce an authority into his works, unless he had read in the original
what the writer had meant to convey. He learned many a language
simply to verify an important quotation. His private correspond-
ence shows the fluent use of fourteen languages, and his books prove
he had a working knowledge of as many others. It is small wonder
that a learned botanist of Turin, Italy, wrote sorrowfully after
death had claimed this master, that the last great American scholar
was gone and no others would reach his heights, since no others,
in the breathless haste of the age, would perpetuate his methods.
It was the Rev. John A. Zahm, retired provincial of the Holy
Cross Order, who brought this renowned scholar before the Catholic
public. In 1894 the University of Notre Dame conferred on Ed-
ward Lee Greene the honorary degree of LL.D. Dr. Zahm also
directed the attention of Bishop John J. Keane, then rector of the
Catholic University of America, at Washington, D. C, towards
the brilliant convert as a notable man for his faculty of philosophy.
22 EDWARD LEE GREENE [Oct.,
Dr. Greene left Berkeley in 1895 and became professor of botany
at the Papal seat of learning. He retained this position until 1904.
This period of his life was neither fruitful nor entirely happy.
Primarily this lassitude and discontent may be explained by the
difference in the point of view between the East and the West.
In the East the Zeitgeist was not working for him; in the West
it strove unceasingly for his fame. Even in the spiritual sense
he felt isolated, and the poignant words of the Psalmist were often
on his lips as they had been on Newman's : " Obliviscere populum
tuum et do mum patris tui." It is possible, however, that if the
clear light which the present sheds upon the past could in those
nine years, from 1895-1904, have been thrown upon the future,
events might have transpired differently. Genius has many times
before passed by unrecognized and neglected. There are many who
have mourned that the eminent botanist ever left Berkeley where
his future was assured and his old age would be protected. But Dr.
Greene never voiced these sentiments. He was always grateful
for the larger opportunity which a residence in the National Capital
meant. If he suffered poverty, disappointment, misrepresentation,
his was a strong soul, uplifted above mere physical privation or the
lack of human consolations. In a book of piety which he used
habitually may be read, in his firm characteristic writing, that per-
fect line from Paradiso, " In la sua volontade e nostra pace."
The next ten years Dr. Greene, as an Associate in the Smith-
sonian Institution, devoted to what he hoped would round out his
life work, the history of botanists of supreme achievements,
and which he called Landmarks in Botanical History. In the do-
main of historical botany he stands preeminent. He had gathered
material for six volumes and had looked confidently forward, since
he came of a race of octogenarians, to passing his declining years
collating his mellow knowledge. Only one of this series was actually
published and he left in manuscript material for the second volume,
now in the course of preparation for printing at the Smithsonian
Institution. These ten years were sadly marked by trials of every
variety, pecuniary reverses and continued ill health, which en-
croached on his work and for long periods rendered any exertion
impossible. Yet he wrote in this trying time that superb volume of
his Landmarks which challenges the admiration "of the world. If
these years had produced nothing more than the history of the
proto-botanist, Theophrastus, the scientific world would be forever
in his debt. He placed the early naturalist for the first time in his
1917.] EDWARD LEE GREENE 23
rightful place in the domain of natural science, and gave for the
first time correctly the year of his birth and the extent of his studies
under Plato and Aristotle. To eke out his slender income, Dr.
Greene at this time accepted a position with the Department of
Agriculture, where his inexhaustible knowledge of the flora of the
Rocky Mountains was of practical value to cattlemen and farmers.
But his health continued to decline. His means, always mod-
est, had been expended in publishing his discoveries and in works
of charity. At this lowest ebb of his fortunes, his first friends east
of the Rocky Mountains, the Fathers at Notre Dame University,
offered him a post in an advisory capacity in the Graduate School
and purchased his splendid herbarium and library at a generous
sum. Those who realize how sorely the great scholar needed a
home and tender care at this time, rejoice that in this library and
herbarium the noble-hearted faculty of Notre Dame will have an
unceasing asset to the fame and activities of their seat of learning.
Already a procession of botanical students visit Notre Dame, be-
cause Dr. Greene's specimens and appended notes must be con-
sulted before progress in certain directions is possible.
When the revered master reached his seventieth birthday, on
August 20, 1913, scientists and scholars in general throughout the
country united in honoring the event. He was guest of honor at
a banquet, unique in the annals of the national botanical and
biological societies. After many notable addresses, all of which
have fortunately been preserved, the venerable scholar was pre-
sented with something he had long craved but could not spare the
money to purchase. This was a bookmark, and it bore the motto,
" altiora petivimus"-—*we have striven for the higher — which
Was so conspicuously the ideal of his life. The fine engraving
showed a bank where a book and staff were lying, and above stood
frowning heights fringed with oak and pine trees. This bookmark
is a true epitome of the life of Edward Lee Greene. He sought
the heights, and those who essay this are lonely. A celibate and
an ascetic, he was without home, family — all the rewards which
men commonly hold dear. Like unto St. Francis, he was the dis-
ciple of Holy Poverty. Gold and fame offered nothing, unless they
could be obtained through rigid moral and intellectual integrity.
In his private papers were found many touching instances of his
charity towards friends in distress, and especially towards young
students struggling against an adverse tide. In his library, in
French, German, Italian and Spanish, in Latin and in Greek, were
24 A BALLAD OF FRANCE [Oct.,
found books known only to pietists, rarely seen now-a-days except
in ancient monasteries, and certainly phenomenal in the collection
of a lay scientist. Work and prayer made up his day. Music,
which he passionately loved, was a rare enjoyment, and visits to his
friends were counted luxuries to be indulged only when all
sterner duties had been accomplished. He sought only the higher
things. From his youth upward he had pursued his quest with
courage and with perseverance, and he found truth at last in
what he so tenderly described as the infallible and revealed Word
of God. He sought beauty, and in the end he received the badge
of knighthood from the holy and consecrated hands of the great
loving mother, the Roman Catholic Church.
A BALLAD OF FRANCE.
BY MICHAEL EARLS, SJ.
YE who heed a nation's call
And speed to arms therefor,
Ye who fear your children's march
To perils of the war:
Soldiers of the trench and camp
And mothers of our men
Hearken to a tale of France
And tell it oft again.
In the east of France, by the roads of war,
(God save us evermore from Mars and Thor!)
Up and down the fair land iron armies came,
(Pity, Jesu, all who fell, calling Thy name).
Pleasant all the fields were round every town,
Garden airs went sweetly up, heaven smiled down,
Till under leaden hail with flaming breath,
Graves and ashen harvest were the keep of death.
1917.] A BALLAD OF FRANCE 25
One little town stood, white on a hill,
Chapel and hostel gates, farms and windmill;
Chapel and countryside met the gunner's path,
Not a blade of .kindly grass hid from his wrath.
Lo! when the terrain cleared out of murky air,
When 'mid the ruins stalked death and despair,
One Figure stood erect, bright with the day,
Christ the Crucified, though His Cross was shot away.
Flame and shot tore away all the tender wood,
Yet with arms uplifted Christ His figure stood ;
Out reached the blessing hands, meek bowed the head,
Christ! the saving solace o'er the waste of dead.
France tells the story; may we learn it well,
Christ His figure stands against all gates of hell;
Flame and shot may rive the fortress walls apart,
Christ the Crucified will heal the breaking heart.
Wear Him day and night, wherever be the war,
(God save us evermore from Mars and Thor!)
Flag and heart that keep Him fear not shot and flame,
(Strengthen, Jesu, all who stand, calling Thy name).
Ye who guard a nation's call
And speed to arms therefor,
Ye who pray for brave lads gone
To perils of the war, —
Soldiers of the fleet and fort
And mothers of our men,
In the shadow of the Cross
Shall we find peace again.
CENTENARY OF THE SOCIETY OF MARY.
BY JOHN E. GARVIN, S.M.
"The Sodality known as that of Bordeaux, by its marvelous system of
labors, called forth a Christian revival, first in the environs of Bordeaux, and
then in several other provinces. It was in fact a veritable seminary for the re-
constitution of Catholic France; in its bosom and under the pressure of new
conditions, there formed and ripened, little by little, under the influence and the
auspices of the Immaculate Virgin, the elements of two Religious Institutes
which came successively into being, first that of the Daughters of Mary, and
afterwards your own Society of the Brothers of Mary."1 (Rome, March 7,
1917.)
HIS is an epoch of centenaries. We are still within
the first century of the reorganization of Europe after
the wars of Napoleon. The Old World seemed to
have awakened to a new life at the dawn of the nine-
teenth century. It was a rather rude and noisy awak-
ening, indeed, but it was not without great hope and greater promise.
Men began to look forward to newer and better things, as if the
future contained all that was great, and as if the greatest of that
future were reserved to them.
Nor were they all mistaken. They lived to see a wonderful
development, and before the hundred years had gone by, their own
children had almost forgotten the remarkable progress of the first
part of the century, in their astonishment at the wonderful triumphs
that followed fast upon one another at its close. Many of us can
still remember the supreme satisfaction, even the lofty self-suf-
ficiency, with which men spoke of the great nineteenth century
and its marvelous achievements, making the very expression " nine-
teenth century " almost a synonym for human triumph, the " last
word " in the vocabulary of invention and discovery, the acme of
modern enlightenment, final, once for all and forever — until the
young twentieth century came on with the usual ignorant assertive-
ness of youth, and impudently assumed that real progress and im-
provement had only begun with its own birth.
It is ever thus. Each age looks smaller to the succeeding age.
We of the twentieth century can afford to smile patronizingly over
^Extract from a letter of His Holiness, Pope Benedict XV. to the Superior-
General of the Society of Mary, in commemoration of the First Centenary of the
Society.
1917.] CENTENARY OF THE SOCIETY OF MARY 27
what our fathers gloried in noisily and celebrated solemnly. But the
beginning of the nineteenth century was confessedly an exceptional
time, an epoch of great opportunities, coming, as it did, immediately
after the greatest political cataclysm in the history of the world —
the French Revolution. It was an era of great men in all depart-
ments of life; in war, in government, in science, in education, and
in material progress of every kind. It was also the period of the re-
vival of the Catholic religion in France, the very centre of the great
upheaval of the previous century, and this movement brought forth
great leaders in the Church. But the great leaders of religious
movements are no longer all-pervading and world-conquering. Re-
ligion is too intimate, too intense, too personal, in its very nature,
and its most effective exponents are at best only a little more than
local. Material progress may improve whole nations at once, mar-
tial glory may fire a world, and the fame of its heroes may encircle
the globe, while the spiritual conquests of religion are noiseless,
and its apostles are soon forgotten in human history.
Such an apostle was Father William Joseph Chaminade of
Bordeaux. His name is less known than it deserves to be. He was
the apostle of the revival of religion in Bordeaux, at the opening
of the nineteenth century. For nearly fifty years his name was
connected with every work of zeal and religion in the city. Said
Cardinal Donnet, the Archbishop of Bordeaux, to the Brothers of
Mary sixty years later : " We do not know your venerated Founder
well enough; we do not appreciate the extent of his work; but I
have made a careful study of the religious history of my archdiocese,
and I can attest the wonderful activity of Father Chaminade. Trace
the origin of any work of piety, any work of charity or of education
undertaken in Bordeaux, and there at the very head you will find
the name of Father Chaminade."
William- Joseph Chaminade was born in 1761 in Perigueux, a
city about eighty miles northeast of Bordeaux. He studied in
Bordeaux and at St. Sulpice in Paris, and was ordained priest in
1784. For six years he was engaged in the education of youth at
a college in Mussidan, near Bordeaux. Upon the outbreak of the
Revolution the college was suppressed, and Father Chaminade re-
moved to Bordeaux. For four years of the Reign of Terror in that
city, he remained in defiance of the Revolutionary agents, serving
the faithful, and exercising a contraband ministry throughout the
territory. A few months of illusive peace and toleration brought
him forth to the public ministrations of religion, but the persecution
28 CENTENARY OF THE SOCIETY OF MARY [Oct.,
broke out suddenly again, and took him unawares. He was ar-
rested, condemned to exile, and conducted to the frontier of Spain.
He chose the city of Saragossa as his refuge, and for three years,
from 1797 to 1800, he devoted himself to the special study of the
history of the Church and of the rules of religious institutes. He
had always been distinguished for his devotion to the Blessed
Virgin, and it was in the famous shrine of Our Lady of the Pillar,
in Saragossa, that he received the first intimations of his future
work. This blessed sanctuary was to him a Mount Sinai; it was
here that he heard the voice of God more clearly. He always con-
sidered it a revelation. He felt himself called to the work of re-
storing religion in France by means of devotion to Mary, and by
the founding of a religious institute dedicated to her special service.
What Manresa was to Ignatius of Loyola, such was Saragossa
to Father Chaminade. Henceforth there was something so definite
in his plans, so determined in his aims, that there is little doubt of
his having received some extraordinary grace, if not a supernatural
revelation, at the shrine of Our Lady of the Pillar.
Immediately upon his return to Bordeaux, early in 1800, he set
himself to the work of evangelization. However, for a few years,
the work of reorganization and reconstruction in Church affairs
was forced upon him, and divided his time. His heroic service in
Bordeaux for seven years, during the Revolution and the Reign of
Terror, his learning, his zeal, his wisdom, as displayed at Sara-
gossa, had singled him out for distinction and promotion. He was
appointed Administrator of the diocese of Bazas, near Bordeaux
and Grand Penetentiary of the Archdiocese of Bordeaux, heading
the commission for the reconciliation of those priests who had taken
the schismatical oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy.
He lent himself to these duties until he could be relieved.
High honors could easily have been his for the mere waiting. He
was to have been nominated bishop, but he begged to be allowed to
devote himself to his chosen work of apostolate among youth. The
Court of Rome was pleased to acknowledge his valuable services
during the Revolution and in the work of reconstruction, by grant-
ing him several titles and privileges. Father Chaminade, accepted
only the title of Missionary Apostolic; as to the other favors and
honors, he neglected them, and never even presented to the arch-
bishop for his ratification the Pontifical rescript in which they were
granted. The title of Missionary Apostolic accorded well with his
vocation. The Archbishop of Bordeaux insisted on naming him a
1917-] CENTENARY OF THE SOCIETY OF MARY 29
canon of his Cathedral, and then, as a token of appreciation of his
work, gave him the chapel of the Madeleine, in the centre of the
city, as his special charge, and as the seat of the Sodality of Bor-
deaux.
Father Chaminade began the work of his apostolate at once.
He had already decided that his best endeavors would be among the
youth of the city. From the very beginning he had noticed in par-
ticular two young men who were assiduous in their attendance at
the services. He invited them to his room next to the chapel; he
introduced them to each other; he encouraged them in their spir-
itual dispositions, and exhorted them to bring, each one of them, an-
other young man to the next service. They did so, and these four
were encouraged to bring four more. Eight young men attended
the next meeting, and thus the good work grew by increasing
ratio, but solidly and surely. Within two months there were more
than a hundred regular attendants. This was the beginning of the
famous Sodality of the Blessed Virgin in Bordeaux. It antedated
the Sodality of Paris, outnumbered it, and also surpassed it in the
wisdom of its management, as later history abundantly testifies.
The Sodality was the master work of Father Chaminade. The
rest of his life for fifty years was devoted to the furtherance of its
success. It was his all in all. Historians of that epoch have ranked
the Sodality of Bordeaux as one of the greatest factors in the reli-
gious revival in the southwest of France. Father Chaminade as-
pired to establish a sort of perpetual mission, and to make each
sodalist an apostle, and in a great degree he succeeded. It is simply
astounding to read the record of its activity in every field of en-
deavor where religion could be served.
From the very beginning the Sodality was a nursery for re-
ligious vocations. Every new convent in Southwest France, every
reviving religious order in and around Bordeaux, counted on sup-
port from the Sodality, and many a time Father Chaminade found
himself obliged to train new officials because he had lost the others
to the religious life. He encouraged this advancement, even though
it caused him great embarrassment. His loss was the other's gain.
" We are playing the game ' who loses wins/ " he once remarked,
when he was informed that a number of his most brilliant sodal-
ists had gone to the seminary and to the convents.
Two of his young men expressed a desire to devote themselves
to teaching poor children. Immediately he sent to Toulouse for a
book of rules of the Christian Brothers, and trained the two as-
30 CENTENARY OF THE SOCIETY OF MARY [Oct.,
pirants to the religious life until a novice-master could be obtained
from the Brothers. He then installed the new novitiate in his villa
on the outskirts of Bordeaux, where it remained for ten years —
the first novitiate of the Christian Brothers in France after the
Revolution. When the Archbishop of Bordeaux reopened his sem-
inary in 1804, the director, the entire staff of professors, and all
the first students were drawn from the Sodality.
The Daughters of Mercy, an institute with the same mission
as the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, were founded by Father
Chaminade, with the help of the president of the Young Ladies'
Sodality, Madamoiselle Therese de Lamourous. She recruited her
associates from the ranks of the Sodality, organized the society, and
became its first superior. The success of this wonderful woman was
remarkable. All Bordeaux revered her as a saint, and admired her
as a consummate administrator. Miracles were worked by her, and
when the archbishop was informed of several marvelous occur-
ences, he said : " I am not at all surprised ; indeed I should rather
be astonished if Mother Therese did not work miracles." She died
in 1836. Her life has been written three times, and the process of
her beatification has been introduced at Rome.
It would be endless to follow the labors of the Sodality in all
their ramifications. The Orphanage of Bordeaux was opened and
operated by the Sodality; the Library of Good Books was instituted
at the Madeleine, and exists in a flourishing condition even to the
present day ; the association for visiting prisoners was organized ; the
Students' Club was founded ; the " Ladies of the Retreat " and
the " Association of the Fathers of Families " were branches of
the Sodality; the Bakers' Guild was organized under the patronage
of the Sodality as early as 1802, and remained under the same care
for many years. Several bishops and archbishops of France issued
from the ranks of the Sodality. But even the humblest of the fold of
Christ were not forgotten in the all-embracing zeal of Father
Chaminade. From seminarian to chimney-sweep is a far cry, but
it was an easy passage for the Sodality. A Chimney-sweeps' Circle
was organized, and could boast as its first promoter and patron the
saintly Adolphe Dupuch, later Archbishop of Algiers.
The Sodality served as a sort of a reservoir which gathered
the waters and held them in reserve, and the Madeleine was a sort
of spiritual power-house which radiated zeal and apostolic spirit to
all parts of the diocese. And yet it was all done without ostenta-
tion, in the true spirit of Christ and the Church. There was none
1917.] CENTENARY OF THE SOCIETY OF MARY 31
of the visionary dreaming of world-planning and world-reforming
that never effects its brilliant conquests. That was not like Father
Chaminade. There was nothing romantic about him, except the
very career he carved out as we see it today. But while he lived, he
went from day's work to day's work with a simplicity that was
almost commonplace, doing the good work that lay before him at
hand, and going on to the next; not waiting for opportunity, but
going out to make it. He was not a man to bewail the past ; he was
too practical a man for that, and he set himself to improve the
present and secure the future. There has lately been popularized a
little ditty, " Brighten the corner where you are." It is only a new
form of an old advice. It was not Father Chaminade's rhyme
but it was his life-long rule. He brightened the lives of thousands
in Bordeaux, through the agency of his intimate association, and
the all-pervading encouragement and activity of his Sodalists ap-
plied to the many needs of their own vicinity.
No one but a man like Father Chaminade could ever have
gained so great an ascendency over the minds and hearts of his
followers, and he employed the simple means of personal solicita-
tion. We have seen that he started his Sodality by personal appeals.
He had faith in the power of man over his fellow-man. He felt
the importance and the necessity of his work of spreading Chris-
tianity, but he also felt that others could do the work as well as
himself. He was able to inspire others, and to make them cooperate,
and pass the inspiration on to others.
Truth comes indeed in the first place from on high; from Mt.
Sinai, from the Sermon on the Mount, from the Cenacle window,
or from the Vatican Hill, but the good news is spread as the first
Gospel has always been spread — by personal solicitation. The lay
apostolate was not invented by Father Chaminade; it was the
working principle of the Church, and he used it with remarkable
success in his efforts to " multiply Christians."
Next to personal interest and endeavor, the work of the So-
dality was marked by a spirit of equality. This was a bold inno-
vation for the times, but Father Chaminade was a born leader, and,
like all leaders, was such from the very fact that he knew the times,
and could read the signs better than most men. Caste and raok had
been the bane of the old sodalities before the Revolution, but
Father Chaminade would have none of them. It is true he made
provision in his organization for separating the various classes of
society, but he knew his sodalists, and he was gratified to see that
32 CENTENARY OF THE SOCIETY OF MARY [Oct.,
these artificial divisions were beautifully disregarded from the very
beginning. In the Sodality meetings of Bordeaux the wine merchant
was enrolled with his cooper, the ship-owner sat with the stevedore,
the banker with his clerk, the landed proprietor with his tailor, the
professor with the students. In later years, on the restoration of
the monarchy, there were some mild protests and it was suggested
that such promiscuous intermingling was impossible, but he retorted
with equal mildness that the reasoning was good enough in theory
but entirely too late in practice; that fifteen years ago he might
have been convinced, but that for the last fifteen years they had
been doing themselves the very thing they now declared impossible.
Little by little, a special band of lieutenants gathered
around Father Chaminade, and managed the various activities of
the Sodality. This select company he called his " staff," and
he began to train them in a more careful manner to the fuller spir-
itual life. This was the origin of the Society of the Brothers of
Mary.
The most brilliant, energetic and influential member of the
staff was a young man of twenty-two, John Baptist Lalanne. He
had studied medicine, and was in practice at the General Hospital
of Bordeaux. He went to Paris to take a special course at the Col-
lege of Medicine, but feeling an attraction to the priesthood, he at-
tended a private college, which in a few years became the College
Stanislas, and was incorporated into the University of France.
Forty years later, by a singular train of events, he was called to as-
sume the direction of the same college, where he remained fifteen
years, from 1855 to 1870, reflecting great honor on the Society of
Mary, and making Stanislas the foremost college in France. This
was the man whom Father Chaminade had always regarded as a
chosen soul, elected and predestined to great things, and in fact
John Baptist Lalanne was to become the corner-stone of the new
Society of Mary, the favorite disciple of the founder, one of the
greatest teachers in France, a national authority on educational
questions, and an honor to the Catholic Church and to his native
land.
On May I, 1817, John Lalanne, then in his twenty-second
year, called upon Father Chaminade with a most important message.
He said he had come to offer himself entirely, unreservedly, and at
once, to his beloved spiritual director, to be used in the realization
of the pious designs of the Sodality. Father Chaminade wept with
joy, and exclaimed : " God be praised ! This is just what I expected
1917.] CENTENARY OF THE SOCIETY OF MARY 33
long ago. God has made His holy will known to me. The time has
come at last to put into execution a plan which I have been revolv-
ing in my mind for twenty years; a plan which God Himself re-
vealed to me!"
This momentous interview really marked the beginning of the
Society of Mary. Several other members of the Sodality staff spoke
to Father Chaminade in the same strain. Arrangements and final
dispositions were made during the summer, and on Thursday, the
second of October, 1817, the feast of the Holy Guardian Angels, at
the closing of a week's preparatory retreat, seven of the young men
of the staff declared publicly and formally to their director that
they placed themselves at his disposal, chose him for their religious
superior, and at the same time begged the privilege of sealing their
promise by the three vows of religion. This was the birthday of
the Society of Mary. The seven original members represented the
various classes of society. Two were students for the priesthood,
one was a college professor, two were engaged in business, and two
were coopers. Thus, from the very beginning, the Society of Mary
embodied in its membership both priests and Brothers and men of
various degrees of education and training.
The education of youth was chosen as the special mission of
the new Society. Its membership increased steadily, and its sphere
of influence widened in proportion. Father Chaminade continued
to govern the Society until his death in 1850. He was in the eighty-
ninth year of his age and had governed the society thirty-three
years. He left behind him a universal reputation for sanctity.
His body lies in the Carthusian cemetery in Bordeaux. A majestic
monument crowned by a statue of the Immaculate Conception
marks his grave. The people of Bordeaux began to visit the tomb,
and the practice has never stopped. They bring flowers, they kneel
in prayer, they hang ex-votos on the railing that encloses the monu-
ment. Again and again these thank-offerings have been swept
away — by reverent hands indeed, but guided by wiser heads who
do not dare to anticipate the verdict of the Church. The cause
of the beatification of Father Chaminade has been introduced at
Rome. The Cardinals of the Sacred Congregation of Rites have
approved the favorable report of the commission appointed to
examine his writings. Another commission has been appointed to
examine the records and testimonies of his life.
At the death of Father Chaminade, the Society of Mary num-
bered five hundred and seventy members, with establishments in
VOL. CVI. — 3
34 CENTENARY OF THE SOCIETY OF MARY [Oct.,
France and Switzerland. The first mission of the Brothers of Mary
in the United States was sent out in 1849, a >'ear before the death of
the founder. The first establishment was made at Dayton, Ohio,
and St. Mary College still remains the largest and most important
establishment of the Brothers of Mary in America. In 1908 a sec-
ond centre was established near St. Louis, Missouri. Today the
Society in the two American provinces numbers five hundred and
twenty members, in sixty establishments, colleges, high schools and
parish schools.
His Holiness, Benedict XV., has graciously honored the cen-
tenary of the Society by a letter of praise, in which he reviews
the history and labors of the Brothers in the various countries of
the world, and grants special spiritual favors and privileges during
the commemoration. The celebration of the centenary will be
threefold. The first took place simultaneously after the yearly
general retreats during the summer vacation at Dayton, Ohio, and
Clayton, Missouri. All the Brothers of the two provinces were as-
sembled, and participated in a home-coming week. The pastors of
the various churches employing the Brothers in their parish schools,
were invited to these celebrations.
The second ceremony will take place on the second of October,
at the Mt. St. John Normal School, the new central house of the
Eastern province, near Dayton, Ohio. His Grace Monsignor John
Bonzano, the Apostolic Delegate, will preside. The final celebra-
tion will be held at St. Mary College, Dayton, on December nth,
and will be an occasion for the reunion of all the old pupils of the
Brothers from every part of the country. Cardinal Gibbons will
honor the festivity with his presence.
The celebration of the hundredth year of their foundation
ought to be an occasion of special interest to the thousands of men
in all parts of the United States who have received their early train-
ing in the schools of the Brothers of Mary. Both religion and
education owe much to the work of these skillful and zealous teach-
ers. Conformably with the injunctions and the practice of its ven-
erated founder, the Society of Mary has suited its apostolate to the
most pressing needs of the times — the parish schools — and the task
of answering the frequent and urgent appeals of the bishops and
parish priests has absorbed the greater part of the resources and
the personnel of the society up to the present day.
In spite of most tempting offers of less fatiguing and,
humanly speaking, more congenial work in establishments of more
I9I7-] CENTENARY OF THE SOCIETY OF MARY 35
enduring kind which they could call their own, and where they
would not be dependent on those uncertain and unsettled conditions
which result from a succession of pastors with changing policies
and varying personal predilections, the Society has deliberately in-
tensified upon the parish school work. But if the field of the Soci-
ety's chosen work has remained elementary and academic to a great
degree, the professional equipment and standing of its teachers has
always been exceptionally high. The Society trains all its members
for elementary work by a full course of normal school pedagogy
and practice, but it also prepares them for academic, college and
university work. It spares no pains and no expense in special train-
ing. Year after year members are sent to study in the universities
of Europe, and after their long course have often been placed in
charge of parish schools or academic establishments.
This devotion to parish schools has its drawbacks. The parish
school teachers are fighting in the open field ; they are not intrenched
behind college walls of their own erection, and this circumstance ac-
counts to a great extent for the shifting nature of their establish-
ments. The tenure is rather precarious, and sometimes depends
upon circumstances which are positively humiliating, and arises
from causes which are absolutely disheartening. This periodic
shifting of bases, this spasmodic giving-up and accepting, may have
marked the parochial establishments of the Brothers of Mary with a
note of inconstancy and instability, but there is a consoling compen-
sation in this continued and preponderant devotion to parish schools
in preference to more durable and more amenable establishments.
The Society of Mary considers the best teachers procurable as never
too good for the parish school classes in which the definite turn
is imparted to the young Catholic mind, and upon which the col-
leges must in turn count for their support and replenishment.
From the humble parish school of sixty years ago up to the
more advanced institutions of today, the work of the Brothers of
Mary has been uniformly uplifting and broadening. Undismayed
by poverty, and undiscouraged by misplaced economy, the Brothers
worked with what they had or could get, until they could command
something better fitted for education. ' Material equipment and re-
sources might have lagged behind the requisite, and even behind the
indispensable, when it was not theirs to furnish, but educational
preparedness and religious devotedness never failed.
The zeal of the parochial clergy and the generosity of the
Catholic laity have been constantly gro.wing with the reputation and
36 CENTENARY OF THE SOCIETY OF MARY [Oct.,
efficiency of the Catholic parochial schools. Excellent schools are
being built, in old parishes as well as new, schools which are in
startling contrast to what used to satisfy an earlier generation, and
which are a marvel even to the most progressive and exacting edu-
cators. After years of patient and faithful work under difficulties,
the Brothers of Mary are sharing in the welcome expansion and im-
provement to which they have long and generously contributed.
The Brothers have worked long and generously, indeed, and
silently as well — perhaps only too silently, which may have been a
reason for their having to work so much more generously. It was
a question of self-help or no help at all. They have earned all they
possess and a great deal more than they would ever dare to claim.
No great benefactions mark their establishments. No names of
benefactors are emblazoned on the entablatures of monumental in-
stitutions, for there are neither entablatures nor monuments on
which to parade them. The only monuments they ever attempt are
moral and educational foundations. The chosen field of the Brothers
brings them in contact only with pupils of immature age ; the finish-
ing touches are left to others and these touches are often effective,
successful and productive in more senses than one.
The Brotherhood has remained true to the spirit of their ven-
erated founder, a spirit of humility, silence and obscurity. Hist-
orians who write of Bordeaux in the nineteenth century have
remarked that there is almost a conspiracy of silence about the life
and works of Father Chaminade. Such a consummation may have
been to his liking. It may be objected that the present laudation of
his humility, his silence, and his obscurity threatens to break the
charm and lose the merit of a hundred years. Silence boasted is
silence broken ; humility heralded is humility lost ; obscurity revealed
is publicity courted.
True indeed for ourselves, but not for one for whom his spir-
itual children have been encouraged to solicit even the honors of the
altar. There is a time for silence and a time for speech, and just as
the obscurity and silence of Father Chaminade during his life re-
dounded to the glory of God and the honor of the Church, so like-
wise will his exaltation at this period, in the commemoration of the
centenary of the Society of Mary, again redound to the honor and
glory of religion.
A centenary marks an epoch in the history of any institution
that lives to celebrate it, and history is, in essence, a study of the
past with the ultimate intention of improving the present and pre-
1917.] CENTENARY OF THE SOCIETY OF MARY 37
paring for the future. If in the study of the past we find the key
to the correct understanding of the future, then the record of the
Brothers of Mary is an encouraging history. There have been the
usual varying fortunes and the inevitable vicissitudes that accom-
pany every undertaking, however blessed and select, in which the
work of man is essentially in evidence.. Problems have been
met and solved as they presented themselves; pressing wants have
been supplied in the educational field ; the school system adopted by
the Society of Mary is based upon the needs of human life and not
reared upon dreams of culture; efficiency has been sought be-
fore expediency or a deceptive success; theories have been subor-
dinated to practice ; the practical has served as a guide in seeking the
desirable; and above all the great end of Catholic education has been
kept constantly in view, " the one thing necessary," without which
the parochial schools would lose their very reason for existing at all,
the study of religion, has been a constant duty ; the service of God
and His Church has been the constant aim; and devotion to the
glorious Mother of God, the patroness of the Society, has been the
constant inspiration; her life has been the ideal, her protection has
been the guarantee that she who is the chosen patroness of this
country of abundant possibilities and great generosity, may con-
tinue to make Catholic education in the United States an honor to
the world, a consolation to the Church, and a means of salvation to
her children.
THE CLASSICAL ELEMENT IN SHAKESPEARE.
BY JULIAN E. JOHNSTONE.
EARS ago a certain Dr. Farmer, who knew some-
thing of Latin, a little of Greek, and still less of
English wrote with massive labor a dissertation
to prove that Shakespeare was no classical scholar
whatever, and proved to the dispassionate reader
that Shakespeare was one of the most finished classical scholars in
England. Dr. Grey, Upton, Theobald, Warburton and Pope had
shown definitely that the great dramaturge, known as Shakespeare,
was as full of Greek and Latin erudition as were Marlowe, Jonson
and Milton. And Fanner proved his right to the name when he
wrote that disquisition so derogatory to the claims put forth for
Shakespeare; so true is Pope's aphorism : "A little learning is a
dangerous thing."
In utter dissidence from Farmer's view are the illuminating
papers which Churton Collins, one of the greatest classicists in
England, contributed a decade ago to the much mooted question
of Shakespeare's academic learning. Collins, than whom there was
no greater Grecian in his generation, proved incontestibly that the
genius known as Shakespeare was permeated with Greek thought
and culture; and in support of his claim adduced such a multiplicity
of quotations and parallelisms from the Greek tragedians that the
old theory of an illiterate Shakespeare is absolutely indefensible.
Elaborate as the essays are they are not exhaustive. The limits he
prescribed for himself, precluded the professor's study of Plato,
Aristotle, Pindar, Lucian and the comedies of Aristophanes, from
all of whom Shakespeare appropriated some of his most striking
thoughts and images. As none of those authors existed in English
until Shakespeare ceased to exist, it is obvipus that the playwright
had read them in the original Greek. None of Collins' arguments
will be employed in this paper.
Titus Andronicus, we take it, was the earliest of the Shake-
spearean productions, for Jonson tells us it was on the boards in
1586. Yet the poet quotes the following lines from Virgil of whom
there was no translation in the vernacular: "Flectere si nequeo su-
peros, Acheronta movebo." This Shakespeare renders : " We will
1917.] CLASSICAL ELEMENT IN SHAKESPEARE 39
solicit heaven and move the gods." In the same play we find men-
tion of Tully's Orator, a book not translated then, allusions to
Sophocles, yEschylus and Euripides, the satires of Perseus, a quo-
tation from Seneca's Hippolytus, and a reference to the battle of
Hercules with the Nemean lion. Hesiod, Lucretius and Theocritus
are the only authors who celebrate that combat, and none of these
was as yet translated. The same may be said of Perseus and the
Greek tragic poets. It is patent, therefore, that the young prodigy
who penned the play was a consummate scholar; for inspiration
cannot afford one an education. That is the effect, not of genius,
but of genuine study.
The first draft of Hamlet was staged as early as 1586, for we
have the testimony of Nash and Gabriel Harvey to that effect.
Moreover, it was performed at Cambridge and Oxford in 1588 and
1592 respectively; and so great an authority as Professor Courthope
states categorically that the Hamlet of 1586 and that of 1602 (our
Hamlet} are one and the same play. In Act I., S. 3, Polonius gives
ten precepts to Laertes about to travel. "Hold not forth thy hand to
every man," says the old statesman. In other words he inculcates
wise reserve in his dealings with his fellows. In his Moral Maxims
the Greek poet Theognis, an author studied at Cambridge, impresses
the same counsel on his friend Cyrnus : " Be reserved ; speak little ;
give not thy hand to every man." Pythagoras says the same thing :
"Ne cuivis porrigas dexteram." Since neither author was Englished
in Elizabeth's time, it follows that our author had recourse to them
in the Greek.
Again Ophelia tells Laertes that "the violets withered when my
father died." B ion the Greek poet wrote : "When Adon died all the
flowers withered." That Shakespeare had read the Fragments of
Bion is indisputable, for Touchstone parodies his famous sayings
in As You Like It, a fact admitted by all the commentators, though
they cannot account for our poet's acquaintance with so recondite an
author.
Commenting on Hamlet's strange behavior, Polonius speaks
in this wise : " Though this be madness yet there's method in it."
Every student recognizes this as a verse of Horace, whose Odes and
Epodes were not translated till Shakespeare was translated to
heaven. The Sabine poet says: " Insanire paret certo ratione
modsque." Hamlet's father is poisoned by his uncle, who pours
henbane in his ear, while he sleeps in the garden. Henbane was
a well-known Italian poison; but strange to say the only classic
40 CLASSICAL ELEMENT IN SHAKESPEARE [Oct.,
that speaks of it is Pliny, who was not translated by Philemon
Holland until 1602, many years after the play was written, at
least in its first inception. Pliny tells us in his Natural History
that, " oil of henbane dropped into the ear disturbs the brain
and often produces death." The fact that the Latin writer
was not rendered into English when Shakespeare first wrote the
drama is proof of the poet's familiarity with Pliny in the origi-
nal. That Hamlet was formed on the model of Sophocles' poem,
Electra and ^schylus' Agamemnon; in fact that the English poet
plagiarized from both with the boldness of a Milton, we hope to
prove in a subsequent essay : for we have over fifty quotations from
the Greek tragedians in support of our position. The Comedy of
Errors, as everybody knows, was appropriated bodily from the
Menccchmi and Amphitruo of Plautus, who was not translated by
Warner until seven years after the composition of the play. The
well-known lines about the vine being wedded to the elm is taken
from Catullus, a Latin not done into English until Shakespeare had
ceased to talk English.
Speaking of the comedy, Cowden Clarke, an orthodox Shake-
spearean, declares that it is so saturated with Greek and Latin
thought, " it is evidently the production of a man fresh from col-
lege;" and George Brandes, the foremost critic of Denmark, is as-
tounded at the elegance of the diction, and the unmistakable classic
style and tone of the poem. Brandes certainly does not acquiesce in
the old belief of an uncultured and illiterate Shakespeare; and the
most accomplished scholars of the century are beginning to admit
that only men of the very broadest scholarship can fully appreciate
the classic culture and universal learning contained in plays that
epitomize the best of the world's thought.
It may not be inapposite here to say that the circulation of the
blood is alluded to over seventy times in the dramas. Dr. Harvey,
the putative discoverer of arterial circulation, did not publish his
epoch-making book until 1629: yet Shakespeare anticipated Harvey
by at least thirty years; for he mentions the circulation of the blood
twice in the Comedy of Errors, a poem written in the year 1587,
almost the year he went up to London. Whence then did Shake-
speare gain his idea, an idea that revolutionized the medical world
of England ? Plato had some notion of it as we perceive in his great
prose-poem, the Republic. Pythagoras and Heraclitus hint of
it; but Empedocles, one of the profoundest thinkers of antiquity,
had a positive knowledge of that, which Harvey demonstrated to an
1917.] CLASSICAL ELEMENT IN SHAKESPEARE 41
astonished world two thousand years afterward. In his Fragments
we read " the thin blood surges through the veins and the limbs;"
and again : "The heart, dwelling in the sea of blood, which runs in
opposite directions for the blood running through the veins is
the life of man." Here he speaks in language explicit as that of
Harvey. There was no version of the Greek philosopher in English,
nor was there any version of Plato in the vernacular. The English
poet read the Greek prose authors in the original, therefore ; unless
he possessed the Latin translation of the Republic published at Paris
and Venice. That he knew Empedocles is certain: for in Richard
II. , Henry V. and otherwhere, he shows a knowledge of the four
elements upon which that physicist built the universe. Anaxagoras
had taught that material atoms were the source of all things, a
doctrine that still survives in the monads of Vogt and Haeckel.
Heraclitus held that fire was the primal principle; but it was Em-
pedocles who taught that air, earth, fire and water are the four
elements that constitute the whole cosmological order. This was
the system taught at Oxford, when Bruno lectured there on the
much-derided Copernican system in 1582, under the auspices of
Lord Leicester. Shakespeare was the only playwright of the period
who had a didactic purpose in writing. We have seen that he
called attention to the circulation of the blood repeatedly, and he
belongs to the school of Empedocles in natural philosophy. He ridi-
cules the Copernican System, for in Troilus and Cressida he sings :
Doubt that the stars are fire,
Doubt that the sun doth move
But doubt not that I love.
He was a firm believer in Empedocles, and took every opportunity
of popularizing his doctrine which was the classic doctrine, the
tenets held by his favorite poets, especially ^schylus and Lucretius.
If we have dilated at greater length than seems necessary on
this matter, it is only to show that Shakespeare, having studied the
philosophy of Empedocles, at some college, or under some cultured
tutor, must have been acquainted with the content of his thought,
as embodied in the Fragments, found only in the Greek at the twin
universities, and so derived his knowledge of the circulation of the
blood from that author rather than from Plato. If it be so, and
everything points that way, the dramatist was as conversant with
Greek literature as was " Rare Old Ben " himself.
That there may be no slightest doubt in the mind of the reader
42 CLASSICAL ELEMENT IN SHAKESPEARE [Oct.,
as to the poet's proficiency in Greek studies, we shall adduce a few
random quotations to illustrate that proficiency, howsoever he ac-
quired it. Hamlet says : "There's nothing good or bad ; 'tis thinking
makes it so." This is an extraordinary sentiment in the mouth of a
Christian poet, and speaks volumes for his Greek culture. It is so
eminently Grecian that we marvel at the ineptitude of the annotators
to explain the passage. Heraclitus, who is mentioned twice in the
dramas, tells us that " there is nothing good or evil," and Marcus
Antoninus, the eclectic philosopher, extracts this thought from his
elder, and renders it thus wise : " There is nothing good or bad, but
custom makes it so." Both men wrote in Greek ; neither was turned
into English till Shakespeare was turned into dust. Obviously our
poet took the sentence from one or the other and arrogated it to
himself, as he ever does : for he is the least original of all writers.
Again, our poet in the person of Hamlet says : " Appetite grows
by what it feeds on." Polybius, the Greek historian, whom Shake-
speare assimilated as thoroughly as he did Lucretius and Juvenal,
Polybius, we say, assures us, that " the appetite for power grows
by that on which it feeds." As the historian was not rendered info
English until a hundred years after Shakespeare rendered up his
accounts, the laws of logic compel us to make the reluctant admission
that the prince of poets copied the prince of historians, and so
read him in the Greek.
Once more, in All's Well, Act IV., the First Lord remarks:
" The web of our life is of mingled yarn, good and ill, together."
This is directly referable to Plutarch, and that part of Plutarch
which was not translated until the last century, namely the Letters.
In Shakespeare's day, North's translation of The Lives was in
everybody's hands: but neither North nor Amyot knew anything of
the Letters. Strange to say, Shakespeare did. He knew that of
which two of the greatest scholars of the time were entirely ignor-
ant; and reading the Letters in a desultory fashion he discovered
this thoroughly Greek epigram : " The texture of our lives is of so
varied a thread, that good and bad are mixed confusedly."
Lastly, in proof that our poet was an accomplished Grecian, we
call attention to Moth's remark in Love's Labour's Lost. Sir
Nathaniel and Holof ernes have been discoursing so pedantically,
and interlarding their language with so many foreign phrases, that
Moth says derisively : " One would think they were at a feast of
languages, and had picked up the crumbs." None of the com-
mentators has been able to throw the least light on this passage. In
1917.] CLASSICAL ELEMENT IN SHAKESPEARE 43
a copy of Athenseus owned by a friend of ours, is this anecdote of
./Eschylus, the Greek tragedian : "When ^Eschylus was asked where
he got his style, he modestly replied : ' I have been at a banquet of
the poems of Homer, and have gathered up the scraps.' ' Athenaeus
was a rare author, even in Elizabeth's epoch ; when scholars seem to
have read the abstrusest documents. He wrote in Ionic Greek and
was not translated until the last century. His book, The Banquet of
Wisdom, may be found in almost any public library, and is well
worth perusing : for it stood Shakespeare in good stead on more than
one occasion. Here, then, we have four Shakespearean quotations
chosen at random, and we confront them with four Greek epigrams,
so similar in thought and language that it is morally certain the
one set of quotations was derived from the other. Shakespeare read
Polybius and Athenaeus, therefore, and, of necessity, read them in
the original.
The next play we consider is Love's Labour's Lost. This is so
evidently the product of the polished scholar, bearing as it does on
every page the incisive stamp of classic culture, that, to any fair
and unbiased mind, it offers the most convincing testimony to the
author's scholastic training, and his familiarity with the language
of the gods. Gervinus, Hallam, Coleridge, each has animadverted
on the classic tone of the poem, and each has expressed his aston-
ishment that a composition, showing the very highest culture,
could have been the product of a man who had no culture at all.
Suffice it that we cite two examples of the poet's learning. He
says : " Fat paunches have lean pates," in other words, poor wits.
Martial, the epigrammatist, puts it in this wise : "Pinyuis venter non
gignit sensum tenuem" (A fine paunch has no fine wit). There
was no English version of the Roman poet in Shakespeare's day.
Again, when the cynical Moth is sneering at Armado, the latter
exclaims : " Quis, quist thou consonant." None of the editors has
been able to explain this seemingly incongruous and outlandish
epithet. Armado calls Moth a consonant, a most extraordinary ap-
pellation. But Shakespeare never talks nonsense. He has a prece-
dent, usually a classic one, for every departure he makes from con-
ventional usage. And in calling Moth a consonant he gives indis-
putable evidence of his intimate acquaintance with the Latin poets.
Juvenal terms a thief (fur) a "fellow of three letters." Very good ;
but Moth is a fellow of one letter, and that a consonant. Turning
to Perseus, we discover which consonant is meant. In the Fifth
Satire, the Noman tells us that R is the dog-letter. Why ? Because
44 CLASSICAL ELEMENT IN SHAKESPEARE [Oct.,
it connotes the snarl or growl of a dog ; and the scholiast inf onns us
that as the thief was called the " man of three letters," the cynic, or
growler, was facetiously styled the man of " the dog-letter."
Since Moth openly shows his disdain for Armado, the very
affected Castilian turns on him, and calls him a consonant, in other
words, a puppy. It needs not to say that Perseus could be read
only in the Latin. In Hamlet, Act I., there is a passage, which un-
doubtedly alludes to the Samian letter, the mystic Y of Pythagoras.
Here, in this play, is an allusion to the " dog-letter " of the cynic.
If Shakespeare were not a profound classical scholar, it passes the
limits of rational hypothesis how he knew two of the most obscure
passages in all Latin literature. The average college man, even
today, never heard of the Samian letter, and would be nonplussed to
explain the Roman significance of the letter R, the dog-letter of
dear old Perseus. The truth is, the author of the Shakespearean
drama was so erudite, his reading in Greek and Roman, French,
Spanish and Italian literature so discursive, his knowledge of law,
music, medicine, geology, physics, political science, and philosophy
so profound that no editor, without a learning commensurate with
his, can ever hope to do him justice. It would require the uni-
versal learning of a Bacon to illustrate and give adequate expression
to the universal genius of Shakespeare. Our poet-philosopher is
too deep for the average scholar.
Thus far we have commented only on four plays; and those
were all written in the rough as early as 1588, the very year Shake-
speare entered London. It looks, therefore, as if they were com-
posed at Stratford, where not one of the Greek and Roman authors,
quoted in the plays, was ever taught or perhaps ever heard of. An
Anacharsis came out of Scythia: but if Love's Labour's Lost was
composed at the Stratford Grammar School, we respectfully submit
that not Oxford nor Cambridge was the great university of Eng-
land, but the Grammar School of Stratford. It is really too bad
that young Bacon, upon quitting Cambridge, did not finish his
education at Stratford instead of going to Paris, and finally turning
up at the celebrated University of Prague. What immortal poetry
he might have written had he done so ! But as Petrarch says :
Every man's lot is at his birth decreed.
di noi pur fia
Quel chi ordinato e gia nel sommo seggio.
In As You Like It, Jaques speaks of " night-wandering weas-
els," and in The Rape of Lucrece, when Tarquin steals along the
1917.] CLASSICAL ELEMENT IN SHAKESPEARE 45
corridor "night-wandering weasels shriek to see him there." For two
hundred years the critics have made themselves hilarious over this so
palpable proof of Shakespeare's ignorance of Roman life and
natural history. The weasel is not a nocturnal animal, say the
wiseacres; neither did the Romans keep such animals about their
premises. But the critics are wrong as usual, and our poet is correct
as he almost invariably is.
How in the world did this man, who never studied anything,
know everything? How did he know that which Johnson, Coleridge,
Grant White, Furnivall certainly did not know? Turning to Juve-
nal, whom the poet appears to have known by heart, we read that
the Romans, instead of the cat, kept the mustela, an animal very
like the polecat, or weasel. Pliny, also, tells us in the Natural His-
tory (i., 29) that the Greek and Roman people, in lieu of the feline,
had an animal known as the Y«XT) or mustela. There were two kinds
of the weasel, one domestic, the other wild, and fond of wandering
in the night. " Duo autem sunt genera, alterum domesticum, quod in
domibus nostris oberret et serpentes persequitur; alterum sil-
vestre, distans magnitudine , greed iK-ciBlcc vocant" The Greek
IKTIS of course is the weasel or martin-cat. As every naturalist
knows, the martin-cat is nocturnal in its habits. Philemon Holland
did not publish his English version of Pliny until the year 1602.
Lucrece was printed in 1594. Therefore Shakespeare read that
classic writer in his sonorous Latin. The fact that our poet was
possessed of so recondite a piece of information in respect of the
Roman household is clearly indicative of the deep student, not the
mere cursory reader. That Shakespeare recalled those passages,
when he had to write of a Roman home, recalled two of the least
known lines in Latin literature, is a certain sign that he was a pro-
found student, and from long study of the classics had them at his
finger-tips. In the Merchant of Venice, the irrepressible Gratiano
cries out : "Why should a man whose blood is warm within sit like
his grandsire cut in alabaster? " In other words, Gratiano says that
a man devoid of energy (virtus) differs in no wise from a marble
statue. In the Eighth Satire, Juvenal tells a fop, who boasted his
descent from the noble Cecropids, that without virtue of his own
he is no better than the carven pillar, crowned with the head of the
god Hermes. Then he assures him that in no point has he an ad-
vantage over the marble statue, save in this, that Hermes' head is
of marble, the fop's a living image. " Nidlo quippe alio vinds dis-
crimine quam quod illi marmoreum caput est, tua vivit imago"
46 CLASSICAL ELEMENT IN SHAKESPEARE [Oct.,
Both poets liken a phlegmatic man to the statue of his ancestor ;
for be it remembered that Hermes was the founder of the Cecropid
family. Then we have a verse of Euripides to the effect that
" mere flesh without spirit is nothing more than the statues in the
forum." This is tantamount to saying that a man devoid of action
is no better than an alabaster monument. Clearly Shakespeare was
saturated with classicism. He could hardly think except in the
terms and imagery of the most approved Athenian poesy. Like the
man in Juvenal, who consulted his almanac if he rode only a mile
from home. Shakespeare holds the ancients in such high appraisal
that he cannot say a single thing without opening his book to ascer-
tain how Plato or Pindar said it, "Ad primum lapidem vectari quum
placet, hora sumitur ex libro."
In The Merchant of Venice, again, Shylock exclaims : " You
take my life when you take the means whereby I live." It is trans-
parent as a Persian lantern, as Plautus puts it, that our poet had been
reading Sophocles. In fact the English poet employs the very lan-
guage of the Greek poet. In the tragedy of Philoctetes, when the
son of Achilles deprives the unhappy hunter of his bow and arrow,
the fatal bow, bound up predestinately with the fall of Troy, the
poor old man cries out in a paroxysm of anguish : " You take my
life, when you take those things which sustain my life." There was
not even a Latin translation of Sophocles published in England when
Shakespeare gave this play to England. It is evident that our poet
after the manner of Lord Bacon, whose note-books are filled with
excerpts from the Greek and Latin writers, made extracts out of
every author he read ; and he read omniverously. As Pliny says of
another great genius : " Nihil legebat quod non exceperet"
In another drama, Juliet is called the bride of Death. This
is so extravagant that it inevitably consociates itself with the orient-
alism of the Greek. In fact it is so intrinsically Grecian, that pre-
scinding from all the arguments we have adduced, in support of our
contention that the author of the plays was a consummate classical
scholar, this of itself is sufficient to convince any man conversant
with Greek literature that Shakespeare was eminently well read in
that literature. The phrase " the bride of Death," and that other,
" the bridegroom Death, has killed her maiden lips," occur over a
dozen times in vEschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Thus, when
Iphigenia, about to be sacrificed at Tauris, lifts up her lamentation,
her father, Agamemnon, tearfully exclaims : " Alas, poor maiden !
But why, maiden? for thou art wedded to the Bridegroom Death."
1917-] CLASSICAL ELEMENT IN SHAKESPEARE 47
In Henry IV., Captain Jack Falstaff affirms that " discretion is
the better part of valor." This is notoriously un-English and anti-
Celtic. The sentiment was never popular with the theatre-goers.
Even at Waterloo, Wellington with the national contempt for cau-
tion, violated the fundamental rule of war as laid down by Jomini,
namely, that a general must never select a battlefield with a forest
in the rear; for Wellington selected the height of Mont St. Jean,
with the impassable wood behind his fighting line. But whence did
" old fat Jack " derive his very un- Saxon sentiment ? From " old
fat Euripides " as the comic poets called him. This author, every-
where, inculcates the lesson of prudence. Thus, in one play, he says :
" Discretion is a thing of more value than valor ;" in another : "As
to a general, a wise discretion is better than valor and foolhardi-
ness." It is evident that nothing of beauty or wisdom ever escaped
the all-inclusive vision of the cultured poet who wrote the dramas.
Again, when Prince Hal perstringes the fat knight on points of
honor, and ridicules his corpulence, old Jack rejoinds : "When I was
your age, Hal, you could draw me through an alderman's ring."
Every reader of Aristophanes recognizes this at a glance. In the
Ecclesiazusa the second woman, an inordinately fat one, remarks
to the young man : " When I was young I was so slim in the waist,
you could pull me through a finger-hoop."
Our poet is so full of imitations and reminiscences of Aristo-
phanes, it is incontestable that the greatest comic writer of the
English copied from the greatest comic writer of the Athenians.
We have discovered over a score of pertinent passages to prove the
point.
Trolins and Cressida also gives the most unmistakable proofs
of our author's acquaintance with the Greek writers. This play and
Timon afford so many instances of the employment of the Greek
idiom, so many passages excerpted from Lucian, Sophocles, Plato,
Menander and ^Eschylus that it were as futile to gainsay Shake-
speare's scholarship as to wash a brick with violet water, to use the
language of Theocritus. We content ourselves with one illustration
of his palmary knowledge of the poets. In Troilus, Ulysses em-
ploys a most extraordinary expression. It is this :
As venerable Nestor
Should with a bond of air
Knit all the Grecian ears to his experienced tongue.
This is hyperbole with a vengeance ; it is oriental enough to pass for
48 CLASSICAL ELEMENT IN SHAKESPEARE [Oct.,
Persian. Nevertheless it is Greek, the purest Greek of Athenia. All
the Hellenic poets represent their orators as tying the ears of their
auditors to their words. Even in Greek sculpture, eloquence was
symbolized by chains, or bonds, connecting the speaker's tongue with
the ears of his auditory. The idea is so eminently Grecian, that it
occurs in no other literature, not even in the highly imaginative writ-
ings of Arabia. It is so utterly alien to the Western mode of thought,
that none, save a student so deeply read in Greek literature that
he assimilated the most idiomatic expressions of Greece, and almost
thought in the Greek language, could possibly employ it; and that,
too, so pertinently in this very Athenian play.
In the same drama, Cressida, with a prescience truly wonderful
in that age of ignorance and witchcraft, is the prophet of the law of
gravitation, not discovered by Newton till nearly twenty years after
the performance of the play. She assures Troilus that " her love is
as firm as the earth, that.draws all things to the centre." It is evident
that Shakespeare was the greatest scientist of the age, unless he
gained his knowledge from Bacon, who wrote to the same effect in
the Novum Organum; from Dante, who speaks about the centre of
gravity in the fourth canto of The Inferno; or from the Latin, Lu-
cretius. Bacon's book, he could not see, for the biographers, with
child-like simplicity, aver that he never knew Bacon. Dante was an
Italian, and William never studied Italian; at least so they say.
This process of elimination leads us to the only classic, who speaks
of gravitation, not as Plato does obscurely, but as Bacon does in-
cisively. That author is Lucretius, a writer whom Shakespeare
reproduces as often as Ben Jonson incorporates Seneca into his com-
positions. True, Lucretius does not believe in a centre of gravity;
but he was familiar with the doctrine, and inferentially tells us that
it was a theory held by the philosophers of the time. These are his
words : " Longe fuge creder, Memmi in medium summer, quod dic-
unt omni niti — Do not believe my friend, that all things, as they say,
press to the centre of the sun." Lucretius, therefore, alludes to a
well-known belief of the physicists. These were Parmenides, Em-
pedocles and Pythagoras, the latter the first to announce the true
motion of the earth around the sun. All three have been credited
with the discovery of the law of gravitation ; but we cannot find that
law enunciated in the fragments that have come down to us. Since
Lucretius is the only ancient author who mentions the law of
gravity, that is, specifically, it stands to reason that Shakespeare
studied him : of course in the original.
1917.] CLASSICAL ELEMENT IN SHAKESPEARE 49
In Richard 11., the gardener of the Duke of York compares the
commonwealth to the state of man. Dion of Halicarnassus, with
whose golden thoughts the plays are intertissued, says : ' The
commonwealth has a resemblance to the state of man : for the senate
may be considered the soul, and the people the body." Plato speaks
in the same vein. Both' wrote in Greek, and as there were no English
versions available in Shakespeare's time, our poet must needs have
read those classic authors in the original and so arrogated the
thought to himself. In the same drama the king likens a kingdom
to music. The passage is too well known to suffer quoting. In
Cicero's Republic, of which there was no translation in the spacious
times of Elizabeth, Tully tells us that " the government of a king-
dom requires as much skill as the government of a musical instru-
ment." Shakespeare's thought and language are so very like the
Latin writer's it is as clear as a proposition in Euclid, that the Eng-
lishman read the Roman, most probably at Cambridge University.
When Bolingbroke is banished from England, and Richard tells
him that he will curtail his long exile by four years, the heart-broken
hero exclaims:
How long a time lies in one little word!
Four lagging winters, and four wanton springs
End in a word.
In Euripides, when the citizens confer as to whether Orestes
shall die, or live in exile, the prisoner exclaims to Pylades : " Our
life, or death, so short the words, that tell of things so long."
A man blind as Belisarius can perceive that Shakespeare trans-
scribed the words, almost literally, from the Grecian tragedy, which
he read either in the original, or in the Latin translations, published
at Basle and Paris. Bolingbroke's words have been admired and
much commented upon: but this is the first time they have been
traced to their source in Euripides. Indeed the vast majority of
the classic allusions in this paper have been given to the public for
the first time.
Again, Shakespeare assures us that "kings have long arms."
We instantly recall the Persian tyrant, Artaxerxes Longimanus.
But Herodotus is the author whom the London prodigy had in mind.
In seven places the "Father of History" assures us that "kings have
long arms." Once more our poet asseverates " the world moves
on wheels." We have seen that Shakespeare like Bacon rejected
the Copernican system ; for in that day its advocates had not suffi-
VOL. cvi. — 4
50 CLASSICAL ELEMENT IN SHAKESPEARE [Oct.,
cient evidence to support it. The satellites of Jupiter, which prove
it, were undiscovered then; neither were the moons of Saturn
known. He adhered to the old system of Empedocles and Ptolemy.
Consequently, our poet was not alluding to the orbital revolution of
the heavens, when he said " the world moves on wheels." He re-
ferred either to Anacreon's dictum, "Life rolls away like a chariot
wheel," or to the story of Darius as related by old Herodotus.
Darius worshipped the Earth-God : and had an image made of him
in the shape of a gilded globe mounted on a wagon, of gold also.
This he carried with him on all his campaigns : and this gave rise to
the saying in Persian and Arabic literature : " The world goes on
wheels." There was no English proverb to that effect when Shake-
speare wrote. Herodotus was not .given to the English world till
William went out of the world. The dramatist read him in Greek,
therefore. But Sidney Lee tells us Shakespeare knew no Greek ; to
which we say in the language of Horace : "Garrit aniles ex re fab el-
las." Vernon Lee, a far better scholar than Sidney, said years ago:
" The play-goers in Shakespeare's time went to hear Baconian
thoughts uttered in Baconian language." And we would say that
the theatre- folk went to hear the finest poetry of ancient time trans-
lated by the finest poet of all time.
It will be seen that we have examined only one-third of the
thirty-seven dramas, or rather just glanced at them: but we think
we have adduced sufficient testimony as to Shakespeare's classical
learning to convince everyone that the great dramaturge was an ex-
ceptionally fine classical scholar; a man so well inducted into the
beauties, the graceful amenities, and peculiar charms, so elusive in
a translation, that not only was he a great scholar in the most ex-
clusive sense of the term, but also a Grecian, who alm-ost thought
in the Greek idiom, for he reproduces that idiom in a multiplicity of
passages. It was our intention to point out his many obligations
to Lucian, Plato, Lucan, Lucretius, Pindar, Virgil, Claudian and
Callimachus: for Shakespeare like the bees of Calymna sucked
melrose from them all, but to do so would require a dissertation
double the length of the present paper. The student, who would
inquire more fully into the classic culture of the poet, would do well
to examine Professor Spencer Bayne's book, dealing with Shake-
speare's indebtedness to Ovid; Dr. Maginn's essay in Black-wood's
Magazine, a reply to Farmer ; and J. E. Riddle's Illustrations from
Aristotle of the Works of Shakespeare. The latter, an Oxonian,
gives a list of over one hundred and fifty parallelisms between the
1917-] CLASSICAL ELEMENT IN SHAKESPEARE 51
great philosopher of England and the greatest philosopher of Greece.
We have refrained from all allusion to Ovid and Aristotle in this
paper, for we deem it unfair to encroach upon the territory of
others. Let the student read Riddle's essay: and the riddle of
Shakespeare's erudition will be as easy of solution as was that of
the Sphinx in the hands of (Edipus.
The fact is the Shakespeareans of the old school have such a
reverence for the Truth as the Hebrews had for the name of
Jehovah; and so never utter it. Dowden wrote his notes on the
Shakespearean sonnets to throw light on their obscurity: and he
has succeeded in making their obscurity deeper, darker, more im-
penetrable than Cimmerian gloom in mid-winter. The sonnets
imitate Sidney, Bruno, Lucretius, Sophocles, Tacitus, Horace,
Petrarch, Marianus of Alexandria, and Boccaccio. Dowden knew
it; but does his very best to prevent the reader from knowing it.
This is the approved Shakespearean method of throwing light on
the subject. As for the biographers of " Shagspere," for that was
the actor's baptismal name, these gentlemen are really the finest
poets that England ever produced. They are endowed with so
exquisite a fancy, so creative an imagination, a constructive genius
so remarkable, that their " biographies " are really the most trans-
cendent poems ever elaborated. Compared with them The Fairy
Queen, Orlando Furioso, and Camoen's Liisiad pale into insignif-
icance like stars, whose splendors evanesce in the blazing glory of the
risen sun. As romances, pure and simple, they eclipse Amadis of
Gaul, Lucian's True History and the Adventures of Don Quixote.
Viewed as epic poems, they are of superlative merit : but re-
garded as histories, as biographies, they are the most lamentable
failures that ever issued from the press. Fiction is all right in
its place, but we protest vigorously when an author labels a work
of fiction " a true history." When a man is looking for facts, he
does not want to receive a book of fables. Pilpay, Phaedrus and
La Fontaine have supplied us with a sufficiency of those oriental
parables: and it is inconsiderate in a man, purporting to write
biography, to enter into rivalry with those inimitable fabulists.
One word more. Had the university men expended their best
efforts on the plays of Shakespeare, rather than on the third-rate
player known as " Shagspere," the mystification surrounding the
great dramatist would have vanished " into air, thin air," or as
Virgil puts it " evanuit in tenuem." But in trying to reconcile the
glaring incongruities between Shakespeare's learning as displayed
52 KNIGHTS-ERRANT [Oct.,
in the book, and "Shagspere's" ignorance as evinced by the man, the
deluded votaries of a false worship are endeavoring to perform the
impossible. In the words of Petrarch, they are pursuing an elusive
Laura, on a very lame ox.
Lagrimando e cantando, i nostri versi,
E col bue zoppo andrent cacciando I' Aura.
In over a dozen passages, Euripides, whom our poet knew by
heart, alludes to Pallas, the goddess of wisdom, as " the Spear-
Shaker, who shook her lance at Ignorance." In his famous dedica-
tory poem, after pointing out the authors Shakespeare copied
(^Eschylus, Accius, Pacuvius), Ben Jonson distinctly tells us he
" shook his lance at Ignorance." Jonson hints at the Greek origin
of the pseudonym. We wonder will the world ever take the hint.
KNIGHTS-ERRANT.
BY S. M. M.
DEATH is no foeman, we were born together;
He dwells between the places of my breath,
Night vigil at my heart he keeps and whether
I sleep or no, he never slumbereth.
Though I do fear thee, Knight of the Sable Feather,
Thou wilt not slay me, Death!
But one rides forth, accoutred all in wonder;
I know thee, Life, God's errant that thou art,
Who comes to make of me celestial plunder,
To wound me with thy love's immortal smart!
Life, thou wilt rend this flesh and soul asunder;
Love, thou wilt break my heart!
SUPERSTITIONS OLD AND NEW.
BY JAMES J. WALSH, M.D., PH.D., SC.D.
T is almost a commonplace in periodical literature,
newspaper writing and public speaking of the super-
ficial kind, to thank God we have outlived that la-
mentable tendency to superstitions so prevalent in
the long ago and particularly during the mediaeval
period. As a definite demonstration of past ignorance and lack of
information as well as of judgment, especially in the benighted
Middle Ages, it is declared that many people then believed the moss
scraped from a dead man's skull or the extract of a bat's wing
or pulverized mummy or something equally absurd was efficacious
for the cure of disease. People were, moreover, credulous of the
marvelous effects of water from holy wells, of earth from holy
places, or of pilgrimages to some particular locality which was
supposed to possess a healing virtue due to some event that had
occurred there in the past.
These expressions are rather amusing because they evidence
such a neglect of that time-honored maxim : " people in glass houses
should not throw stones." As a matter of fact we have so many
examples today of over-credulity in remedies of all kinds, most of
which are known, by those with a right to an opinion in the matter, to
be quite without any physical effect that it is surely " the pot calling
the kettle black " for us to comment censoriously upon the credulity
of the past. Indeed I do not hesitate to declare after many years of
attention to the history of medicine, that there probably never was a
time when so many people were fooled by " cures " of all kinds as in
our day. Literally many millions of dollars are spent every year for
highly advertised remedies, although the remedies are shown by
scientific investigation to have no therapeutic efficiency, and owe
their supposed healing powers entirely to the suggestion of ad-
vertisement.
Everyone is familiar with Munyon of the pompadour and up-
lifted finger with remedies for nearly everything under the sun and
a few other things besides. The Bureau of Chemistry of the United
States Government, in accordance with the Pure Food and Drug
Act, recently analyzed some of these remedies with really wonderful
54 SUPERSTITIONS OLD AND NEW [Oct.,
results. As a consequence a judgment was entered in the United
State Courts, which I quote briefly. According to the advertise-
ments, Munyon's Asthma Cure would " permanently cure asthma."
The Government chemists analyzed the " cure " and found it to
consist of sugar and alcohol. That, however, was at least one in-
gredient better than the next of his remedies to be analyzed. This
was Munyon's Blood Cure. The claims for it were " Munyon's
Blood Cure will positively cure all forms of scrofula, erysipelas, salt
rheum, eczema, pimples, syphilitic affections, mercurial taints,
blotches, liver spots, tetter and all skin diseases." When analyzed
by the Government chemists this promising remedy guaranteed to
cure nearly all skin affections, and therefore presumedly a veritable
godsend, was found to consist simply of sugar.
With the evidence of the Government chemists before the
court, Munyon pleaded guilty and was fined two hundred dollars
in each of the cases on which he had been tried. But what of the
people who have taken these remedies and have felt themselves
benefited by them, for invariably medicines of this kind secure
their vogue, at least partly, through the recommendations of those
who have used them? A little alcohol and sugar will not go far to-
wards curing asthma, and sugar alone will not accomplish anything
for the cure of skin diseases, and yet, for years, the American
public has been fooled into buying these substances and has paid
good prices for them, too. We continue to talk about our won-
derfully enlightened period, and how much more intelligent people
are now than in the so-called dark ages when mummy and skull
moss and other such materials were used for the cure of disease !
As a matter of fact while ever so many more people, in propor-
tion to the whole population, know how to read and write now
than formerly, the ability to read only leaves them more open to
suggestion of many kinds, and almost inevitably the great majority
are brought to do anything that they are told to do provided they
are told it often enough.
Superstition plays just as large a role as ever in life. It is only
the subject that has changed somewhat. According to its ety-
mology, a superstition is something that stands over one and pro-
duces so strong an effect on the mind as to suspend reason. In
the older days the great source of superstition was religion, because
religion was the subject of paramount interest. In our time the
source of superstition has been transferred to science. If scientific
expressions are used, it matters not how little of sense they may
1917.] SUPERSTITIONS OLD AND NEW 55
have, many people at once believe in whatever they are applied to;
they do not reason, but just accept what is said to them and, as a
rule, act upon it.
Hence the many hundreds of remedies whose manufacturers
have been condemned under the National Food and Drug Act for
selling their medicines under " false, misleading, or fraudulent
claims." The records of these cases are published by the United
States Department of Agriculture in a series of leaflets known as
Notices of Judgment which can be obtained from the Superin-
tendent of Documents, Government Printing Office, Washington,
D. C, for a few cents. The Notices of Judgment are grouped
in a series of pamphlets containing fifty each, and the contrast be-
tween the claims made in the advertisements and the substances
found in the remedies by the Government chemists make very in-
teresting reading. Nothing proves more conclusively how gullible
the people of our generations are, how ready to accept anything
that they see in print, and even to pay good money for the most non-
sensical claims, than these items of court information gathered
under oath.
What is most interesting, of course, is the fact that these
fraudulent remedies find place in the advertising columns of reput-
able newspapers and magazines, sometimes even after notices of
judgment have been published. All that the United States Court
can do is to declare that the claims made for the remedies are
" false, fraudulent, and applied recklessly and wantonly," and then
the manufacturer is required to modify his claims. If the formula
contains any medicament, he may still continue to sell it, pro-
vided he makes no claims to " cure," and may thus trade on its
previous reputation and continue to exploit the public. English-
speaking people are so afraid to infringe on personal liberty that
they insist that anyone who wants to make a fool of himself shall be
free to do so, and we have not reached the point of prohibiting a
man who has been caught deliberately cheating poor ailing people
from thereafter making any pretense to possessing beneficent
remedies.
Advertising is the secret of their success. The newspapers
are fully aware of this; they also know these remedies to be harmful
rather than helpful, but the money paid for advertising tempts
them to be partners in the fraud upon the public. So far as I can see
there is no other way to express it, since even a little investigation
would convince any newspaper man that ninety-nine out of every
56 SUPERSTITIONS OLD AND NEW [Oct.,
hundred of these remedies could not be other than attempts to take
advantage of people who are suffering or think they are suffering
from various ills.
The history of the patent medicine business shows very clearly
that the men who enter into it are usually men who know nothing
at all about medicine or disease; they are not infrequently people
who have made failures in other lines of business, and who now
turn to the exploitation of the public in order to make a living.
The ingredients of their remedy are of no consequence, the all-im-
portant thing is a taking name and a clever advertising campaign.
The formula of the remedy may be changed at any time and fre-
quently is. Scientific analysis has often shown this to be the case.
The National Food and Drug Act, especially with the Sherley
Amendment, has made it possible to get at some of the worst of
these frauds, though the evil has only been scotched, npt killed,
Only after a long fight did the United States Supreme Court main-
tain the validity of the act as originally passed, and a portion of it
had to be strengthened by the Sherley Amendment. Justice Hughes
of New York, one of the three members of the Supreme Court who
dissented from the opinion of the majority of the Court freeing the
manufacturer of a " cancer cure " from responsibility for claims
made with regard to it, wrote : " Granting the wide domain of opin-
ion and allowing the broadest range to the conflict of medical views,
there still remains a field in which statements as to curative prop-
erties are downright falsehoods and in no sense expressions of
judgment."
This advertising abuse is not new, it is very old. The oldest
newspapers in this country contain a number of advertisements of
medicinal preparations. A medical essay, awarded a prize nearly one
hundred years ago in New York, had for its subject, The Influence
of Trades Professions and Occupations in the United States in the
Production of Disease. In that essay Dr. Benjamin McCready said :
There is an evil which has of late years become of excessive
magnitude, and which is daily increasing — the consumption of
quack medicines. Aided by the immense circulation of a cheap
press, many of these nostrums have obtained a sale that exceeds
belief. Few patients among the lower classes now apply to a
physician who have not previously aggravated their complaints
by swallowing numbers of these pretended specifics, and a late
resident physician of the city hospital has informed me that he
has met with many cases of derangement and irritation of the
1917.] SUPERSTITIONS OLD AND NEW 57
mucous membrane of the stomach and bowels, caused solely by
the drastic articles which enter into their composition. Formed
in most instances of irritating ingredients, and directed to be
taken in immense doses, and as infallible remedies in all cases,
the mischief which they do is incalculable, and unless some stop
be put to the evil by. law or by an enlightened public opinion,
it will soon claim an unenviable preeminence as a cause of pub-
lic ill-health.
Dr. McCready's prophecy was fulfilled in the days when opium
and alcohol with cocaine and acetanilid, unregulated in any way,
became the basis of a great many of our proprietary medicines. His
recognition of the role played by the newspaper advertising must
have been shared by many of his colleagues and by all interested in
social problems and the protection of the defenceless half-informed
from their own ignorance. Nevertheless advertising has continued
down to our own time to be the most potent auxiliary of the pro-
prietary medicine. Quonsque tandem! how long will they abuse our
patience ?
After the Sherley Amendment was passed specifically forbid-
ding the publication of claims for curative proprieties that could not
be substantiated by definite evidence, or that were manifestly fraud-
ulent, Justice Hughes wrote the opinion of the Supreme Court sup-
porting that legislation and declared : " We find no ground for say-
ing that Congress may not condemn interstate transportation of
swindling preparations accompanied by false and fraudulent state-
ments just as well as lottery tickets."
It is now recognized that people must be protected from frauds
of various kinds. The Postoffice Department has saved millions of
dollars a year to people who on the strength of notices they received
through the mail, were sending hard-earned savings to concerns of
whom they knew nothing except their claims in mail matter. In
one way or another, in spite of the fraud orders, advertisers still
succeed in getting large amounts of the people's money, for another
great source of superstition are the " get-rich-quick " schemes which
tempt many people to put aside their reasoning and listen only to
suggestions of any and every kind no matter how absurd.
Probably the worst feature of this patent medicine business is
that it exploits particularly the ailing poor. They find themselves
prevented from continuing their work or hampered in it, and fear-
ful of what may come to them and their families if their ills
should continue, they eagerly grasp at proffered straws of assistance,
58 SUPERSTITIONS OLD AND NEW [Oct.,
and avidly swallow the bait of alluring advertising. The promises
of cure are so outspoken and positive, their symptoms are discussed
so learnedly, their fears of the worst possible developments are so
sagaciously worked upon, their hopes are so aroused, and, above all,
their smattering of knowledge so acutely imposed upon, that they
proceed to invest in the promising remedy. Usually one bottle is
not enough, so they buy several in succession, from the habit of tak-
ing it, and continue it for a good while. Often the remedy is skill-
fully compounded to produce just this effect.
Habit- forming drugs are frequently employed, and used to be
very commonly sold in these proprietary medicines even in their
most seductive forms until the Government stepped in to prevent it.
Many widely-advertised cures for the cocaine and morphine habits
a few years ago actually contained these habit- forming drugs in
larger quantities than the poor deluded victim had been already
taking.
At least this climax of evil has been prevented, but a great
many remedies still contain habit- forming drugs. Alcohol is a very
common ingredient in considerable quantities. The United States
Government, just before the War, forbade the sale of some sixty
tonics that were being sold in considerable quantities especially to
women, because an analysis showed them to contain so little medicine
and so much alcohol that they ought to be vended as spirituous
liquor, not as medicine. The real reason for Government inter-
ference in the matter was that reports showed that these remedies
were being given by mothers to their children which could not fail
to do incalculable harm to the little ones.
Before the law required the amount of morphine and cocaine
contained in any mixture to be put on the label, a large number of
preparations for babies contained considerable amounts of opium in
one form or another. " Baby killers " physicians very rightly
termed these so-called " soothing syrups," " teething syrups " or
" baby syrups." Even after the Food and Drug Act went into effect
the amount of alcohol and opium present in these mixtures was
often misstated in the label, and within the last two or three years a
number of their manufacturers have been convicted in the Federal
courts for " false and fraudulent claims made knowingly and in
recklessness or wanton disregard of their truth or falsity." The
favorite recommendation of all these advertisements is of " safe
and sure remedies for the home." As a matter of fact they are
neither safe nor sure, and are calculated to do immense harm to
1917-] SUPERSTITIONS OLD AND NEW 59
little children who are ever so much more sensitive to the effect of
opium than adults, and upon whom it has much more lasting con-
sequences. Baby killing as a source of revenue is certainly the
limit of human malignity, and yet lots of these remedies are still
on sale, evading the law in one way or another, working on mothers'
feelings by picturing healthy happy babies " after taking."
I have before me as I write some of these Notices of Judg-
ment with regard to the " baby killers." The Bureau of Chemistry
of the United States Department of Agriculture analyzed a speci-
men of one nostrum whose claim was: " For teething and restless
children it is not only safe and harmless but positively beneficial.
If they are sick it will do them good, if well it will do no harm.
It is perfectly harmless." The analysis made for the Government
showed that the mixture thus advertised contained alcohol eighty-
six per cent, opium alkaloids, camphor, capsicum, and vegetable ex-
tractive matter. No wonder the Federal Court decided the state-
ments were " false and fraudulent and were made knowingly and in
reckless and wanton disregard of their truth or falsity," and no
wonder the manufacturer pleaded guilty. But after pleading guilty
of practically endangering the lives of children under specious
promises of absolute safety, the manufacturer was fined only one
hundred dollars. This is truly matter for wonder. A teaspoonful
of this medicine was equal in alcoholic strength to almost a half an
ounce of whiskey as it is sold over the counter of the ordinary sa-
loon. Nothing could prove more clearly how purchasers need to
be protected against the money-grabbing passion of certain manu-
facturers than the fact that such a preparation could be sold publicly",
Nothing shows more plainly the weakness of human nature and
its amenability to suggestion than the fact that such preparations
find purchasers ready and eager to permit their children to use
them, on the word of an unknown manufacturer.
It is always the advertising that sells these remedies, so the
advertising mediums are at least equally responsible. Some of these
baby mixtures have been known to kill children and one of them,
the infamous Kopp's Baby Friend, left a trail of deaths after it in
many parts of the country. Over two thousands bottles of this
" baby killer " were seized by the Government, and the stuff proved
to contain one-eighth grain of morphine sulphate to the fluid ounce.
The case was not defended. As no one appeared to claim the prop-
erty, the court entered judgment of condemnation and forfeiture,
and ordered the United States marshal to destroy this dangerous
60 SUPERSTITIONS OLD AND NEW [Oct.,
fraud. Personally I feel that all those who helped in the publicity
given this murderer of babes shared in the responsibility for the
deaths that followed in its train. I suppose the doctrine of the
responsibility for advertising would not be popular, but I feel it
to be none the less real. No man may take money for any service
that he renders unless he is sure that it will do no harm to anyone
else. When he has excellent reason to suspect the possible harm-
fulness of the work he is cooperating in, he is bound to investigate
before he lends his aid.
The worst feature of this combined moral problem of impudent
medical imposition and grafting advertisement is the fact that reli-
gious elements are allowed to complicate the situation. Some of
the worst of these medical frauds have been advertised very freely in
religious journals. Readers of religious papers are inclined to take
all that is said in their journals, including even the advertising, more
seriously than they do what they read in the ordinary secular press.
Medical frauds have been quick to take advantage of this, and to
advertise especially in religious papers and magazines whenever
they could secure an entrance to them. As religious papers usually
need the money as much as, if not more than, the secular press, this
advertising has constituted a great temptation to which numbers
have yielded. Now that definite efforts are being made to lift
advertising out of the slough of despond into which it has fallen, it
is a source of no little scandal that religious publications are slower
than others to take part in the reform movement.
A favorite device has been to use saints' names or in some way
to connect their remedies with the legends of the healing powers
of the saints. Priests' names have been used to give medicines
vogue, and as a consequence not long since we had the spectacle of
a dear old dead priest's name, Father John of Lowell, being dragged
through the Federal Courts because a remedy said to have been
recommended by him was declared to be sold under claims that were
false and fraudulent. Over four thousand bottles of Father John's
medicine were seized by the Federal authorities on the charge that
the product was misbranded. The manufacturers withdrew their
answers to the charge, and the court entered a judgment of con-
demnation and forfeiture with payment of all the cost of the pro-
ceedings and the execution of a bond in the sum of five thousand
dollars.
Father John's medicine was intended to attract the Irish par-
ticularly; for Catholics of other nationalties, another medicine was
1917-] SUPERSTITIONS OLD AND NEW 61
put on the market. This was Pastor Konig's Nerve' Tonic or as I
believe it is now called Pastor Konig's Nervine. The title on the
bottle is illustrated, or used to be, with a cross and an anchor and a
sun with rays of light radiating all round. Pastor Konig's Nerve
Tonic was declared to be a natural remedy for epileptic fits, hyster-
ics, Saint Vitus' dance, hypochondria, nervousness, inebriety, sleep-
lessness, spinal and brain weakness. After a chemical analysis the
Government declared that the stuff was misbranded, because the
curative claims made for it were false and fraudulent, and were em-
ployed knowingly for the purpose of defrauding purchasers.
How long will the press of this country continue to be partners
of the proprietary medicine people? When journalism is ready to
admit that it knows how much of fraud it has countenanced and
encouraged and fostered and really made possible in the past, and
refuses to do so for the future, then we shall have an end of this
flagrant imposition on our people. In the meantime, at least, we
must resent the combination of religious elements that encourages
such a fraud on the public. None can afford to take money for help-
ing in the carrying on of a fraud. Without advertising these imposi-
tions would be quite impossible. We are our brothers' keepers and
are bound to prevent as far as possible impositions of this kind, and
never more so than now when the War makes the prevention of
wastes of all kinds absolutely incumbent upon all the members of
the community.
THE APPLE OF DISCORD.
BY CLIO MAMER.
HE " apple of discord," as Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the
leader of the Liberal Party in Canada, has so well
named the Conscription Bill in his able speech on the
third reading of the Military Service Bill, was hurled
into the arena late in July of the present year when
the House of Commons passed it by a majority of fifty-four.
On the eighth day of August this bill practically became
a law of the land, for on that day it received its third reading in the
Senate, and at the present writing awaits only the assent of the
King of England and the proclamation of the Governor of Canada
to place it on the statute books of the Dominion. Under its pro-
visions all men between the ages of twenty and forty-five, unless
expressly exempted, will be obliged to submit to the chance of
being drafted into the overseas army, which ever since the out-
break of the great World War has so ably assisted the Mother
Country in her struggle against Prussian militarism.
What will happen when the attempt is made to carry out the
instructions of the new law, time alone can tell. The mere intro-
duction of the bill into the House of Commons served to disrupt the
two dominant political parties in Canada, and caused to reappear
in a very decided fashion the line of demarcation between the French
and English which has always existed, but which many thought, or
at least fervently hoped, had been completely erased for all time
in the early days of the War.
The French-Canadian press as a whole has denounced what it
considers an unconstitutional attempt on the part of the English-
Canadian to bring about the extinction of the French race in
Canada, and the more radical of these papers have issued a call to
arms to resist the enforcement of the unpopular law. Foremost
among these extremist organs may be cited : I.' Ideal Catholique of
Montreal, which during the days when the Conscription Bill was
being put through the House of Commons openly advocated se-
cession in the event of its becoming a law, and La Liber te of
Quebec, which called for a leader to head the rebellion. That there
will be serious trouble seems certain, for, if the newspaper reports
1917.] THE APPLE OF DISCORD 63
are reliable, the very night the bill passed its third reading in the
Senate, an attempt was made upon the life of Lord Athelstan, the
publisher of the Montreal Star, which had been a warm advocate of
conscription. Lord Athelstan's summer home at Cartierville, six
miles from Montreal, was dynamited, after numerous warnings had
been sent him that he and other prominent persons in Montreal and
Ottawa would be killed in case they did not cease their agitation for
compulsory military service. It is to be hoped that there will be no
uprising on the part of the French-Canadians, for from what we
know of the English-Canadian temper at the present moment to-
wards all those who seek to hinder England in a victorious prose-
cution of the War, we feel there would be very little leniency shown
to those who took part in a civil war.
Most of the pro-Liberal papers accuse the Conservative Party
of having foisted conscription upon the country for the purpose of
securing to itself another term in office. The Montreal Herald
and Daily Telegraph holds this view. In its issue of July 28th, it
points to the fact that four hundred and twenty-six thousand men
out of the five hundred thousand demanded have been raised by
means of voluntary enlistment, which it contends is sufficient evi-
dence that the remainder of the quota could have been secured in the
same manner, had the thing been gone about in the right way. It
insists that : " A reason had to be found to start a grievance against
Quebec, and Sir Laurier, its most prominent representative. Que-
bec had to be found in the wrong." It also declares that : " The ob-
ject of conscription is not so much a desire to find soldiers for the
firing line, as it is to stir up the people of the English-speaking
provinces against Quebec."
No doubt there are ample grounds for, the cry of politics in
connection with the passage of the conscription law at this particu-
lar time. There has been strong criticism, in some sections of the
Dominion, leveled at the Borden administration, and there is
strong likelihood that the deferred election Mall have taken place
before this article goes to press. If so, the English votes won
from the Liberal Party, on account of the enactment of the
compulsory service bill, will come in handy for Sir Borden and his
followers.
Among the Liberal leaders and Liberal newspapers there has
been much dissatisfaction at the treatment accorded thereby the
party in power. The Toronto Star, which was one of the strongest
adherents of conscription, T>n July 27th, demanded the resignation
64 THE APPLE OF DISCORD [Oct.,
of Sir Borden, declaring that the minister was unfitted for the
task of War Premier.
Mr. N. W. Rowell, K.C., the leader of the Liberal Party in
the Ontario Legislature, the man whom many believe the Star
would like to see succeed Sir Borden, although siding in with the
Conservative Party as to the necessity of conscription, criticizes the
present government for not having consulted with " labor, agricul-
ture, and the other interests vitally affected before the proposal
was submitted to Parliament." He voices his belief that conscrip-
tion in Canada should have been made a national and not a party
issue. More than once Sir Laurier has complained bitterly that,
whereas in Britain it has been considered worth while to consult
with the minority in all matters of grave import, such a course has
not seemed expedient in Canada.
It is easy enough for the advocates of compulsory military
service to denounce Sir Laurier for his opposition to it, but
they forget that as the leader and representative of the French
people in Canada, it is his duty to defend their interests.
Moreover, Sir Laurier realized undoubtedly that to go against
the demands of the French-Canadians in this instance was tanta-
mount not only to signing his own political death warrant among
his people, but to delivering them over into the hands of Botirassa,
the Nationalist leader, who has consistently opposed Canada's par-
ticipation in the War. Furthermore, Sir Laurier had a perfect
right, had he so desired, to claim treachery on the part of the Gov-
ernment for introducing the Conscription Bill in the manner in
which it did. The present Parliament had its life extended on the
express understanding that there was to be no resort to force to
raise the army enlistment, and Sir Borden as far back as August,
1914, declared at Halifax that there was not and would not be
conscription in Canada. This statement he repeated time and again.
In January, 1916, when Parliament allowed the number of troops
to be raised to be increased to the present quota of five hundred
thousand, the Prime Minister said: "In speaking in the first three
months of the War I made it clear to the people of Canada that we
did not propose any conscription. I repeat that announcement with
emphasis today." •»
What, we ask, has become of these fine promises which so de-
ceived \>ir Laurier that at Sohmer Park in 1914, after having de-
manded that the French-Canadians enlist, he made the following
statement to over twenty thousand of them : " It is a sacrifice that
1917.] THE APPLE OF DISCORD 65
is quite voluntary. Canada is an absolutely free country. What
has been done up to the present, what will be done in the future,
will be absolutely voluntary." Then again in 1916, he declared in
Parliament that : " Conscription has come in England, but it is not
to come in Canada."
In a vain attempt to block the passage of the Military Service
Bill in the House of Commons, Sir Laurier contended that under
the existing law the Government's power is limited to the repelling
of invasion and to the defence of Canada, and that it has no power
to conscript for service abroad. He also maintained that British
procedure provides for an appeal to the people when important
matters arise on which they have not been consulted, and that,
therefore, the Conscription Bill should have been submitted to a vote
of the people.
In replying to Sir Laurier's contentions, various members of
the opposition declared that conscription had become absolutely nec-
essary if Canadian troops were still to be sent to the front, and that
it was too grave a measure to be left to the vote of the uninformed
public, and also that immediate action was necessary. They refused
to regard the present war as any other than a war in defence of
Canada. The French people have a slight but desperate hope that
the bill will not receive the royal signature, as they have appealed
their case to the British Government itself.
To one who has kept in close touch with the progress of events
in Canada both before and since the outbreak of the War, the
French-Canadian's violent and persistent opposition to conscription
does not come as a surprise. There is grave doubt whether, even
had the question been handled in a more astute fashion, the French-
Canadian could have been persuaded to acquiesce in the introduc-
tion of the bill, which although designed for the entire country is
really a slap at the Province of Quebec. All the world knows that
it is an attempt to force that province, which in the eyes of the
English-Canadian has not done its duty by the British Empire in the
titanic world struggle, to contribute its share of men. The seventy-
five thousand needed to fill the quota could in all probability have
been raised had the period of voluntary enlistment been extended,
but they would not have come out of Quebec whence the English-
Canadian would like to see them emerge, and whence he thinks at
least a fair proportion should in all justice come. Naturally the
French-Canadian who refused to enlist voluntarily, resents being
forced to do so. Besides, he insists that he has carried his portion
VOL. CVI. — 5
66 THE APPLE OF DISCORD [Oct.,
of the burden, but that the English-Canadian has refused to give
him due credit for what he has done. French-Canadians in Eng-
lish-speaking regiments have been classed as English-Canadians, he
tells you.
Let us grant that the English-Canadian's statistics are correct.
Then, why has it been found necessary to compel the French-Cana-
dian to rally to the King's aid? The English-Canadians will tell
you that it is because he is a coward and an ignoramus who is held
in bondage by his parish priest. They seem to overlook entirely
the fact that many of the men affiliated with the labor unions of
Canada do not belong to the Catholic Faith. Neither did the sturdy
mountaineer whom I met in the Canadian Rockies last summer,
and who assured me that Canada would be a different country after
the War, and that he and the other young men of his village would
like to see any draft officer attempt to force them to fight England's
battles. If by chance your informant happens to be a Catholic,
he will vary his statement somewhat. I give verbatim the answer
one such gave when I questioned him : " There are among the
French-Canadians many who are' possessed of more than average
intelligence. A great many are brilliant and their loyalty to Canada
cannot be questioned. The English-speaking Canadians seem to
think that a goodly number are domineered over and held in ignor-
ance through fear of their priests, and yet it is such men as Laurier,
Bourassa, and others of their kind, who for political gain are willing
to have the Church blamed for their rotten and willful game of
politics."
This represents to a large extent the view of the English-speak-
ing Canadian who is at once a Catholic and a member of the Con-
servative Party. He is loyal to his Church, and at the same time he
feels he must find an excuse for the actions of the French-Cana-
dian which will hold water with those who are not of his Faith. So
he lays the blame for the peculiar situation on the leader of the
opposing parties, Sir Laurier, the distinguished leader of the Lib-
erals, and Bourassa, the oracle of the Nationalist Party, which holds
in Canada a position similar to the Sinn Fein Party of Ireland.
The harsh words applied to Sir Laurier seem all the more unjust
when we consider that he, more than any man in the Dominion, has
been responsible for the enlistment of the French-Canadians who did
join the colors. In spite of his years, in spite of the many snubs he
has received at the hands of those who hold the reins of government,
he went from one end of the Dominion to the other urging the
1917.] THE APPLE OF DISCORD 67
French-Canadian youth to enlist. On August n, 1914, he made
a statement at Ottawa which defined clearly the stand which he
would take should war be declared : " I have often declared that if
the Mother Country were ever in danger, or if danger ever threat-
ened, Canada would render assistance to the fullest extent of her
power. In view of the critical nature of the situation I have can-
celled all my meetings. Pending such great questions, there should
be a truce to party strife." In an address before the Reform Club
of Montreal on December I2th of the same year, Laurier again
gave proof of his patriotism : " I have no particular love for the
Government, but I love my country. I love the land of my ances-
tors, France. I love above all the land of liberty, England, and
rather than I in my position as leader of the Liberal Party shall
remain passive and quiescent, I would go out of public life alto-
gether." Time again, and in speech after speech, Sir Laurier, and
other French-Canadians, who have risen high in the councils of the
Dominion, repeated the slogan of both the Conservative and Lib-
eral Parties: " Canada is at war when the Empire is at war," and
urged their followers to accept the axiom and to act upon it.
And Laurier's campaign for soldiers to fight in the ranks of the
Mother Country certainly bore fruit at the beginning of the War.
In spite of all that has been said to the contrary, the French-Canadian
population as a whole looked upon Canada's entrance into the War
with favorable eyes. No less an authority than the Canadian An-
nual Review for 1914 is responsible for the statement that in
" Montreal on August ist and 3d of that year huge crowds paraded
carrying French and British flags," and that in " Quebec the Eng-
lish, French and Irish paraded together in an outburst of combined
patriotism, and at Ottawa, in London, St. John's, and Halifax, sim-
ilar demonstrations took place."
If the testimony of one who personally witnessed like scenes
can add weight to the above, the writer is well able to furnish it.
Towards the middle of August, 1914, I spent several weeks in the
north country, and was wonderfully impressed by the eagerness
which Canadians of all conditions were displaying to enlist. Out of
.Haileybury, Cobalt, Cochrane, and the surrounding cities went
man after man whose ancestors had left the British Isles to find
new homes in the rich and fertile valleys of the St. Lawrence, the
Ottawa, and the Great Lakes, and who had died in blissful ignor-
ance of this new Eldorado upon which their sons were soon to
stumble, while out of Ville Marie, that quaint evolution of what
68 THE APPLE OF DISCORD [Oct.,
had once been a Hudson's Bay Trading Post, on the opposite banks
of the Temiskaming, and in the Province of Quebec, went the
descendants of the founders of New France, young men, who
though British subjects, spoke English with a foreign accent and
only when necessity demanded it. Impelled by one desire, obliv-
ious of the chasm which had separated them for years, they went
forth shoulder to shoulder with the English-speaking Cana-
dians across the seas to assist the Allies against the conquering
German.
I confess that I, who had visited the northeastern portion of
Canada, Quebec, the Saguenay District, and old Acadia, where the
children who learned English in the public schools were afraid to
speak that language in the presence of their fathers and mothers,
and answered people who spoke to them in that tongue : " I do not
speak English. I am French," remained a pessimist, and refused to
subscribe to the general theory that the petty strifes and jealousies
which had existed for years between the two races had been blotted
out, and that Canada's greatest problem, the assimilation of her two
divergent peoples, might soon be looked forward to.
Two months spent in western Canada in 1916 convinced me
that I had been correct in holding to my pessimistic views. The
tide had turned. That outburst of friendly feeling which I had wit-
nessed on the banks of the Temiskaming had subsided, and in its
place had grown up a feeling of hatred which neither race took any
pains to conceal. The English-Canadian talked long and loudly
and gave his opinion of the French-Canadian in unmistakable terms.
The French-Canadian showed plainly what his feelings were towards
the English-Canadian, whom he accused bitterly of trying to de-
fraud him of his treaty rights. From the moment I crossed the
border into the Dominion, I was regaled with tales of French-Cana-
dian treachery. If there was one thing apart from universal
hatred for the " Hun " upon which western Canada seemed to have
agreed, it was in contempt for the " cowardly Quebec habitant."
While riding in a street car along the St. Charles road out from
Winnipeg, the conductor whose burr betrayed his Scotch extraction,
discanted at length upon the hardships of the past winter : " Wages,
were low, and the price of food exorbitant. The cold was intense,
and these plains were covered with six and seven feet of snow, and
in the midst of all this the French, the traitors, wanted to turn this
country over to the Americans."
I remonstrated with him gently : " We in the States have al-
1917.] THE APPLE OF DISCORD 69
ways thought the French-Canadian's love for Canada exceptionally
great."
" Then why won't he fight for her?" he demanded fiercely. And
wherever I went throughout western Canada, I encountered the same
question, asked with the same show of bitterness. And from the
English-Canadian's point of view there was justice in it, for the west
was drained of its able-bodied men. In Winnipeg it became a game of
" guess why," every time I saw a healthy looking male under forty in
civilian clothes; in Edmonton I watched a division of infantry pass
the Macdonald Hotel on its way to the training camp, and there was
more than one fifteen-year-old boy in the ranks, if I am any judge
of ages; in Vancouver at the exposition grounds where the raw re-
cruits were drilling, and the Canadian engineers were busy digging
exhibition trenches, I talked with one of the officers who informed
me that he personally knew of two lads, neighbors of his, who had
just graduated from knickerbockers, who had recently joined the
colors. And in spite of all this self-sacrifice on the part of the west,
there was, and still is, Quebec persistently refusing to lend further
aid, as far as soldiers are concerned, and there was, and still is,
the English-Canadian reviling the Catholic Church in Canada for
the attitude of some of its members. Regardless of the fact
that such leaders of Catholic thought in Canada as Monsignor
Bruchesi, Archbishop of Montreal, and Cardinal Begin have done
all in their power to offset the crusade conducted by Henri Bour-
assa and Armand Lavergne against the Allies, they are given little
credit for their efforts.
To an outsider, it is simply amazing to see that the English-
Canadian does not even suspect that in the majority of cases there
may be other and valid reasons, besides the influence of the Catho-
lic clergy, which are contributing to the French-Canadian's refusal
to respond to England's and France's call for help. He seems to
have absolutely no inkling that the condition for which he is blaming
the Church is largely the result of his own stupidity. The reason
why those early volunteers went forth eagerly from Villa Marie
was written in letters large enough for all who cared to read.
They were urged onward, not by love for England, nor through any
sense of duty, but by affection for France whose memory they still
cherished, no matter how they may have despised the irreligious
government with which she was afflicted, and by their unrelenting
hatred for the conquerors of Alsace and Lorraine, and the desecra-
tors of Belgium. They ceased to enlist when they were made to
70 THE APPLE OF DISCORD [Oct.,
realize that they were no longer Frenchmen, nay not even French-
Canadians, but denationalized adjuncts of the British Empire. This
was where the English-Canadian blundered. He made no attempt
to conciliate the French-Canadian at a time when he needed his
services most. He found fault from the start with Quebec, which
ought not to have been expected at a moment's notice to shake off
the peace-loving rigidity of years and to equal the warlike spirit
of the youthful and mobile west. He failed to take into considera-
tion that in this old Catholic province, there had been no race
suicide, and that as a consequence almost every man of military
age had from one to a dozen little ones dependent upon
him. He went even further. He deliberately antagonized the
French-Canadian by constantly reminding him that he was a con-
quered subject of Great Britain and as such owed her allegiance.
He refused from the very beginning to treat him as a Canadian and
an equal. French-Canadians who wished to raise regiments among
their own people received little or no aid from those in power, while
the English-Canadians, on the other hand, were favored with grants
of money from the general or provincial government, but the great-
est indictment against the English-Canadian in the eyes of the
French-Canadian is that he has broken faith with him. He has
attempted to Anglicize him.
To the French-Canadian there are two things more precious
than life itself, his religion and his language. Tamper with either,
and you do so at your peril. The French-Canadian has remained
loyal to England largely because that country has allowed him the
free exercise of his religion, and the privilege of having his lan-
guage taught in the schools and accorded an equal place with Eng-
lish. The French-Canadian was grateful to England for these con-
cessions, and although he acknowledged no inherent obligation to
fight for her, merely for Canada, he doubtless would have done so
to the best of his ability, had not the English-Canadian been guilty
of what he looked upon as treachery to- him and to his children.
At a time when every means possible should have been taken to
win over the French-Canadian, the Province of Ontario, bent on
showing its loyalty to everything English, passed a law which rele-
gated the French language to a secondary plane. The result was a
protest not only from the French-speaking inhabitants of Ontario,
but from those of the entire Dominion. It was useless to attempt
to explain away the action of the Ontario Parliament on the grounds
that it did not represent the opinion of the other provinces. In
1917.] THE APPLE OF DISCORD 71
the eyes of the French-Canadian, this deed of the Ontario Parlia-
ment was all part and parcel of an infamous plot to make of him a
Protestant Englishman. If his language must go, he reasoned, the
next attack would be made upon his religion. And thus was inau-
gurated the campaign of hate which has brought about conscription
in the Dominion.
Is it any wonder that when that which he held dearest was
threatened, the French-Canadian forgot that he had set out to right
the wrongs of humanity, and that he ceased to look upon England
as the liberator of the oppressed, and that when disdainfully ad-
monished to enlist, he retorted: " This is not Canada's war; it is
England's war, and England has broken faith with my race through
the action of the Ontario Parliament. My race has lived up to its
obligations. We, French-Canadians, have been faithful to the prom-
ises made by our forefathers. We have not taken up arms against
the Empire. We have not aided and abetted her enemies. There
is no conquering army thundering for admittance at the door of
Canada. Why should we go beyond the letter of that which was
laid down for us in our treaty, when you have failed to keep your
part of the bargain? "
And so it is as L3 Action Catholique de Quebec reiterates:
" The die is cast. We are to have conscription." " Canada has en-
tered a new way, the end of which none can foretell, and the calm
and consideration we have advocated, are now more than ever
necessary."
Yes, indeed, Canada has entered into a new way, the end of
which none can foretell. Will a united Canada stand at the turning
of the lane? I hope so, but I doubt it. The pride and prejudice
of race and religion will never be eliminated from our neighbor
of the north, so long as she remains a part of the British Empire.
The English-Canadian is, and always has been, first a British sub-
ject and then a Canadian. In all probability tinder existing con-
ditions that is exactly what he ought to be, but it is hardly fair to
ask the same thing of the French-Canadian. It is only natural
that he should wish to continue to be that which he has always
claimed to be, a French-Canadian. It is absurd to exact of him
that he be, first, an English subject, then a Canadian, and last of all
a Frenchman.
THE SECOND DROWNING OF LISHUS DOE.
BY JAQUES BUSBEE.
OME men are born to be drowned, same as some men
are born to be hung. But a man can't be hung but
one time, while a man can be drowned as often as he
falls overboard. When it comes to hanging, I can't
say right now what that feels like, but I'm here to
tell ye that drowning is a fine, easy death — coming back to
life is where a man catches hell. It's like being born, I reckon,
only a man's so little and foolish when he's born, he can't remember
how bad it hurts.
" They rolled me on a barrel to get the water out'er me the
first time I was drownded, and I was too sore and bruised for over a
week to move without yelling. Man! it was awful. I wish't when
I fell overboard that first time they'd let me gone to the bottom and
stay there. Then I'd been safe from me second drowning, though
come to think of it, I'm glad I was saved to drown again. I reckon
I'll go that way at last, for I mean to sail me schooner as long as I'm
living, unless Pamlico Sound goes dry, and I don't much expect
that'll happen in my life time.
" Drowning does some men good, 'specially if they don't come
back to life, and some it teaches sense, for it took a second drown-
ing to show me what a loon I was. Any man that can't tell which
woman he loves the best, don't deserve to have no woman at all ; for
the sure way to know is to find out which woman loves him best.
" Now my trouble was just this a'way. Tilly lived up here at
the Cape and I was mighty glad Omie was ten miles away down at
the town of Hatteras. If those two girls ever got together I'd been
ruined, for I promised to marry 'em both, and ye know the law
won't stand for that. I warn't bothering me head about which of
them two ' blonds ' loved me the best, but which I wanted for me
wife. But then I couldn't decide in me mind which one I loved the
best — they was so different.
"Women certainly are jealous-minded — they don't want ye to
so much as look at any other woman but them. Now ye want y'r
wife to look nice, but ye don't want her to be so pretty that every
man comes along is making eyes at her and she getting her head
1917-] THE SECOND DROWNING OF LISHUS DOE 73
turned so she can't tend to her work, but is all the time a'thinking
about her looks and her clothes and spending her man's money on
foolishness.
" Tilly Mashew warn't exactly what ye might call a beauty,
but she was nice looking and how she could sail a boat and swim —
Man ! it was a sight to see ; and she warn't but nineteen years old
neither. Her hair was about the color of the sand on the beach
where it's wet and her eyes was green. Least ways, that's what I
told her, just to pester her. But they really was betwixt green and
blue — 'bout like the surf when it breaks and is all covered with
white circling spoon-drift.
" And she'd say to me, ' Well, my eyes is a sight better color
than yourn, Captain Ulysses Doe, for yourn ain't no color at all —
just black. I'd a heap rather look like white folks than a Spaniard.'
" It certainly is funny how women hate to be teased about
their looks. But I never told Tilly how pretty I thought she was,
though if I could have me choice, I'd take brown eyes.
" Omie Austin had dark eyes though they warn't exactly brown.
Her hair was dark too. She was the kind of girl that couldn't
wait for a man to look at her 'afore she'd begin to rouse his at-
tention. She'd been to school over on the main land and she had
mighty hyfalutin' ways and spent more money on her back than old
man Austin could make in one shad season. Man! she was just
'bliged to have a new dress of store boughten clothes twict a year;
but then she certainly was stylish looking. Seemed like she didn't
belong at Hatteras nohow, though she was born and raised there.
I tell ye, it ain't safe to send a girl off to school. She don't learn
nothing that's any use to her and it fills her head with foolish
notions.
" Omie had a honing to be a great singer and she was all the
time pestering her poppy to give her an organ, so she could practise
her squealing, I called it, just to see how mad she'd get.
" ' You just wait, Lish/ she'd say. ' I ain't going to spend my
life on no sand bar. I'm going to some big city where my voice will
be appreciated. They told me at school I could sing wonderful, and
it would be a shame not to make something out of it. When we are
married you could sail out of Norfolk just as well as here. You
wouldn't be at home much anyhow. If we lived in a city I could
have my singing lessons and I could see something now and then.'
" If it hadn't been for that prying post mistress at the Cape I'd
been all right, but every time I'd get a letter on blue paper, she^d
74 THE SECOND DROWNING OF LISHUS DOE [Oct.,
hand it to me with a knowing smile and say out loud so everybody
standing round could hear : ' Captain Doe, here's that love letter
ye'r looking for with a Hatteras postmark onto it. They come
mighty regular these days and it's a lady's handwriting, I'm think-
ing. Ye don't go down there often enough to hear all she wants to
tell ye. Seems like she has to write ye what she forgot when ye was
there. Oh, y'r a sly one ! I hear ye'r going to leave the Banks some
day soon and live in Norfolk where there's sights to be seen.'
" Well all I can say is, a heap of 'em sees but a few knows ;
and that fool woman would laugh like she knew when me wedding
was to be when I didn't know meself, and the harder I'd try to
look careless like, the redder I'd turn. Then somebody'd say, ' Peter
Mashew won't ever give his consent for his daughter Tilly to leave
home and live where he can't see her every day. Any man that
gets Tilly will have to live at the Cape.'
" And then somebody would answer back, ' Who said it was
Tilly Mashew ? Is it Lish ?'
" I knew from the ways the boys 'ud laugh that no secret goings
on could stay hid in a place no bigger than Hatteras Banks and I
felt like me time had come to make a choice. But I say, d folks
that's always sticking their bills in other people's business, just like
a scoggin.
" Along in February the shad fishing got so fine I had to make
three and, if I could, four trips a week, boating fish to ' Little '
Washington and Elizabeth City and coming back full freighted. If
business kept up till the end of the season, I'd be able to pay off the
mortgage on the ' White Doe.' She was a trim, little, two-masted
schooner, and two men was all she needed to sail her in any weather.
Kit Woden was me mate and the times we've had sailing Pamlico
Sound ! Poor boy, I can't hardly think of Kit now without crying.
" Shad fishing had failed for two years past, but this season
put money in everybody's pockets, especially old man Austin's. But
now right in the middle of the fishing come a bad spell of weather
putting a stop to everything. I had as much as three cargoes of
freight waiting in the warehouse at Elizabeth City, but 'twant no
use to sail empty of a load of fish just to bring back a load of freight
when in two days after good weather I'd have plenty of fish boxes.
So I didn't make a single trip that week. I went down the Banks
to see Omie.
" I never seen a woman so set up over a little thing as Omie
was by her poppy at last givin' her that organ. The old man had
1917.] THE SECOND DROWNING OF LISHUS DOE 75
surprised Omie by sending the cash money to a mail order house for
it, and now for over a week that organ had been holding its breath
in the warehouse. Omie had got the notice out of the postoffice tell-
ing it was there, and her poppy said he'd go plumb crazy if she didn't
get that organ soon, or Omie would spend herself running over to
the Weather Bureau to see when this spell was going to break.
" Omie was the lovingest thing ever ye saw. She all but kissed
me right before her poppy when I went in, and I do believe I
could a' kissed her and she never would a' known it — she was so
excited.
" * Oh, Lish, if you love me, you'll go get my organ,' she began
before I could say howdy. ' Poppy didn't mean for me to know
about it till it got here, but I went to the postoffice and got a notice
on a postal card, so he couldn't keep it from me. If you'll go in
the morning, Lish, you'll be back with it day after tomorrow.'
" ' I won't have a load of fish till this weather breaks and gives
the boys a chance to haul/ I 'lowed, not wanting to own the weather
was too rough and squally.
" 'There's three cargoes of freight waiting in the warehouse
for you, Lish, you said there was. Won't you make just one trip
empty for me ? I'd go for my organ in a spreet boat, if I knew how
to sail it, weather or no weather. I can't live without it, and if you
love me like you say, now's a chance to prove it.'
" I certainly did love that girl a-hanging on me arm and plead-
ing with me to go for her organ, but the weather was rough and un-
settled, and I did hate to sail from Hatteras empty, just to fetch a
woman something to play with. I didn't say a word for awhile,
and Omie put her arms around me and give me a hug.
" 'I knew you'd go, Lish, when I asked you,' she said and
looked at me sweet enough to eat.
" I started to drive back to the Cape right away as I had a
sight to do if I was going to sail at daybreak. I had to find Kit
Woden and I had to see Peter Mashew about his freight that he'd
been waiting for, and somehow I wanted to see Tilly, but I was
feared to tell her I was going.
" It was near 'bout dark when I stopped in at Peter's store. Kit
was settin' by the stove so that saved me looking for him.
" ' What's a little rough weather to a sailor ?' I says to Kit when
he began to object. ' We ain't losing nothing by going any more
than by settin' round warming the chairs. I tell ye, I'm going.'
" ' I'H like mighty well to have them supplies for the store,'
76 THE SECOND DROWNING OF LISHUS DOE [Oct.,
Peter Mashew said, ' but I ain't asking no man to make a trip just
for me in such weather.'
" As I went up the road I met Tilly going in her yard. ' I'll
be back Friday night all right, if nothing happens.'
" 'I wish ye wouldn't go, Lishus,' and Tilly laid her hand on
me arm. Then she looked me straight in the face, and her eyes was
as green as the deep clear sea water in a slick calm. * Who are ye
going for?' she asked.
" It took me so sudden I couldn't answer for a spell. When me
voice came to me it sounded so strange I didn't blame Tilly for not
believing what I said, ' I'm going after some freight for y'r poppy,'
I stammered.
" Tilly let her hand drop from me arm and turned away.
' Ye'r telling me a lie, Lishus. I know who it is down to Hatteras
that's making ye go.'
" I knew she couldn't know for sure as there warn't no way for
her to find out, but women certainly are jealous-minded. Yet she
knew I'd been to see Omie down there and that was enough.
" ' I'll be back Friday night and in to see ye/ I called to her as
she went up the steps. 'Ain't ye going to tell me good-bye and God-
speed ?' But Tilly went in the house and shut the door.
" We sailed at dawn with a fair wind, stiff enough to call it a
gale if ye minded to, and hove to that night about ten o'clock with
the lights from the town wriggling towards us in the black juniper
waters of the Pasquotank River. But I couldn't get Tilly out of
me mind, and wondering how much she knew of why I had made
this trip without a cargo, just to boat back freight, when I could
have brought a load of fish in a day or two longer. Then I won-
dered if that mouthy post mistress had told her about me letters and
if Tilly believed it, for she must have heard something. I couldn't
sleep for wondering of it.
" We didn't get our freight aboard till late Thursday evening,
but I had Omie's organ stowed safe in the hold, and I warn't much
caring about the rest. All night the wind freshened, with little
flurries of snow, and when we slipped our cable at dawn and
dropped down the river towards Albermarle Sound, we rode into
the teeth of spiteful weather.
" The White Doe held her nose proud to the wind, but made
mighty little headway across Albermarle Sound with its yellow
waters all roughened into hillocks topped with white caps. The
weather was so thick and smoky I didn't know we passed the north
1917.] THE SECOND DROWNING OF LISHVS DOE 77
end of Roanoke Island and was in Croatan Sound, until I heard the
bell buoy clanging dismal. ' Kit,' I says, ' we've lost so much time
with this contrary wind, we'll not get home tonight, I'm thinking.'
" 'Omie sure will be disappointed about her organ and Tilly will
be disappointed about her Lishus,' Kit laughed.
"A man is some different from a woman. It don't matter what
a man's been up to, he's just bound to tell another man about it;
but a woman will always hold back a part from her very best woman
friend. She'll come a heap nigher telling a man all she's done than
she will a woman. But men don't care. They're proud of their
meanness — seems like.
" Kit's laughing made me mad. He knew the fix I was in,
though I hadn't told him, but then we never tried to hide nothing
from each other, and from what I said now and then Kit knew as
well as I did how troubled I was in me mind.
" 'If ye'd promised to marry two " blonds " and didn't know
which one ye wanted the worst, ye wouldn't think it nothing to
laugh at,' I answered short.
" 'I wouldn't been fool enough to promise 'em nothing. I'd
kept 'em guessing.' Then Kit added cheerful like, ' Maybe this
trip'll settle it and ye won't be able to marry neither of 'em, for it's
my notion we ain't never going to get home at all.'
" I wouldn't own I was troubled. I'd taken the White Doe
through worse blows than this, but the seas was insulting us, and
the wind not knowing which way to blow, blew from all points of
the compass at one time.
" We must have been somewhere in the neighborhood of Long
Shoals, as well as I could make out, when suddenly Kit called out
in terror, 'Luff her off, Lish, luff her off !'
" Her head was square to the wind and before I knew what had
happened, the White Doe pitched-poled clean over and we were both
struggling in the icy water.
" When she capsized, her anchor slipped off the bow and
moored her fast, and for some reason or other, ballast that was
caught between decks caused her to float just under water.
" Man ! it was a bad capsize. We crawled upon her bottom,
wet through and through, and had to stand up in six or eight inches
of water. I had on gum boots and an oil skin jacket, but me sweater
was under that and if it hadn't been wet I'd a fared well enough.
But Kit didn't have no sweater, though he'd been warm enough
if he hadn't been wet. The wind cut us like a knife.
78 THE SECOND DROWNING OF LISHUS DOE [Oct.,
" 'Kit,' I said, 'can ye sleep standing on y'r legs like a scoggin?
It looks to me like we'd have to spend the night right here. There's
no chance of any boat passing and sighting us 'fore day. What
about supper?'
" Kit didn't answer for some time, but steadying himself by
puttin' his hand on me shoulder, took off first one boot and then the
other, pouring out the water.
" 'Let's go below and play us a tune on Omie's organ,' Kit said
at last, kinder chilly like.
" 'Ye can't blame Omie, Kit. Blame me for it if ye've got to
blame anybody. I'll get blame a plenty, I reckon, when she finds out
I've capsized and ruined that organ and she at the landing right
now, wagrus mad because I've not come back when I said I would.'
" Kit didn't answer. He kept squeezing water from his coat
and shivering. The wind was backing into the north and the smoke
was lifting, but the cold crept closer and closer to a man's very
marrow.
" All night we stood there without saying much to one another.
Just before dawn a few stars pricked through the clouds and the
wind began to lull. I knew day was nigh from the way the water
looked black and heaved slow against the sky turning a sickly pale
color.
" 'Soon as it's light good,' I says to Kit, ' I'm going to dive
under this boat and try to cut the anchor rope. We'd drift fast in
this strong tide, I know.'
' 'How'll ye cut it?' Kit asked without any show of caring.
' 'I've got me pocket knife,' I says. ' I couldn't be no wetter
nor no colder.' So I took off me boots, coat, sweater and breeches
and give 'em to Kit to hold. Then I took the knife between me
teeth and dove for the cable.
" Once under the water it seemed warmer than in the wind,
but I couldn't find the rope. I came up once to get me breath, then
dove again. Still I couldn't find the cable, and had to crawl back
on the hull. The cold blew through me same as I was a gill net,
and seemed like me veins was filled with liquid fire.
'Taint no use,' Kit urged and the way he looked made me so
mad I dove again. Down, down, down — seemed like I wanrt never
coming up no more, when all of a sudden me head struck the cable
and the knife was dashed out of me mouth.
"No — it warn't no use now, and I made a great struggle to
come up, but never would a got out if Kit hadn't lent a hand and
1917-] THE SECOND DROWNING OF LISHUS DOE 79
pulled me onto the hull. I put on me clothes. They was stiff with
ice.
" All day we stood in the water and watched — watched for
some boat to pass, but never a sign could we see. The time had
passed for being hungry, and there ain't much for fellows to say to
one another when they'r to leeward of life and the frost has got
into their brains.
" Towards evening Kit began to act foolish and laugh, when
God knows there warn't nothing to laugh at. Then he thought I was
Tilly Mashew. He looked me straight in the face. ' Tilly,' he
said, ' Lish don't know it, but he ain't loving Omie. He's just being
biggity. I know him.'
" Kit was dippy all right, but it come over me that I warn't so
proud to do something for Omie, as I was to sail me schooner in
weather like this and bring her safe to port again when not another
man on the Banks would have ventured.
" I put out me hand to Kit meaning to make a clean breast of
it and own up I warn't acting right by Tilly, but he warn't there!
" 'Kit/ I said two or three times but never dared to turn round,
for I knew he was gone. Frozen, starved, clean spent, I hadn't
heard him when he slipped from the hull, and now Kit was floating
around somewhere down there under the water and me too near
gone to save him.
"Then for the first time, fear took holt of me. I was feared to
stand there alone, and I was feared I'd jump overboard and end me
misery. I knew right then what was coming to me.
"How I passed that night alone, I can't say. Sometimes I'd
think I was talking to Kit and begging him not to blame me —
'twould just a been suicide; and then I'd be at Peter Mashew's
store setting by the stove. Then I'd think 'twas Tilly begging me
not to go. But the greatest fear, that made me weak and dizzy, was
that I'd drop asleep and fall overboard.
" The sun rose clear, with a gentle breeze blowing out of the
west and the Sound waters dancing and sparkling in the light, with
only here and there a little crest of foam. The cold had lightened
but I was long past caring. Seemed like I didn't have no body at
all — just a little fluttering spot in me chest.
" Far to the so'thard a teeny black speck kept bobbing slowly
up and down and I began to wonder what it could be — a bit of
wreck most likely from the White Doe. Then it grew larger and
me heart tried to break through me ribs. .1 thought I heard the
8o THE SECOND DROWNING OF L1SHUS DOE [Oct.,
throbbing of a gas engine, but I couldn't tell for sure, the way the
blood was pounding in me head.
" Seemed like it was a gas boat and it was headed towards me !
It came closer. Tilly was standing aft and using an oar, and I won-
dered why she rowed when the boat was moving so fast with the
engine going like mad. Her hair was blowing about her face and she
waved her hand to me !
" And I knew from the way me heart leaped that Tilly was the
one I loved, for her face told me that she loved me and was risking
her life for me. For a man, love as he will, can't be saved without
a woman loves him. Then she came within hailing distance and
beckoned to me but did not speak. Then the boat was 'long side,
and she put out her hand to me and I stepped aboard.
" Man ! I was dreaming.
" The icy water woke me as I stepped from the White Doe's
hull and sank — sank with no love of life in me and no strength to
struggle. But a man will struggle for breath even when he no longer
wants to live, and when at last I found meself back upon the hull,
there was no telling how long I had been in the water or how I man-
aged to crawl back there. I couldn't stand. I was too weak and spent
but sat in the water without feeling it. The day must have passed
for the sun was now low in the west and the wind was backing to
the north again. When darkness fell I knew it would be all night
with me. I thought I heard me name called! Was I dreaming
again or was I froze to death — dead and didn't know it?
" 'Lishus, oh, Lishus, I've found ye ! I knew I would !'
" It was Tilly's voice, but how could it be Tilly ? Yet coming
towards me in Peter Mashew's spreet boat, again I saw her. Again
she was standing aft, but had no oar and she sprang f or'd as the boat
touched her prow on the White Doe's hull.
" Then I thought me head was tricking me again, and I
stretched out in the water and clung with me nails to where I lay,
and tried to shut out the vision of her in me brain.
" Her hair was all loosed and her eyes was wild with terror as
she leaned over the boat's side and put her hands about me. Tearing
free me holt, she pulled me into the boat and put her face down close
to mine.
" When I opened me eyes again I was in a bed and Tilly a-set-
ting by holding me hand. Man ! I certainly did enjoy coming back to
life that time, all but thinking of how Kit had lost his life through
me — because I'd been such a loon about girls.
1917-] THE HOMELESS GOD 81
" But after all, there ain't but one girl, and I reckon ye know
the one I mean. When I didn't come home Friday night like I prom-
ised, Tilly got wild, she told me. She couldn't get nobody to go look
for me. They all said if I was fool enough to go out in such
weather, I was fool enough to get home safe, for Hatteras warn't on
the fool killer's chart. But Tilly knew better. All day Saturday
she waited and when Sunday morning come, that girl slipped away
down to her poppy's landing, stole his spreet boat and started alone
on her search.
"That was ten years ago.
" But when I'm drownded the next time, me boy Kit will be
big enough, I hope, to be his mother's man, and man enough too,
in not so many years to sail the Sounds in me new schooner that I've
christened the Tilly."
THE HOMELESS GOD.
BY GEORGE BENSON HEWETSON.
(A Meditation in any church of the Anglican Communion*)
NOT where to lay Thy Head — so from Thy Lips
Fell Thy meek accusation of mankind,
Who brought to Thee for healing sick and blind,
And heard Thee teach from Galilean ships ;
Then saw Thy Light from life smite death's eclipse,
And flash new life into the perished mind ;
Yet left Thee homeless, less than lowest kind,
And sold Thee to the Cross and Roman whips.
And now, when two millenniums of Thy grace
Have blest the earth, with proud, averted face
This England glories in her cold decree,
Blind to the needs of them that walk the night,
And look to Thee for healing and for light,
That in her shrines there is no home for Thee.
'Recently one thousand of the English clergy petitioned their Archbishops for
permission to reserve the Blessed Sacrament. The petition was denied.
VOL. cvi. — 6
A PARADOX OF HISTORY.
BY JOSEPH V. MCKEE, A.M.
*
HE first regiment to leave New York for active par-
ticipation in the War was the Irish Catholic Regi-
ment, the famous " Fighting Sixty-Ninth." It was
altogether fitting that this should have been so, for
no unit in the history of American military achieve-
ments holds a higher or more honorable record for meritorious
service. Just before the gallant soldiers marched away, Bishop
Hayes publicly blessed their standards and bade them Godspeed on
their valorous mission.
This passing of the Sixty-Ninth, in a military sense, was but
an incident in this Great War. But apart from military significance,
there is something in the incident that clothes it with importance
and points to greater things. In terms of service and patriotism,
it indicates the attitude of the Catholics of the country, and shows
the spirit of patriotism and service that is the universal mark of
their citizenship. In terms of history it looms still larger, and
points the great lesson of God's omnipotence working out the
destiny of nations.
Vast, eternal and inscrutable and deeper than the power of
conqueror or of commonwealth, there is a Force that shapes and
guides the destinies of man and nation. Mighty kings and empire-
builders, risen by bloody conquest or strategical statesmanship to tri-
umphal regencies, have received the homage of vast peoples, yet in
the very attainment of their glorious projects, in the accomplishment
of their world-effecting enterprises, they were but executing the
silent commands of Him Who is the King of kings. Nations cra-
dled in adversity have grown to majestic power by the wisdom or
valor of their statesmen, yet at the appointed hour when their mis-
sion was fulfilled, they have toppled and crumbled to ruin. Time,
" the true historian," has chronicled the achievements of potentate
and empire not as their victories, but as deeds directed to the ends of
the "Designer Infinite." Alexander by his conquests erected a monu-
ment, lasting, complete and personal, yet in the ultimate reckoning
his work was but the preparation for the grandeur of Rome. And
the final end of Rome's subjugation of the world was not to centre
1917.1 A PARADOX OF HISTORY 83
the affluence of the universe at Rome, but that the sword might make
easy the way for the torch of Christianity. From the decrees of
Pharaoh, which gave Moses to the Jews, down through the Roman
persecutions, the fanaticism of Luther, the bigotry of England and
the trials of the Church in Japan, Almighty God has directed the
blind, often defiant works of man to the accomplishment of His
divine end. But while the student of history, who reads aright the
true factors that govern the acts of men, can trace God's wisdom
in the life of every nation, nowhere are its effects so evident, so un-
mistakable as in the founding and growth of the United States of
America.
By Catholic courage and enterprise America was discovered
and explored. Aided by Catholic sovereigns, himself a Catholic and
his vessels dedicated to the care of the Virgin Mother, Columbus
shaped his sail across an unknown deep and planted the true Cross
in the New World. In his footsteps followed others who tracked
the mighty forests and explored the vast regions, making possible by
their daring the future habitations of a new nation. De Soto, Ma-
gellan, Cartier, cle La Salle — all were torchbearers in the procession
of the following century. Then came the Jesuit missionaries bring-
ing the Gospel of Christ to the savage peoples, and accomplishing a
work whose beneficent effects can never find adequate appreciation
in the pages of mortal history.
But when the harvest came new laborers were in the fields.
England had been swept away by the flood of Protestantism, and the
storm of bigotry which broke upon the Catholic Church in the
Mother Country carried away the last vestige of religious freedom
for the Catholics in the colonies. In Pennsylvania alone was the
free exercise of religion permitted, while from Massachusetts to
Maryland death and dire penalties awaited upon its public profes-
sion by Catholics. So strong was the grip of ignorance and bigotry
that to the colonist of 1776 the Catholic Church was the dreaded
agent of destruction and the Pope a monster of iniquity.
But even more did religion enter into the very causes of the
American Revolution. In 1774 George III. of England signed the
Quebec Act, which enlarged the Province of Quebec and gave the
Canadian clergy the right of tithes for the support of their religion.
In reality the bill merely allowed the Canadians the right of wor-
shipping according to their conscience, and restored some of the
privileges enjoyed under France. But to the colonists the Quebec
Act was of grievous import. Canada and its one hundred and fifty
84 A PARADOX OF HISTORY [Oct.,
thousand Catholics had ever been a menace in the eyes of the Brit-
ish provincials. In the previous war, the American colonists had
assisted in wresting Canada from Catholic France, feeling secure
with Canada in England's possession. But their hatred was so great
that in the act that restored to a subjugated people some of their
just rights, they saw only the establishment of " Popery " in Canada,
and the making of Canadians " fit instruments in the hands of
power to reduce the ancient, free Protestant Colonies to the same
state of slavery as themselves."1 The alarm caused by the Quebec
Act was even greater than the injustice of " taxation without rep-
resentation," and in a protest to the people of England, Congress
wrote : " Nor can we suppress our astonishment that a British Par-
liament should ever consent to establish in that country a religion
that deluged your island in blood and dispersed impiety, bigotry,
persecution, murder and rebellion through every part of the world."
Thus the American Revolution was waged not only against
civil and political injustices, but also against the feared encroach-
ment of the Roman Catholic Church. Yet strange as it may seem,
no true history of the War for Independence can be written which
does not tell of the deciding influence of Catholic endeavor, that
does not relate the brilliant operations of John Barry, the " Father
of the American Navy," or of the wonderful work performed by
Pulaski, Kosciusko, Stephen Moylan, Rochambeau, de Grasse, d'Es-
taing, and countless other Catholics who pledged their lives, their
fortunes, and sacred honor in the cause of the colonists. Not alone
did the Protestant battle to throw off the oppressive yoke of Eng-
land, for the Rev. John Carroll, S.J., a brother of the signer of the
Declaration of Independence, tells us that " the blood of Catholics
flowed as freely in proportion to their numbers to cement the fabric
of independence as that of any of their fellow-citizens." Nay more,
were it not for the help received from a Catholic nation in the dark-
est hour of their struggle, the colonies would have gone down to
lasting defeat.
Here is indeed a paradox. The colonists had done all in their
power to destroy Catholic religion, they had published as gross in-
justice, a causa belli, the Quebec Act. They had branded the Cath-
olic Faith as the disperser " of impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder
and rebellion through every part of the world." Yet despite all this,
there were none who fought more bravely for the liberty of the col-
onies than did the Catholics. Nor was it a mean part that they
1 Address of the first Continental Congress "To the People of Great Britain."
1917.] A PARADOX OF HISTORY 85
played in the long struggle, for to one fell the lot of founding the
American navy, and upon the assistance of Catholic France the suc-
cessful ending of the war was made possible.
What then can be the explanation of this strange inconsistency ?
Was it lack of faith that led sturdy Irish Catholics to fight side by
side with the enemies of their religion? Was it hope of honor or
glory from the colonists that led the oppressed to take up arms with
the oppressors? Such could never have been. Nor is the answer
to be found in human motives.
In the colonies where was reflected with intensity the bigotry
and antagonism of England towards Catholicism and where the
colonial government was the support of the established Protestant
religion, freedom of worship for the Catholic was impossible. No
advancement could be made, no betterment of conditions could be
hoped for, as long as the colonists remained dependent on England.
But in the impending struggle which was to sever the politi-
cal, civil and religious bonds of America to England, the Catholics
could hope for civil equality at least, and in the broad spirit of lib-
erty and fraternity that a common cause engenders, might attain
religious freedom. This foresight, which actuated them to espouse
the colonist cause, is expressed in the words of Charles Carroll, the
only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence : " When
I signed the Declaration of Independence I had in view not only our
independence of England, but also the toleration of all sects pro-
fessing the Christian religion, and communicating to them all
rights." From motives thus diametrically opposed — the one
through hatred and fear of the Catholic religion, the other lest it
be weakened and oppressed — Protestant and Catholic fought shoul-
der to shoulder.
But though comparatively few in number, the Catholics who
fought for their country's liberty, have enriched American annals
by their heroic conduct on land and sea. Strangest of all is the
fact that by them were decided the most important issues, the very
outcome of the whole Revolution.
As a daring means to check the movements of the British
on land, Congress in 1775 decided to establish a navy whose work
would be to harass the transporting of British troops and supplies.
At the time England was the greatest naval power in the world, and
so little hope of successfully combating her on sea was entertained
that Samuel Chase declared the idea " the maddest in the world."
But despite the tremendous odds the Marine Committee of Congress
86 A PARADOX OF HISTORY [Oct.,
decided to make the attempt, and appointed John Barry, an Irish
Catholic, formerly of County Wexford, the first commander of the
American navy. In command of the Lexington, the first vessel
fitted out carrying the colors of the Continental Congress, Barry
set sail to battle with the pride of the British navy. In rapid suc-
cession he met and took the Edivard, the Lady Susan and the Betsy.
These victories, coming at the time when the American army was
gradually being pushed back from New York, vindicated the desper-
ate risk taken by Congress, and inspired the troops with cheerful-
ness and courage. But the true patriot is to be seen in Barry's
unselfish conduct, when forced to give up his unseaworthy ship.
Instead of remaining inactive until repairs could be made, he re-
solved to assist the army which was in sore straits. Trenton had
not yet been taken, the British held New York, and the cause of
the colonists seemed lost. Seeing the need of new, strong recruits
to assist the ragged, worn-out soldiers of Washington, Barry or-
ganized a company of volunteers and hastened to their assistance.
After lending efficient aid in transferring the troops across the
Delaware and assisting in the surprise of the drunken Hessians at
Trenton, Barry was called to Philadelphia, where he was made
commander of the port and supervised the preparations for the
city's defence. All during that terrible winter when the Continental
troops suffered such hardships at Valley Forge, Barry was engaged
in destroying British shipping on the Delaware, and participated
in the famous " Battle of the Kegs." By brilliant sallies he wrought
havoc amongst the English supply ships, sending the captured pro-
visions to Washington at Valley Forge. In recognition of his gal-
lant work and in gratitude for the food received, General Wash-
ington wrote : " I have received your favor of the 9th inst, and
congratulate you on the success that has crowned your gallantry
and address in the late attacks on the enemies' ships."
But while Barry's service against the British navy cannot be es-
timated too highly, his most efficient work consisted not in any of the
numerous victorious combats, but in a mission that required the ut-
most skill and discretion. America needed money; half-starved and
unpaid, the Continentals were deserting in large numbers. With-
out some financial aid the war would have to end. In order to
raise money, Congress commissioned Colonel John Latirens to
appeal for aid in France, and ordered Commodore Barry to convey
him safely thither. The high seas were infested with British
frigates, and the capture of Laurens meant a deathblow to the
1917.] A PARADOX OF HISTORY 87
colonies. But by extraordinary skill, though only after a desperate
encounter with the Alert, Barry succeeded in landing Laurens in
France, where he obtained from the king a gift of six million francs
besides military stores and clothing, which enabled Washington to
hasten to Yorktown. Had Barry failed, Laurens would never
have reached Paris, Washington could not have moved against
Yorktown in time to reenforce Lafayette, and the war would have
been prolonged indefinitely. Both on land and sea Barry's work
was a prominent factor in establishing the independence of the
colonies. Of his efforts a noted naval authority wrote : " For
boldness of design and dexterity of execution Barry's operations
were not surpassed during the war." But besides the noble work
performed by Barry, valiant service in harassing the English ship-
ping was rendered the colonists by Catholic privateers, a partial list
of which shows thirty-eight vessels in service during 1779 and 1780.
With equal bravery did the Catholic patriots fight in the Con-
tinental armies. In reporting to the Earl of Dartmouth, the traitor
Galloway wrote that of the rebels at Valley Forge " the Irish were
by far the greater number," and General Clinton reported that
" the emigrants from Ireland are in general to be looked upon as
our most serious antagonists." Of Washington's Guard, in which
only the most trustworthy were enlisted and which contained " the
flower and pick of the army," the record show the names of thirty-
two Catholics.
But while there are many whose work is recorded by their
names only, we have in the lives of Moylan, Pulaski, Wallace, Ryan,
Selin, Duffy, Doyle, Moore, Clarke and Brady, all Catholic officers,
noble examples of the service performed by Catholic patriots.
Moylan did yeoman work under Washington. In 1776 he was
appointed Muster-Master General, and later became an aide to
Washington. After seeing service in the campaign around New
York against Clinton, Moylan was placed in command of the whole
colonial cavalry, and conducted his troop with distinction at Brandy-
wine and Yorktown. The noble-hearted Pulaski, after heroic serv-
ice in the provincial cavalry, organized an independent corps, at
whose head he met his death in the brilliant but futile attack on
Savannah.
But while Moylan and Pulaski did valiant work in high com-
mands, there were other Catholic officers who served no less worthily
in less prominent positions. Sergeant Andrew Wallace, a Scotch
Catholic, participated with bravery in many of the more important
88 A PARADOX OF HISTORY [Oct.,
battles, and was the first to succeed Lafayette when the French
commander was dangerously wounded at Brandywine. Captain
Anthony Selin was engaged in the campaign against the Iroquois
Indians and also against General Clinton. Lieutenant Samuel
Brady was at Bunker Hill, Trenton, Princeton and Brandywine,
while the names of Doyle, Duffy and Ryan are inseparably linked
to that of Anthony Wayne, participating with him in his daring
exploits at Stony Point, Camden, Eutaw and Cowpens. These
men have become known to posterity as Catholic patriots, but
there are countless others who served equally nobly, although their
work as Catholics has not been recorded.
Despite the strategic genius of Washington and the bravery
of his troops, little by little the Americans were being driven back.
Each battle found their ranks diminished; each march found their
force debilitated. Defeat and England's retribution faced the ill-
clothed and wretched soldiers. Disheartened, Washington ex-
claimed : " If we do not have money and soldiers from France,
our cause is lost." Thus the people who had raised their voices
in bitter recrimination against the Catholic religion as " dispersing
impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder and rebellion through every
part of the world," now besought a Catholic nation to save them
from utter ruin. How inscrutable are the ways of the Lord !
With their fate resting in his hands, Louis XVI. decided to
help the colonists, and in 1780 an army of five thousand two hun-
dred soldiers was dispatched to the aid of Washington. Besides
this force, among which were the Irish regiments De Walsh and
De Dillon, four fleets were fitted out. With four frigates and
twelve other vessels, Admiral d'Estaing arrived at Delaware Bay
July, 1778, but finding Philadelphia in possession of the British,
sailed north destroying five English frigates and two corvettes on
the way. After putting the English on the defensive and ending
their offensive work in Rhode Island, d'Estaing sailed on Novem-
ber 4, 1778, to the Antilles and thence against Savannah, where the
allied forces were repulsed with a loss of seven hundred to the
French. Although defeated, the unexpected arrival of the French
fleet made futile the proposed expedition against the southern col-
onies, by which the Continentals were to be disunited and thus
cut off from one another to be the more easily conquered.
In March, 1781, Count de Grasse, in command of a large
fleet, left the Antilles with orders to sail along the Atlantic coast
and assist the land forces under Rochambeau and Washington.
I9i7-] A PARADOX OF HISTORY 89
Before embarking, the French admiral obtained a reenforcement
of three thousand four hundred men from the governor and a loan
of one million two hundred thousand livres, secured by his private
fortune. At the opening of the campaign of 1781 a crisis was im-
pending in the affairs of the colonists. Cornwallis, after a series
of skirmishes with the Continental army under General Greene, had
refused to follow the Americans into South Carolina, and began a
marauding march through Virginia. Unsuccessfully opposed by
the slim force under Lafayette, Cornwallis continued his devastating
tour when General Clinton, fearing an attack on New York by
Washington, ordered him to move towards the coast, so as to be
ready with reinforcements, should the threatened attack be made.
In compliance with this plan, Cornwallis centred his troops at York-
town. Washington, seeing the opportunity thus presenting itself,
decided to make a swoop upon Cornwallis, hoping to paralyze the
British in the suddenness of the attack. Covering up his operations
from Clinton, Washington set out by forced marches of sixty miles
a day to join Lafayette. Meanwhile Count de Grasse, with almost
supernatural foresight, determined upon the Chesapeake Bay as
the point of concentration. On September 5th he met the combined
fleets of Admirals Hood and Graves hastening from New York to
the assistance of Cornwallis. After a desperate encounter and
four days spent in manoeuvring, de Grasse sailed into the Chesa-
peake one hour before the arrival of the allied armies. Hemmed
in on land by the American and French forces and on sea by the
French fleet, Cornwallis was forced to surrender October 19, 1781,
and the American Revolution was practically brought to a close.
Thus by Catholic help and valor was made possible the inde-
pendence of the colonies and the founding of the United States of
America. Without the service which was rendered by Catholics
there could have been but one outcome to the struggle of 1776 — the
defeat and subjugation of the colonists. Without Catholic help
the American Revolution would have been a brave but vain battle
of ill-equipped forces, powerless to carry on a long struggle against
the might and power of England.
By Catholic daring and enterprise, America was discovered;
by Catholic explorers its realms were traversed and its wealth and
beauty pictured to the world; by Jesuit missionaries the light of
Christ was first brought to its shores, and by Catholic subjects its
first colony was founded. Now by Catholic help a glorious nation
was established on its shores.
90 A PARADOX OF HISTORY [Oct.,
Yet through it all ho,w plainly can be seen the working of the
hand of God. At the opening of the Revolution we see the Catholic
hated, deprived of his civil rights and debarred by heavy penalties
from the exercise of his religion. But when the generosity of
Catholic France dispelled the gloom of a cause well-nigh lost there
came a gradual change, a softening in the attitude of the colonists
towards Catholicism. So great, indeed, was the transformation that
at the war's close we see the Continental Congress attending Mass
for the soul of the Spanish agent, M. Morales, and again assisting
at the Te Deum for victory.
In the light of today, the divinely-inspired wisdom of our
forefathers receives wonderful confirmation. In seeming contra-
diction they battled side by side with the men who fought lest the
" ancient Protestant colonies " be reduced to the " slavery of Cathol-
icism." Yet their hope that they might receive justice at the hands
of their fellow-patriots who had learned the true meaning of liberty
has been signally realized. Under the beneficent laws of the na-
tion whose establishment was made possible only by Catholic as-
sistance, Catholic America has grown to be the loveliest daughter
of the Church.
And now in the present War when the call to arms came, the
first to go were the splendid men of the Sixty-ninth. Surely their
passing was more than a military incident.
AIMS AND METHODS IN SOCIAL INSURANCE.1
BY JOHN O'GRADV, PH.D.
PROBLEM which has recently been receiving much
attention from American employers is that of labor
turn-over, or the proportion of the number of em-
ployees engaged in different establishments every
year to the total number on the payroll. Many em-
ployers have discovered that they had been employing, on the aver-
age, about four hundred persons every year for every hundred on
the regular payroll. This, of course, meant considerable waste.
The new men had to be trained, a considerable amount of material
was spoiled and the speed of the factory slowed up. In order to
avoid this waste, which has been variously estimated from forty
to two hundred dollars for each new employee engaged, em-
ployers are now making every possible attempt to maintain a steady
labor force. They are using every possible device to interest the men
in their work, and, for this purpose, they are introducing industrial
betterment schemes of all kinds into their factories and workshops.
Employers could not invest their money more profitably. As a
result of its industrial betterment scheme the labor turn-over of
the Ford Motor Car Company has been reduced from four hundred
to twenty-three per cent, and the company has increased its work-
ing efficiency by forty-six per cent, and the return on the money
invested in its profit-sharing bonus has been about twenty- four
per cent.
In addition to providing medical benefits for the care of the
sick and the victims of industrial accidents, establishment funds
provide a cash benefit for the purpose of neutralizing the economic
losses due to sickness. The amount of the cash benefit is generally
about five or six dollars a week, extending over a period varying
from ten to twenty-six weeks. In case of the railroad funds, how-
ever, it sometimes extends over a period of fifty-two weeks.
Sometimes the employer defrays the entire cost of the benefit
fund; sometimes he makes an annual contribution, or defrays the
ccst of administration. In most instances, however, the workers
bear the whole or the greater part of the cost. Only four of the
^Concluded from the September issue.
92 AIMS AND METHODS IN SOCIAL INSURANCE [Oct.,
four hundred and twenty-nine establishment funds studied by the
Bureau of Labor in 1908 were maintained entirely by employers;
one hundred and ninety depended on the contributions of the work-
ers, and one hundred and thirty-nine received contributions of
varying sizes from employers.
How far the workers in this country are protected against the
losses due to sickness by establishment funds, it is difficult to say.
In the one industry in which these funds have been the most widely
adopted, namely, railroading, only twenty per cent of the workers
were protected by them in 1907. In all probability, however, the
establishment funds are doing as much to protect wage-earners
against sickness as any other institution in this country. The bene-
fits supplied by these funds are undoubtedly superior to those of
the fraternal orders and trade unions, especially from the point of
view of medical aid. Establishment funds, as a rule, have fairly
well organized medical benefits. Their medical benefits become
especially effective when administered in conjunction with well-
organized welfare departments in the factories. In such instances,
the workers not alone receive medical attention when they are too
ill to work, but are constantly under the observation of competent
physicians, who detect the first symptoms of disease.
If all employers were philanthropically inclined, if they were
unwilling to take advantage of the power which the administration
of an establishment fund places in their hands, it would be a fairly
reasonable solution of the sickness problem. But unfortunately all
employers are not so inclined. Many do not realize the necessity
of protecting their workmen against sickness; many, too, aire
inclined to use the benefit funds for the purpose of obtaining too
much control over their men. How often has it happened that
workmen who were about to strike or join a labor organization have
had the prospect of losing their benefits held up before them as
a deterrent.
Within the past few years the casualty companies have become
very active in the domain of sickness and accident insurance. The
number of persons whom they protect against personal accidents
and sickness cannot, however, be ascertained with any degree of
accuracy. It has been estimated that about two million persons
carry personal accident policies, and about half a million are insured
against sickness in the casualty companies.
In order to sell accident and sickness insurance to wage-earn-
ers, casualty companies must make a house to house canvass, and
1917-] AIMS AND METHODS IN SOCIAL INSURANCE 93
they must follow the same policy in collecting premiums. We
cannot, therefore, be surprised when we find that in many instances
the cost of administration amounts to about fifty per cent of the
premium. In fact the companies feel that the business is being
conducted at a loss when the loss ratio, or the ratio of losses paid
to the premiums received, exceeds forty-eight per cent, which means
that the workers must pay one dollar for every fifty-two cents re-
ceived by way of benefits.
From the foregoing discussion the following general conclu-
sions may be drawn :
1. In the first place sickness constitutes a very serious risk
for workmen in the United States. For thousands, a sickness
lasting two or three weeks means poverty. Even for the more for-
tunately situated skilled wage-earner it may mean the dissipation
of the savings of a lifetime.
2. Saving is not a desirable means of protecting the wage-
earner against sickness. It is more economical to distribute the loss
due to sickness over a large number by means of insurance.
3. The existing agencies cannot solve the problem of sickness
in the United States because there is no hope of their making insur-
ance universal. So long as we depend on them, the persons who
need insurance the most will remain without its protection.
4. The existing agencies in so far as they impose the entire
cost of insurance on the wage-earner are not based on sound social
policy. Sickness, as every modern student recognizes, is due in
part to personal neglect, in part to occupation and in part to the
unhealthy environment in which workmen live. The cost of insur-
ing against it should, therefore, be borne conjointly by the workers,
by industry and by the state.
5. Under the voluntary systems of sickness insurance in the
United States very frequently no medical benefit is provided, and
when such a benefit is provided, it is scarcely ever sufficient to meet
the needs of the situation. In point of fact the providing of an
adequate medical benefit which is so necessary for the prevention
of sickness and speedy recovery, involves such a large expense that
it cannot be very well provided except through the cooperation of
the employer, the employee and the state.
During the past two or three years the adoption of compulsory
health insurance by American states has been seriously discussed.
The United States Commission on Industrial Relations made a
special study of the question, and the majority report recommended
94 AIMS AND METHODS IN SOCIAL INSURANCE [Oct.,
the enactment of compulsory sickness insurance legislation in this
country. A number of private organizations have also been de-
voting considerable time to the study of this newer form of social
insurance, the most prominent among them being the American
Medical Association, the American Association for Labor Legisla-
tion and the National Civic Federation. In the spring of 1916, and,
again, in 1917, compulsory health insurance laws were presented
to the State Legislatures of Massachusetts, New York, New Jer-
sey and Pennsylvania. In Massachusetts a committee of the Legis-
lature was appointed to study the question and make recommenda-
tions. The committee, however, failed to agree and presented a
divided report. In California a commission was appointed in 1915
to study sickness and old age insurance. After making an intensive
study of the problem' of sickness in the state and of the various
private institutions which have been organized to protect the worker
against the losses due to sickness, the commission recommended
that a constitutional amendment, authorizing the Legislature to pass
compulsory sickness insurance legislation, be submitted to the voters
of the state in 1918. A few weeks ago the Ohio State Legislature
created a commission to study health insurance and old age pen-
sions, and the creation of a similar commission is being considered
by the New York Legislature.
At the present time the health insurance movement is passing
through the same stages as the workmen's compensation movement
in 1909 and 1910. Many of the states have at least reached the
point when they are sufficiently interested in compulsory health in-
surance to spend money in studying its results elsewhere, and,
were it not for the fact that the complicated problems of the
War have diverted the attention of our legislatures for the moment,
we would undoubtedly find compulsory health laws on the statute
books of American states within the next two or three years.
There is nothing entirely new in the proposal to adopt com-
pulsory health insurance for all wage-earners or others with small
incomes in this country. This form of social legislation has been
tried by nearly all the more important European states. Its under-
lying principles are as generally accepted in Europe as the com-
pensation principle in this country. Germany, England, Austria-
Hungary, Russia, Norway and Holland have considered it just
as important to protect the worker against sickness and disease as
against industrial accidents. Other countries, among them, France,
Belgium, Denmark, Switzerland, while not going so far as to
1917.] AIMS AND METHODS IN SOCIAL INSURANCE 95
adopt the principle of universal compulsion for wage-earners, have
subsidized the different organizations carrying sickness insurance
out of the national treasury.
In the health insurance movement, as in all other social move-
ments, the larger issues should be kept in mind, and not be per-
mitted to be overshadowed, by minor details which can be easily
adjusted in due time. The most fundamental issue of the whole
programme is the principle of compulsion and, on this issue, the
wise men of America still differ. There are many who believe
that insurance against sickness should be compulsory, but are op-
posed to the present legislative schemes because their own cherished
monopolies do not receive sufficient consideration. The different
fraternal orders have been in the field of sickness insurance for
generations, and they are naturally opposed to any form of legis-
lation which they imagine would interfere with their development.
Tjra.de unions have been building up sickness funds during the
past fifty years, and many of their leaders feel that compulsory
insurance is an unreasonable interference with their activities.
The labor leaders and the officers of fraternal orders who are con-
vinced of the necessity of compulsory health insurance are anxious
to have their organizations take a prominent position in the pro-
posed scheme.
The insurance companies also feel that they should be con-
sidered. They have been developing a large sickness insurance
business in recent years, and, if they have been permitted to carry
workmen's compensation insurance, they feel that there is no
reason why they should not be permitted to carry sickness insurance.
After the problem of compulsion has been solved and the various
interests affected properly accommodated, we have still to decide on
the extent and scope of the proposed legislation, as well as on the
equitable distribution of the financial burden.
Very few countries outside of the United States, at the present
time, believe that private cooperative effort can of itself protect
the workers against the sickness hazard. This does not mean that
all countries have decided to adopt compulsory sickness insurance.
Sweden, Denmark, Belgium and Switzerland have satisfied them-
selves with subsidizing private cooperative effort; France has con-
fined its compulsory legislation to miners and seamen, and Italy
to railroad workers.
After years of experience with voluntary subsidized sickness
insurance it has been found that large numbers of workers are
96 AIMS AND METHODS IN SOCIAL INSURANCE [Oct.,
still unprotected against sickness in countries where this form of
insurance has been put into effect. It has also been discovered that
the benefits provided under the voluntary subsidized systems do not
at all come up to the standards of the compulsory systems.
The most far-reaching and extensive system of voluntary
subsidized sickness insurance is that of Denmark. Adopted in
1892 the Danish law provides a state subsidy of one-fifth of the
total income from dues for societies that come up to certain
prescribed standards in regard to entrance requirements and bene-
fits. Under the influence of the law the various private benefit
societies have increased in membership from one hundred and
sixteen thousand seven hundred and sixty-three in 1893 to eight
hundred and forty-three thousand two hundred and forty-four in
1914; their membership in the latter year being about thirty per
cent of the total population of the country. This would seem to
make a strong case for the voluntary subsidized system of sickness
insurance, the percentages of insured persons in the total popula-
tion in Denmark being equal to that of Germany and nearly equal
to that of England. It must be remembered, however, that half
the members of the Danish societies are women. It is not un-
common to find husband and wife insured in the same society,
which is not at all so necessary in Germany on account of the
extension of the medical benefits to the wage-earner's wife and
family, so that, in reality, we find a larger amount of family in-
surance in Germany.
It is in the matter of benefits granted that the Danish system
compares most unfavorably with the compulsory systems. All the
compulsory systems require the payment of benefits for at least
twenty-six weeks and, in some instances, payments may be ex-
tended to fifty-two weeks. In Denmark the benefits both financial
and medical do not ordinarily extend beyond a period of thirteen
weeks.
Under a compulsory system there is a better chance of in-
surance becoming universal than under any voluntary plan. Al-
though the subsidy may be large, the cost of insurance will still
be too great for the ordinary wage-earner. It may induce the
worker who is receiving a high wage to insure, but to those who
have scarcely sufficient to maintain a decent standard of life it
offers very little hope.
Workmen's compensation legislation has compelled employers
in this country to pay considerable attention to the prevention of
1917-] AIMS AND METHODS IN SOCIAL INSURANCE 97
industrial accidents. American employers now realize that it is
a better economic policy to introduce safety devices into their fac-
tories than to pay large sums of money to the victims of industrial
accidents. Employers, too, have learned that immediate and careful
attention to all the injuries great and small suffered by their em-
ployees, expedites recovery and shortens the period for which com-
pensation must be paid. European experience justifies us in be-
lieving that similar results will be obtained under compulsory sick-
ness insurance.
In Germany, sickness insurance has compelled employers to pay
more attention to the health of their workmen. They have realized
that healthy workers mean not only lower insurance rates but also
greater output. At no time have European countries realized more
fully the close connection between health and efficiency than during
the past three years. Under the stress of war conditions they have
been compelled to speed up their industries in order to secure the
greatest possible output. It has, therefore, been found necessary to
pay close attention to every factor affecting the efficiency of workers,
and, for this purpose, welfare committees have been organized
under the auspices of the government in the different countries at
war. These committees have invariably found that lost time was
one of the greatest causes of inefficiency, and that most of the time
lost by the workers was due to sickness. The remedies suggested as
means of minimizing lost time are : more efficient medical aid for the
sick ; shorter hours ; the establishment of restaurants in factories, so
that the workers may have an opportunity of obtaining wholesome
food at cost. Here we have one of the many instances in which
the scientific discoveries of the War have confirmed the theories for
which social reformers have been battling for generations.
In organizing the medical resources of the community for the
prevention and cure of sickness, compulsory sickness insurance is
far more effective than any voluntary plan. The local insurance
funds of Germany have placed at the disposal of the worker the
best results of modern medicine and surgery. Members of these
locals may have medical care in their homes or they may be sent to
hospitals or sanatoria established by the funds. Their wives and
the members of their families may also have medical treatment in
case of sickness. Such effective medical care could not be provided
by a voluntary organization; the cost would be prohibitive.
In regard to the persons included under its provisions, com-
pulsory sickness insurance in Europe followed the same lines of de-
VOL. CVI. — 7 »
98 AIMS AND METHODS IN SOCIAL INSURANCE [Oct.,
velopment as workmen's compensation. For a number of years
sickness insurance was in the experimental stage and it was, accord-
ingly, considered necessary to limit its application to certain classes
of workers. The original German Act of 1883 was limited to work-
ingmen in mines, quarries, factories and other industrial concerns.
By the amendments of 1885, 1893 and 1911, it was gradually ex-
tended so that, at the present time, it includes practically all manual
workers and salaried employees earning less than two thousand
marks ($476) a year. The more recent sickness insurance laws are
far more general in their application than the original German
Act. The Norwegian Act of 1909 includes all wage-earners and sal-
aried employees earning less than twelve hundred crowns in the
rural districts and fourteen hundred crowns ($375.20) in the urban
districts. The British act of 1911 includes all wage-earners and sal-
aried employees earning less than one hundred and sixty pounds
(less than $800.00) a year.
As a matter of social policy, there is no good reason why any
class of wage-earners or any class of salaried employees, earning
less than fifteen hundred dollars, should be excluded from the pro-
posed American laws. The inclusion of all classes of workers from
the beginning will make the law cumbersome and, therefore, diffi-
cult to enforce; but the main objection to a universal law, at first,
is a political one. It might not be good policy to arouse the oppo-
sition of American fanners and housewives against compulsory
sickness insurance, until the other classes concerned have accepted
it. The application of sickness insurance on a small scale, in this
country, may be an excellent means of educating the public in re-
gard to its practical utility. If the experiment as applied to certain
classes of^ workers should, prove successful, there will be little diffi-
culty in making it universal.
The problem which seems to be giving most concern to the ad-
vocates of sickness insurance at the present time, is the insurance
carrier. As we saw in a previous article there are many organizations
in this country having as their aim the protection of the workers
against the sickness hazard. What is to become of all these or-
ganizations under compulsory sickness insurance? Are all the mu-
tual and fraternal societies whose members are bound together by
so many ties to be legislated out of existence, as some would have
it? European countries had at one time to face this same problem
which is now confronting the American states. In Great Britain,
Germany and Austria before the passing of compulsory legislation,
hundreds of private societies were providing sickness insurance for
1917-] AIMS AND METHODS IN SOCIAL INSURANCE 99
their members. In England and Germany, as well as in other
European countries, these private societies were made a part of the
national systems. They were permitted to continue their work as
in the past, but in order to receive contributions from the employer
and the state they had to conform to certain standards in regard
to financial solvency and benefits. In Germany, in addition to the
societies already in existence, two new organizations were provided
for. The local authorities were authorized to establish local funds,
whenever the number of persons to be admitted was at least one
hundred. The local funds are generally created for persons in a
particular occupation. The communes may however combine dif-
ferent occupations in one fund if each has less than one hundred
persons. On account of the fluctuating character of the building
trades and the unusually high rate of sickness in them it was
thought that they could not be included in the ordinary local funds.
The authorities were, therefore, authorized to create special funds
for them. In order to protect the locals against, the burden of in-
suring low paid labor, a new type of insurance fund was created in
1911, for agricultural laborers and domestic servants. Although
the German local funds did not possess any initial advantages over
the already existing institutions they seem to have become the most
popular carriers of sickness insurance in the Empire. In 1913 the
locals had about fifty-seven per cent of the total number of persons
insured against sickness in Germany. The reasons assigned by ex-
perts for the great success of the German local funds is their effi-
ciency in organizing medical aid, in providing hospital and sana-
torium treatment and in increasing the financial benefit to the max-
imum permitted by the law.
In Great Britain the private institutions have a larger share in
the administration of sickness insurance than in any other European
country. Under the German system the existing societies are made a
part of the national system, but they are not encouraged, the local
funds organized by the communal authorities being the standard in-
surance carriers. In England, on the other hand, the friendly so-
cieties, the trade unions and the establishment funds are the
standard insurance carriers. The individual, while compelled to
insure, is free to join any one of these societies, and the societies are
free to reject any person whom they may look upon as a poor risk.
Those who cannot find admittance to the friendly societies, trade
unions or establishment funds, are compelled to become deposit
contributors; that is, they must pay their weekly contribution into
the post office.
ioo AIMS AND METHODS IN SOCIAL INSURANCE [Oct.,
The Health Insurance Law of the American Association for
Labor Legislation recently introduced into the legislatures of New
York, New Jersey and Massachusetts is modeled after the German
system. It is proposed to make the local fund the standard insur-
ance carrier for both medical and cash benefits. Fraternal orders
and other private organizations insuring against sickness are to be
permitted to participate but they are not to receive any contribu-
tion from employers. This apparent discrimination has naturally
aroused the opposition of the private societies as it places them at
a serious disadvantage compared with the local funds.
American employers cannot be expected to contribute to fra-
ternal societies and trade unions since they have no say in the man-
agement of these organizations. The fraternals and the trade
unions, on the other hand, cannot be expected to acquiesce in a form
of legislation that prevents their normal development. Some com-
promise similar to that proposed by the California Social Insurance
Commission must, therefore, be worked out, which will be acceptable
to both parties. The essential features of the California plan are the
separation of the cash benefit and the medical benefit and the pro-
vision that the insured must pay the entire cost of the cash benefit.
For those who do not belong to fraternal societies, trade unions or
establishment funds, it proposes the establishment of a state in-
surance fund. In addition to providing a cash benefit for those
who do not belong to existing voluntary institutions, the state fund
is to be the sole insurance carrier for the medical benefit, the cost of
which is to be borne by the employer in part, and in part by the
state. This plan follows the precedent set by the British act in
separating the medical and cash benefit. It is, however, an im-
provement on the British system, in that it provides for the organ-
ization of a state fund for those who are not members of voluntary
societies. In Great Britain such persons merely become deposit
contributors, and in case of sickness, can only obtain benefits to the
extent of the amount placed to their credit in the post office by them-
selves, their employers and the state. There is no distribution of
risk as under the proposed California scheme. One period of sick-
ness may use up all the worker's savings.
After an agreement has been reached in regard to the principle
of compulsion and the institutions which are to participate in sick-
ness insurance, the problem of distribution of cost can easily be
solved. We must care for the sick in some way, and, if they are not
protected by insurance, they must become dependents upon public
charity. Of the two, insurance is the more economical because it
1917.] AIMS AND METHODS IN SOCIAL INSURANCE 101
places the burden where it belongs and gives the worker the care
necessary for a speedy recovery. Modern science recognizes that in-
dustry is to a certain extent responsible for sickness among wage-
earners. It also recognizes that the wage-earners themselves and
society share this responsibility with industry. The more recent
sickness insurance laws, therefore, divide the cost of insurance be-
tween the employer, the employee and the state. Under the British
law the insured contributes four-ninths, the employers three-ninths
and Parliament two-ninths of the cost. According to the German
law, however, the cost is borne conjointly by the employer and the
employee at the rate of two-thirds and one-third, respectively, the
state defraying a part of the cost of administration.
Wage-earners who are receiving living wages may reasonably
be compelled to bear a part, and perhaps the greatest part, of the
cost of sickness insurance; but what of those who are scarcely re-
ceiving sufficient to maintain a decent standard of life? It might
be a better social policy to have the employer and the state bear the
entire cost of sickness insurance in the case of these poorly paid
workers. Great Britain was the first country to exempt poorly-paid
workers from contributing to the sickness insurance funds. But
while the American states may copy the principle applied by Great
Britain in this regard, the standards set by the British law are so
low as not to offer any precedent for American action. The British
law entirely exempts only those earning less than thirty-four cents
a day and lowers the rate for those receiving less than sixty cents
a day.
A sickness insurance law ought to make up at least in part for
the wage loss due to sickness, and provide the worker with the
medical care necessary to hasten recovery. In European countries
the worker generally receives a cash benefit varying between fifty
and seventy-five per cent of the wage scale of the group to which
he belongs. England has departed from the general European
precedent by prescribing a fixed benefit of ten shillings a week for
men and seven shillings for women. The medical benefit, under
European laws, generally provide medical attention, dental care,
drugs and hospital care when necessary.
Sickness insurance legislation ought to prevent the workers
from becoming public dependents or from dissipating the savings
of a life time during periods of illness; it ought to give them access
to the best things which modern medicine and surgery can offer and
from which they are at present excluded.
flew Boohs*
OPERATIVE OWNERSHIP. A System of Industrial Production
Based upon Social Justice and the Rights of Private Property.
By James J. Finn. Chicago: Langdon & Co. $1.50.
If all laborers were paid living wages; if a considerable minor-
ity of them received considerably more than this amount; if all
were adequately insured against accidents, sickness, unemployment
and old age; and if practically all were organized in labor unions,
would the problem of capital and labor be satisfactorily solved?
Probably the majority of social students would answer this question
in the affirmative. Nevertheless there is a growing minority, en-
tirely outside the ranks of Socialism, that refuses to accept such
a solution. Among them is the author of Operative Ownership.
The system that he proposes and defends under this title is not
new. Briefly, it would make the workers in any establishment the
owners. Two stages are suggested ; one in which the laborers would
own a part of the concern, leaving a part in the hands of the non-
working shareholders; and the more advanced and satisfactory
stage, in which the workers would own the whole of the business.
The first of these is usually called copartnership ; the second, " per-
fect " productive cooperation. What is distinctive in the author's
proposals is the method by which either or both of these arrange-
ments are to be realized. He is aware that the number of success-
ful instances of either degree of cooperation is discouragingly small,
and he believes that there will be no material increase until the
workers receive help from the government. He would have a law
passed enabling the workers to form a corporation for the purpose
of buying a part or all of the capital. If the capitalists consented,
the workers would obtain a voice in the management of the business
and a share in its profits. After wages, interest, and all other nec-
essary costs had been paid, the surplus would be divided on an
" equitable basis " between capitalists and workers. Out of their
share of the profits the workers would gradually buy out the cap-
italists. Any of the latter who refused to join in this scheme would
be compelled by the government to sell their entire holdings to the
workingmen's corporations. In such cases the money for making the
transfer would be provided by means of government credit. It is the
IQI7-] NEW BOOKS 103
opinion of the author that when the capitalists were confronted
with this contingency of compulsory sale, most of them would prefer
the first method of joint profit-sharing and joint ownership, and
therefore that the use of the legal power of eminent domain and
of government credit would become necessary only in a small pro-
portion of establishments.
There seems to be nothing essentially unsound about either of
these methods. Compulsory profit sharing is no violation of the
rights of capitalists, and the increased efficiency of the workers,
after they had become participants in the management and the
profits, would undoubtedly enable them to become within a reason-
able time owners of a considerable share of the stock in very many
concerns. And the device of a law compelling the workers to invest
at least half of their profits in the business would be reasonable and
efficacious. Nor would compulsory sale of their property by those
capitalists who refused to enter the copartnership involve any vio-
lation of the rights of property. It would be necessary for social
well-being. As the author points out, the use of public credit for
this purpose would be merely a belated extension to the laboring
class of governmental assistance such as that given to the farmers,
the railroads, the manufacturers and other classes. And the loans
could be sufficiently safeguarded to protect the government against
more than a trifling amount of losses.
While the author is right in his belief that the wage system
cannot endure as the dominant form of industrial organization, and
while the methods that he proposes for bringing about " operative
ownership " would probably be both just and effective, he exag-
gerates the proper scope of his own plan, and minimizes the justice
and efficacy of other measures of industrial reform. In describing
the field to which his scheme could be applied, he makes no distinc-
tion between competitive and monopolistic industries. Thus, he
would have even the railroads owned and operated by the workers,
either alone or in union with the capitalists, and without any " inter-
ference by governmental agencies." Yet he ought to know that the
railroad industry is a natural monopoly, and as such must be regu-
lated by the government in order to prevent extortionate rates of
transportation. This need would be quite as great under labor own-
ership as under the present capitalist ownership; for human nature
is essentially the same in both classes. The labor managers could
not be trusted to use their monopoly power with justice towards the
patrons of railways. The same is true of all other public utilities,
104 NEW BOOKS [Oct.,
and of much of the mining industry. In all these fields the prefer-
able form of industrial organization is ownership and operation by
the government.
The author minimizes the necessity and justice of other social
and industrial reforms, when he denounces progressive income and
inheritance taxes, the laws against trusts and monopolies, the
use of the police power of the state to crush the excessive power of
capital and protect the rights of labor, and the regulation of rail-
way rates by the Interstate Commerce Commission and the various
state commissions. If he were better acquainted with the teaching
of the economists and of Catholic moral theologians on the essential
justice of the progressive principle in taxation; if he had a more
comprehensive knowledge of the concrete facts about monopolistic
extortion during the last thirty years ; if he would try to acquire the
social student's as well as the lawyer's view concerning the necessity
of employing police power to prevent the oppression of the strong
by the weak under the guise of freedom of contract; and if he had
statistical knowledge instead of a newspaper opinion of the fairness
of our public regulation of railway rates, he could never have writ-
ten the virtual apology for unrestrained capitalism that appears in
Chapters VI. and VII. Had he made a thorough and first-hand
study of the facts, he would have found that the various measures of
governmental regulation which he denounces have practically all
been in harmony with his own principle of a " fair return to capital."
His limited acquaintance with the pertinent industrial facts, and his
naive reliance on second-hand sources are aptly and pitifully illus-
trated by his citation of ex-President Taft as an authority on the
" hostility of legislatures against all successful investments of cap-
ital !" From the viewpoint of his own purpose, as well as from the
viewpoint of truth, it is a pity that he permitted himself to insert
those two chapters. They are not necessary to his argument, and
they will tend to alienate the sympathies of all well-informed and
progressive-minded readers.
HISTORY OF THE SPANISH CONQUEST OF YUCATAN AND
OF THE ITZAS. By Philip Ainsworth Means. Cambridge,
Mass. : The Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and
Etymology.
This valuable work consists mainly of translations of early
Spanish books and manuscripts relating to Central America, and
was the result of work carried on by Mr. Means as a graduate stu-
1917.] NEW BOOKS 105
dent in the Department of Anthropology of Harvard University.
The first part is devoted to a study of civilization of the Mayas, who
occupied the peninsula of Yucatan, parts of Mexico, Honduras and
all of Guatemala. Existing contemporaneously as a branch of the
Mayas were those people known as the Itzas, who were to be fpund
in a part of Guatemala and the southern portion of the Yucatan. It
is now believed by scientific investigators that the aboriginal races
of America, far from being of enormous antiquity as has been sup-
posed, have been in existence for not more than three thousand
years. The greater part of Mr. Means' study is devoted to the
eighth period of the Maya race (1519-1697), when they were en-
gaged in struggles with the Spanish conquerors. The Franciscans
played an important part in the colonization of Central America,
and one of the most valuable historical documents relating to the
subject, quoted largely by this writer, is the first-hand account of the
conquest of the Itzas related by Father Andre de Avendano y
Loyola. Besides the importance of Avendario's manuscript, "we
must not lose sight of the fact that that same Relation is also a
wonderful, though unconscious, testimony to the piety, unselfishness
and bravery of him who wrote it."
THE WOMEN OF BELGIUM. By Charlotte Kellogg. New
York: Funk & Wagnalls Co. $1.00 net.
Mrs. Kellogg tells a wonderful story of courage and heroism
as splendid as any of the battlefield or trench. It is based upon the
work of the Belgian Relief Committee headed by Herbert Hoover.
Its purpose, however, is not to speak of the great services rendered
by this body of men and women, but rather to bring to the reader
the untiring patience, the unflagging fortitude and the thrilling self-
sacrifice of the women of Belgium.
A little country no larger than Maryland, packed with eight
million inhabitants, Belgium found itself at the outbreak of the War
the cockpit of Europe. Within a short time she was trampled under
foot, and over three million of her people rendered destitute — and
not least among these the little children. How the Belgium women
took up the work of saving their offspring, how they labored in the
canteens to feed the hungry little beggars, the energy with which
they bore up under heavy burdens of grief and destitution, forms a
page in history brighter with good deeds than all the honor rolls
of the War. It is more than a mere story; it is a holy record of
noble women sacrificing themselves in their mission of love. The
io6 NEW BOOKS [Oct.,
profits from the sale of this book go to the Commission for Relief in
Belgium.
LILLA. A Part of Her Life. By Mrs. Belloc Lowndes. New
York: George H. Doran Co. $1.35 net.
Mrs. Belloc Lowndes has again given us a novel of war con-
ditions. In October, 1914, Captain Robert Singleton, of the
British army, is erroneously reported killed. His wife, Lilla, de-
votes herself to war work. She meets Darrell Carter et, under un-
usual circumstances, their acquaintance develops into love; they
marry and have for some months enjoyed a happiness greater than
either has ever known, when Singleton effects his escape from im-
prisonment in Belgium and arrives in London, having sent no word
of his coming, and in total ignorance of what has occurred. Though
shocked and wounded when he learns the truth, he has no other
thought than that his wife shall return to him. Carteret is a Catho-
lic, but lax; his mother, however, is profoundly devout, and between
her and Lilla a warm affection exists. Lilla seeks counsel with
her, and Mrs. Carteret states the only opinion possible for a stanch
Catholic as to any solution of the difficulty by persuading Singleton
to obtain a divorce, to be followed by a second marriage of Lilla and
Carteret. Her words strike an answering chord in Lilla's instincts,
which are fine and true, and after a bitter struggle she accepts the
older woman's standard for her own. Singleton, being about to re-
join his regiment, is induced by Mrs. Carteret to consent that his
reunion with Lilla be deferred until after the War ; Carteret receives
a Government appointment that sends him with Lord Kitchener on
the foredoomed journey to Russia; Lilla goes to France to carry on
her war work there. On the eve of her departure she is received
into the Church; and our last sight of her is on the day the news
reaches France of the loss of the Hampshire, as she kneels in the
church at Bougival to pray for the souls of the great commander
and the men who went with him to their death.
Mrs. Belloc Lowndes is one of the most variable of writers,
therefore it was not to be expected that this book should be upon
the same plane of excellence as its immediate predecessor, Good Old
Anna; but it is disappointing to find that unusually well-constructed
story followed by the author's relapse into an error to which she is
much addicted, the introduction of characters wholly extraneous to
the subject in hand and not even indirectly promoting the action,
yet in whom she attempts to create an interest by long explanations
1917-] NEW BOOKS 107
concerning their earlier lives, these having evidently formed the
material of previous novels. It is incredible she failed to realize
that the book's one vitally significant point is in Mrs. Carteret; nev-
ertheless, the reader is not set upon the path to this objective before
being led up several blind alleys. When he arrives, at last, he con-
fronts a memorable figure standing out clearly against the confused
background, the white-haired invalid, strong of faith as she is frail
of body, experienced and sympathetic, exercising tactful speech
and wise silences in the hallowed diplomacy by which she saves her
beloved son and Lilla from spiritual disaster. It is she whose ac-
quaintance we most wish to renew, at greater length, in the contin-
uation which the title and the somewhat indeterminate ending,
taken in conjunction with the author's predilections, seem intended
to intimate.
"BLESSED ART THOU AMONG WOMEN." The Life of the
Virgin Mother. Compiled by William Frederick Butler.
Chicago: Rand, McNally & Co. $3.50.
In this handsome volume the life of the Blessed Mother, lead-
ing up to and merging in the life of her Divine Son, is beautifully
displayed in one hundred and fifty masterpieces of the world's
greatest painters. Mary, the blessed among women, has ever been a
fruitful source of inspiration to poet and painter as well as to saint.
As the Archbishop of St. Paul says in his foreword : " Art, in its
many forms of expression, covets the true, the good, and the beau-
tiful, and revels in the task of lending to the invisible ideal visible
reflected radiancy. . . . And so, amid its quests, art caught up the
vision of Mary of Nazareth .... The triumphs of human art are its
pictures of Mary, maid and mother. Art has been the willing auxil-
iary of the Church in her fulfillment of Mary's prophecy — ' For be-
hold from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.' ' To
this truth this choice collection bears ample testimony. Taste and
judgment have been used to conserve as much harmony in concep-
tion and treatment in the sequence as was compatible with the
wide range of artists represented. The Italian and Spanish schools
predominate, with a fair representation of the French, German and
Dutch also. For the most part the examples chosen are in accord
with the older traditions.
The whole forms a most unusual and interesting collection well
calculated to delight the eye and to uplift the heart, through the
Mother to the Son.
io8 NEW BOOKS [Oct.,
FROM MOSCOW TO THE PERSIAN GULF. By Benjamin
Burges Moore. New York: G. P. Putman's Sons. $3.00.
" Persia, a country that has in many ways been worth the
visit, but one that I hope heartily never to see again." In these dis-
couraging terms the author characterizes the country which fur-
nished him with materials for a highly interesting journal de
voyage. An accurate observer of men and customs and gifted with
artistic temperament, he depicts in vivid style the beauty and mys-
terious life of the country. His narrative throws much light
on the history, geography, art, archaeology, religion, domestic life
and moral conditions of the country he has visited, and will prove
valuable not only to the general reader, but also to scholars and
critics because of the minute description of Persian customs, tradi-
tions and monuments. One hundred and sixty illustrations from
photographs taken by the author greatly enhance the interest and at-
tractiveness of the volume. A few pages are devoted to Russia, par-
ticularly to Moscow. They are not, however, among the best of the
book, being merely personal impressions.
THE RUSSIAN SCHOOL OF PAINTING. By Alexandra Benois.
New York : Alfred A. Knopf. $5.00 net.
In his preface.M. Benois states: "During the two hundred
years of the existence of Western art in Russia, it has produced
very few phenomena of a purely artistic character." The sentence
adequately sums up the situation; in fact, after reading it and the
remainder of the book one wonders if the title quite truly covers the
subject. For it is still a moot point — Is there a school of " Russian
Painting?"
The early iconography of Russia — the first form of art to make
itself manifest — was Byzantine, and for several centuries it reflected
the Byzantine influence until the national characteristics began to be
crystallized, when it could be called Russian. With the establishment
of the state along fairly permanent lines, art became the object of
royal and wealthy patronage, and as the state tended to attract
Western culture its paintings showed more and more this Occidental
influence until art in Russia grew to be a mirror of French, German
and English art. In the course of these decades giants arose, but
they did not create any school. It may even be claimed that not
until the seventies did Russia begin to show anything that ap-
proached a national school of distinctive art.
But if the title of Mr. Benois' excellent work is slightly mis-
1917.] NEW BOOKS 109
leading, its contents are ample compensation. It is a clearly written
history of the art of a comparatively modern Russia, beginning with
the eighteenth century — the time of Peter the Great when the West-
ern influence was the first felt, continuing through the classicism of
Sheluyev and Yegorov — on to the romantic stage of Kiprensky and
Orlovsky and Semiradsky, the religious painting of Ivanov, Nicolay,
Gay, Nesterov, Vasnetzov and Vrubel, and then taking up the three
classes of realism and purpose painting, historical and legendary
pictures, landscape and free realism, and finally the present state
of Russian painting.
As a resume of the scope and endeavor of painters in Russia,
this book is by far the best for those who have an appreciation of
art as a foundation. Beside being an historic accounting, it is a
keenly critical piece of writing; vivid, charming and delightfully
logical — something one so seldom finds in books that have such an
ambitious subject as the history of a nation's art. It is to be recom-
mended for the sanity and balance of its comments and its capable
appreciation and its excellent background. A large number of il-
lustrations cover the range of Russian paintings from Levitsky to
Malyatin.
The fabric of the book itself — its type, reproductions, arrange-
ment and binding — comprise a singularly fine example of book
manufacturing.
THOSE TIMES AND THESE. By Irvin S. Cobb. New York:
George H. Doran Co. $1.35 net.
This collection will add much to Irvin Cobb's growing reputa-
tion for excellent craftsmanship and fine standards.
The tales are ten. The opening story relates the anabasis of the
sixty Confederate soldiers who started south for Mexico, when Lee
surrendered, determined to enlist with Maximilian's army. As they
neared Monterey, it dawned on them that they would become men
without a country. Wheeling about they galloped back north, their
hoarse voices singing " My Old Kentucky Home." Never was there
a more welcome sight than the Rio Grande to these returning Amer-
icans.
The Family Tree gives the account of the old gentleman with
the black stock, who unwittingly thought he was a Van Nicht, but
measured up to right manhood. Hark! From the Tombs! is a de-
lightfully, humorous story of the night watch of the Afro- American
Order of Supreme Kings of the Universe. Cinnamon Seed and
no NEW BOOKS [Oct.,
Sandy Bottom proves conclusively that mind has an impelling force
on matter. A Kiss for Kindness is a vivid description of the old-time
political picnic away back in the second Bryan campaign. The last
story in the collection delineates the abandoned form of fact — not
fancy. Every story is well written, and, as Judge Priest would say,
" is as clean as a hound's tooth."
THE RED PLANET. By W. J. Locke. New York: John Lane
Co. $1.50 net.
This novel, written with much skill, timely to the very minute,
and full of human appeal, is destined to be one of the most popular
books the World War has brought forth. In a way, it might be
called a second " Mr., Britling Sees It Through," although it is
hardly so profound a document as Mr. Wells gave us. On the other
hand, its success may even surpass that of the Wells novel, because
by many it will be found easier to read. It is full of real emotion
and the gentle whimiscal humor for which W. J. Locke is famous.
The title of the story is drawn from the very apt verse :
Not only over death strewn plains,
Fierce 'mid the cold white stars,
But over sheltered vales of home
Rides the Red Planet Mars.
A truth which we Americans have yet to experience in the present
conflict. Indeed, it is astonishing how faithfully this chronicle, sup-
posedly penned by the crippled Major Duncan Meredyth, veteran of
the Boer War, reflects the conditions in which we are today living
here in the United States. It will be profitable as well as enjoyable
for Americans to read Mr. Locke's books : it may awake many to the
peril that threatens our own life, not alone on "death strewn plains,"
but in " sheltered vales of home."
To the writing of The Red Planet the author has brought the
finished art of a trained novelist. The plot is absorbing; and al-
though the clue to the chief mystery of the tale is perhaps given
away a little too soon for the critical reader, the suspense is sus-
tained, nevertheless, because the story is full of interesting char-
acters drawn in a most life-like manner. One loved the old Major
who tells the tale; Betty is refreshing and adorable; Sergeant Mari-
gold is worthy of Dickens at his best. The book presents a pageant,
in fact, of charming people, manly men and lovely women, revealing
the pure gold of their souls under the glare of the Red Planet as
it rides across their paths of life. There is a proper villian, too; and
1917.] NEW BOOKS in
it is just possible that in this personage named Gedge, Mr. Locke
has added a new verb to the language. Henceforth " to gedge " will
be to play the mean small-minded purchasable malcontent in the
time of national crisis. In the central character, Leonard Boyce,
there is likewise a strain of what, for a better name, we must call
villainly; and yet he is the hero of the story, and a character so
clearly delineated, drawn with so much sympathy and understanding,
that we cannot fail to love him and pity him. The story of Boyce
is, in fact, a remarkable study in the psychology of physical coward-
ice, as contrasted with moral courage. Mr. Locke has succeeded, in
his portrayal of Boyce, in giving a living character to literature.
All the more regrettable, then, is the fact that, despite his success in
building up this character, he has failed in the end in depicting its
ultimate fate. The conclusion is an artistic blunder, as well as dis-
tasteful from the moral point of view. The book may be said,
nevertheless, to carry this deep lesson (with which, however, the
author can hardly be credited) that the natural virtues alone, un-
fortified by supernatural grace, cannot suffice to a man's salvation :
if Leonard Boyce, striving with all his might to overcome his pas-
sions, had had the help of the sacraments of Penance and Holy
Eucharist, his story, though none the less tragic and appealing,
would have been sublimely different in the end.
THE BASIS OF DURABLE PEACE. By Cosmos. New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons. Cloth, 50 cents. Paper, 30 cents.
This volume presents to the reader in book form a series of
articles that appeared sometime ago in the New York Times. The
writer who offers his work under the title of Cosmos, and who is
undoubtedly ex-President William H. Taft, has given us probably
the sanest discussion of the terms of peace that the nations must
agree upon at the close of the War.
He insists that if there is to be a permanent peace Great
Britain and her Allies must be big enough to allow the utmost free-
dom in the development of the international trade, and not follow
up the present struggle by an economic war. All private property at
sea not contraband must be exempt from capture or destruction by
belligerents. Concerning France, he insists that Alsace-Lorraine
must be returned ; that the Bosphorus and Dardanelles be given over
to Russia, and that the German people must destroy the Prussian
militarism that brought on the present conflict.
After discussing these concrete proposals, the learned writer
112 NEW BOOKS [Oct.,
takes up the question of insuring universal peace after the War. It
is more or less the plan adopted by the League to Enforce Peace,
which provides for a convention similar to the Hague, which will
use its military and economic forces to prevent warfare among its
members.
The articles show sound judgment and as far as the settlement
of the War is concerned, great practicability. Of the proposals set
forth to insure peace, there is grave doubt whether any league of
nations can, by physical force, prevent war.
THE DESTRUCTION OF MERCHANT SHIPS. By Sir Frederick
Smith, K.C., M.P. London: J. M. Dent & Sons. $1.25 net.
This book might be called a brief. It is a valuable little volume,
written by the British Attorney-General, presenting the perplexing
question of merchant ship's status in war time. The author first
discusses enemy merchantmen, and goes into the question of visit
and search, seizure and destruction, examining the various points
in the light of former decisions on similar cases. He then considers
neutral merchantmen, and their position under the customary law.
He bases his findings on the practice that obtained in the Russo-
Japanese War, and later modified by the discussion at the Second
Hague Conference, and the Declaration of London. He. does much
to clarify this very difficult problem, and gives a comprehensive,
trustworthy basis for the many decisions that must be made at the
close of the War.
THE LILY OF ISRAEL. The Life of the Blessed Virgin. By
Abbe Gerbet. New York : P. J. Kenedy & Sons. 75 cents.
This is a revised edition of the Abbe Gerbet's well-known life
of the Blessed Virgin. It is to be regretted that the volume over-
emphasizes the legendary and apocryphal stories about the Blessed
Virgin at the expense of the Gospel records. The reader is not
warned of the legendary character of the history of St. Joachim
and St. Anne, the infancy of the Blessed Virgin, her life in
the temple, her espousals, and the details of the sojourn in Egypt.
There is certainly enough in the Gospels themselves on which to
build up the devotional life of the people without trying to incul-
cate piety on a basis of imagination and legend. The lives of Christ
by Didon, Fouard, Le Camus, Elliott and Coleridge wisely omit
altogether the data of apocryphal writings of antiquity, and teach
men to love Our Lord and His Mother by a simple presentation of
the facts of the New Testament.
1917-] NEW BOOKS 113
THE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION OF AN AMERICAN CITIZEN.
By Francis Greenwood Peabody. New York : The Macmillan
Co. $1.25.
This latest work of the well-known Plummer Professor of
Christian Morals (Emeritus) in Harvard University carries with it
all the characteristics of its author. His easy, graphic style, together
with his apt and ready allusions to current thought, makes pleasant
reading for the average man, whilst for the trained student of
Divinity his vague theological opinions cannot but provoke a certain
vexation of spirit.
In his introductory note the author tells us that the purpose of
this collection of papers and addresses is " to call attention to some
of the influences which direct and some of the qualities which mark
the religious education of an American citizen." These he proceeds
to discuss in some dozen chapters. In the first, for instance, he tells,
with some show of modern psychology, how religion should be
taught. In the main we all must agree with him, that the teacher
must adapt his teaching to the child mind. This has not, indeed,
been done always and by all ; but this has been the fault of the indi-
vidual and not of the system. Psychologists of the day have much
to say in favor of the manner in which the Catholic Church has
taught her children, instilling religion into them from infancy
through all their senses. Thus she makes of religion a real element
in life — which Mr. Peabody insists upon as the first requisite. Then
he would make it democratic, so as to accord with our national bias.
Well, the Catholic religion has ever been democratic — her charter is
to teach all nations : but as she had definite truths to teach, and as
truth makes no compromises, it is for all peoples to believe these
truths and be baptized under penalty of being condemned. Here,
as throughout the book, we find the fundamental error of Protest-
antism, i. e., it is not for God to prescribe what religion men are to
practise, but for men to let God know with what religion He must
be satisfied. This error appears again when the author insists upon
liberty of religious belief and practice. He would have " private
judgment and consent of the governed " apply to religion as well
as to politics. If this be true, why call himself a Professor of
Christian Morals, rather than Mohammedan, or any other system
that might suit his fancy.
And so, we might follow him throughout his little volume.
He says much about the dangers of home, school and university
training, which we deplore and fear as much as he. We try to
VOL. cvi. — 8
ii4 NEW BOOKS [Oct.,
offset them by fostering Christian morals in the home for parents
and children alike, by making our parochial school, our Catholic
colleges and universities consistently Christian in theory and prac-
tice. This is the remedy we approve and apply. What is being
done outside the Church? The vagueness and feebleness of the
suggestions made here by the Plummer Professor of Christian
Morals are discouraging in the extreme.
Possibly the reason why he speaks so falteringly is to be
found in his concluding chapter on " The Place of Christ in Re-
ligious Experience." In vain do we look for any definite statement
by the author as to the nature of Christ. Were he asked point
blank, " What thinkest thou of the Son of Man? " he could not be
convicted of having confessed with St. Peter : " Thou art Christ,
the Son of the Living God!" And if he wavers in this funda-
mental belief, what light or leading can be expected from him on
the momentous question of " The Religious Education of an
American Citizen?"
THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE. By Sir Bertram C. A. Windle.
St. Louis: B. Herder. $3.00 net.
The author's work of about a year ago, A Century of Scien-
tific Thought, was a note of triumphant cheer to all Christians, in
that it showed the change that progressive research, especially that
of the last twenty-five years, has brought about in the attitude of
science toward faith in revelation, the transformation of a front
almost solidly hostile to a broken line that touches at various points
all the way from the former extreme position to full acceptance of
the Catholic Faith.
The present volume, as the title implies, is addressed more ex-
clusively to Catholics, yet the appeal, though more concentrated, is
not narrowed ; on the contrary, the book is of broader scope than its
predecessor, which dealt mainly with some results of biological in-
vestigation that were too hastily believed to have conclusively shat-
tered the argument from design. Since that mid- Victorian tempest
beat futilely against the immovable Church, she has been many times
assailed with reproaches of superstition, obscurantism and dogged
resistance to the advance of knowledge. These accusations have
grown to be accepted as commonplaces among writers who have no
anti-Catholic prejudice, but will not take the trouble to verify them.
The general reader cannot but be influenced by these statements.
" If he is a good Catholic he probably makes an Act of Faith, gives
1917-] NEW BOOKS 115
a sigh, and goes his way a little discouraged as to the body to which
he belongs."
For the information and aid of all such this book was written.
It is a layman's manual, of intense interest and written with the au-
thor's accustomed force and charm. From a mass of material so
vast as to be unattainable to the average busy man, Sir Bertram has
gathered into convenient form the truth concerning the many mat-
ters upon which rests the imaginary quarrel between scientific fact
and Catholic belief. He sets forth each subject at sufficient length
to give the reader a clear idea of it, explains on what grounds the
conclusions reached were supposed to conflict with the Church's
teachings, and states what is now the position, in the light of fur-
ther research; the result being, of course, absolute vindication of the
Church's policy of deliberateness in accepting new theories, since
she has again and again seen them seized upon, dictatorially as-
serted, wrangled over, tested, disproved and abandoned. A notable
instance is the discovery of radium, by which science has been com-
pelled to discard completely the doctrine that it held firmly fifty
years ago.
The reader is made acquainted with an imposing array of
achievements of the highest order that must be credited to Catholic
scientists from the ranks of both the clergy and the laity. The con-
demnation of Galileo is handled with disarming frankness and thor-
oughness; in fact, the author pronounces it inexcusable, though he
quotes Huxley as saying in his opinion " the Pope and the College
of Cardinals had rather the best of it;" and he reminds us that
Cardinal Newman has pointed out that the case is the only one of
the kind which the enemies of the Church are able to bring against
her.
In brief, the book's message is that the advance of science
brings with it constantly increasing testimony to the impossibility of
antagonism between the Church and any form of truth; that the
fancied enmity originated in premature acceptance and proclamation
as facts of what were in reality only theories ; and that wisdom de-
crees for the scientist an attitude of humility and patience, and for
the Catholic a happy security in the knowledge that any theory that
may seem to conflict with Catholic dogma will assuredly, in the
course of time, be either proved false and cast aside, or found, when
more closely viewed, to be in accordance with the Faith.
The number of topics dealt with is too great to be listed in a
review; the space occupied is moderate, yet Sir Bertram seems to
ii6 NEW BOOKS [Oct.,
have overlooked nothing. In graciously acknowledging the sources
of the help of which he has availed himself, he gives guidance to any
reader who has time and inclination to consult the host of authors
cited. The book should be upon the shelves of every Catholic li-
brary, public and private, and should be in immediate use among
educators.
Above all it should, by every means possible, be circulated
among young men, at this time when thousands of every faith and
of none are going forth to share the life of camp and trench, and to
be subjected to tests of unprecedented severity. They will see, as
has been seen so often in France during the last three years, the
profound impression made upon non-Catholics by the marvelous
consolations effected by the sacraments of the Church. The Catholic
soldier who has familiarized himself with even a part of this work
will be competent not only to meet attacks, but to give to his com-
panion who may be lingering wistfully at the door the word of
reconciliation that will enable him to cross over the threshold into
the Household of Faith.
THE HOLY SCRIPTURES ACCORDING TO THE MASORETIC
TEXT. A New Translation. Philadelphia : The Jewish Pub-
lication Society of America.
An important event in the literary .history of the Hebrew Bible
is the publication of a new English translation by Jewish scholars
of America and England. It hardly indeed deserve? the name of a
new translation; it is based very naturally upon the Authorized
Version of King James, but while it does not wantonly abandon the
" admirable diction " of that version, it draws upon all the famous
English translations, including our own Douay, and frequently in-
troduces its own new readings. It is a new revision, rather than a
new translation, and follows in the wake of the English Revised and
the American Revised Versions. Considered scientifically as an aid
to understanding the real meaning of the original, it is very valuable
for it grasps and expresses Hebrew idioms which previously were
imperfectly or wrongly rendered, even in the two Revised Ver-
sions. It is gratifying to note that not infrequently it agrees with
our Douay version against the Authorized or Revised Versions. The
explanation, we believe, is to be found in the fact that St. Jerome,
from whom our version is derived, studied Hebrew under Jewish
rabbis and drew upon some of the same sources of learning
and tradition which the present Jewish translators have ex-
1917-] NEW BOOKS 117
ploited. This new version will tend, therefore, to heighten the
ever-rising esteem in which the Vulgate is held by the learned world ;
but what is more important, it is a very valuable contribution to the
more perfect English version which scholars and religious men of
all faiths are desiring. A Jewish version, it is typical of the objec-
tive and impartial spirit in which scholars now perform the work of
translating the inspired text; and it is an evidence that a version
might be produced which would be acceptable to men of every faith.
The Catholic objective would not be the translation of this or that
verse or phrase, though occasionally some difference might be found,
but the exclusion of certain books which we regard as inspired
and worthy of a place alongside the books received by all.
From the point of diction, the new version is to be commended
for removing some antiquated expressions, following in this the
lead of the revisers of the Douay. Occasionally, in endeavoring to
be more clear, it falls into an error of its own. This is certainly the
case with Jeremiah xx. 9:
Then there is in my heart, as it were, 9. burning fire
Shut up in my bones,
And I weary myself to hold it in,
But cannot.
This plainly says the opposite of what the prophet, and pre-
sumably the translator, intended to say; for the prophet had no
desire to hold the burning fire in his heart.
The work is one that is worthy of minute study by all who
desire an exact translation of the Hebrew text; it will, however, re-
quire a long time before its real value can be carefully appreciated,
and the concurrence of many minds.
THE STORY OF BIBLE TRANSLATIONS. By Max L. Margolis.
Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America.
The editor-in-chief of this new Jewish translation accompanies
it with a separate little volume, The Story of Bible Translations,
which relates the genesis of the new translation, and tells over again
the history of the principal translation of the Old Testament. Pro-
fessor Margolis tells his story interestingly, in an easy, flowing
style; he writes in a judicial and moderate spirit, with an evident
desire of fairness, and if he lays more stress than is usual upon the
work of Jewish scholars, it is because his little book is intended
chiefly for Jews and aims to give the Jewish point of view. This
constitutes, in fact, the chief merit of the book, which well deserves
n8 NEW BOOKS [Oct.,
to be read in connection with the more complete histories of Bible
translations. Professor Margolis appears to be unacquainted with
the claim, made by Cardinal Gasquet, of a Catholic origin for the
first translation of the Bible into English; nor does he know, ap-
parently, the influence of the Douay version upon the authorized
King James. His whole chapter on the age of the Reformation is
too much influenced by the traditional Protestant view, and should
be revised in the light of more recent studies, Protestant as well as
Catholic, of the era of the Reformation.
SOLUTION OF THE GREAT PROBLEM. By Abbe Delloue.
Translated by E. Leahy. New York: Frederick Pustet Co.
$1.25 net.
We regard this book as a very useful and important contribu-
tion to Catholic apologetics, and the translator has rendered a good
service to the cause of truth in giving this Engish version to the
public. It is introduced by a neat preface from the pen of the Rev.
George O'Neill, S.J., M.A., Professor of English Language and
Literature in the National University of Ireland.
The problem which the learned author undertakes to solve is :
What is the meaning and purpose of human life? No thought-
ful mind will deny that the problem involved in this question is of
fundamental importance, and Abbe Delloue has dealt with it, in our
opinion, very clearly and effectively in this book. In the opening
chapters he expounds lucidly the problem and the solutions offered
by the materialist, the pantheist, and the skeptic, all of which he
demonstrates to be unsatisfactory. Then he establishes the existence
of God by the use of the usual arguments, which he urges with a
simplicity and force that at once bring conviction to the mind. He
next deals with the immortality of the soul. Here again the author
is happy in his manner of marshaling the old-time arguments to
support his contention. " The Need of Revelation," " The Reli-
gious Solutions of the Problem," " The Christian Solution," " The
Christian Conception of Life," make up some of the chapters of
this able and fascinating volume. The chapter which is headed
"Where Shall All Find True Christianity?" is particularly well
written.
We have read many works on apologetics written with a more
scientific and more ambitious aim, but we do not remember to have
seen the problem under discussion handled more simply, or more
effectively, anywhere than in this book. We have no hesitation in
1917.] NEW BOOKS 119
recommending the book to our readers for their careful perusal. It
will be useful to teachers and students in our colleges, and we think
too that it ought to find a place on the shelves of every priest's li-
brary. Though the price is only a dollar and a quarter, the book, in
our opinion, is worth its weight in gold.
ON THE SLOPES OF CALVARY. A Religious Drama by Rev.
Aurelio Palmieri, D.D., O.S.A. Translated by Henry Grattan
Doyle. Philadelphia: Our Lady of Good Counsel Printing
School.
This is a devout prose drama dealing with the Passion of
Christ, and written primarily as a Lenten exercise in honor of Our
Lord and His Blessed Mother. Something of the simple dramatic
spirit of Oberammergau has found a way into its pages, although
Father Palmieri's dialogue is more theological and for most audi-
ences might require shortening. While the author acknowledges
that his intention was chiefly devotional, the play has been success-
fully performed by reverent amateurs. Its dramatic persona in-
clude the Blessed Virgin, several of the Apostles and various scrip-
tural and apocryphal characters connected with the first Holy Week.
Acting permission must be obtained from the Augustinian Fathers,
Christian Street, Philadelphia.
THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY IN BRITISH POLITICS. By
Clarence Walworth Alvord. Cleveland : The Arthur H. Clark
Co. Two volumes (maps and bibliography).
These volumes treat of the trade, the land speculation, and the
experiments on imperialism that culminated in the American Revolu-
tion. To the author of this interesting inquiry such incidents as the
Boston " Massacre " and the Boston Tea Party do not satisfactorily
account for the feeling against England and the resulting war. To
find causes commensurate to the undertaking of the colonists, Pro-
fessor Alvord has conducted his researches chiefly amongst British
sources. As the loss of the colonies was but an incident, though a
very important one, in the history of the British Empire, it is only
in England that one would be likely to find a complete explanation of
the origin of the controversy, of its development, and its culmina-
tion.
It was while discussing the disposition of the territory acquired
by the Seven Years' War that factions began to form. For the de-
ceit of France, as Gallic policy was popularly termed, some English-
120 NEW BOOKS [Oct.,
men would exact little, whereas others would demand Canada,
Louisiana, and her West Indian possessions. Though considerable
had been written about them, not much was accurately known of the
value of the late acquisitions. Canada, it was believed, might bring
a slight extension of the fur trade and yield a few fish. Of the Mis--
sissippi Valley, Englishmen seemed to know even less than they did
of Canada. Franklin, it is true, had a vision of its future importance,
and, long before its acquisition by England, Governor Dongan, of
New York, appears to have divined its worth. Did he learn some-
thing of its resources and extent while serving in the armies of
Turenne? Though one of the greatest of colonial statesmen, he is
not so much as mentioned by name in most of the popular histories
of the era of settlement.
Before the close of King George's War, 1748, there had been,
says the author, no attempt to formulate a Wrestern colonial policy
imperial in character. This was not because British statesmen in
general knew so little of the needs of colonial life, for that informa-
tion it was possible to acquire. As early as 1 72 1 , Deputy Governor
Sir William Keith, of Pennsylvania, had, in response to a request
of the Lords of Trade and Plantations, given a detailed account of
the trade as well as the trade-routes of the interior. In the same
communication he sketched in outline a policy that would enable the
English to supersede the French in the traffic with the Indians.
Among other suggestions Sir William recommended a union of the
colonies for the regulation of the fur trade. The injuries committed
on the natives he knew and deplored. The beginning of trouble was
still more than two-score years in the future.
The first volume of Dr. Alvord's work includes an excellent
sketch of Lord Shelburne from the time of his boyhood, in his native
city of Dublin, until the moment of his retirement from British pol-
itics. Great though he undoubtedly was, and in some things he was
superior to Pitt or Burke, he is not so well known as even the minor
statesmen of his day. His knowledge of America was considerable,
his sympathy with the colonies was profound. What he might have
done had he maintained his leadership in the Government belongs to
the realm of political speculation. The section which deals with
his policy is of the greatest interest.
Soon after the acquisition of New France suggestions were
made for the conversion of the Canadians to Protestantism. By the
Proclamation of 1763 the political, legal and social life of Canada
was thrown into confusion. On the theory that the disabilities of
1917.] NEW BOOKS 121
English Catholics extended to their co-religionists in Canada the
French were excluded from participation in government. English-
speaking subjects used the law courts to exploit the French. Roman
Catholic lawyers were not permitted to practise before them. A
measure of protection, however, was given the French by Governor
Murray, who took a broad view of affairs. His pen described the
imbecility and the tyranny of the conquerors during the early years
of British domination. As reported by him the Canadians had fallen
on evil times. The Governor wrote :
The improper choice and the number of the civil officers sent
over from England increased the disquietude of the colony.
Instead of men of genius and untainted morals, the reverse
were appointed to the most important offices under whom it
was impossible to communicate those impressions of the dig-
nity of government by which alone mankind can be held to-
gether in society. The judge pitched upon to conciliate the
minds of seventy-five thousand foreigners to the laws and gov-
ernment of Great Britain, was taken from a gaol, entirely ig-
norant of civil law and the language of the people. The at-
torney-general, with regard to language, was no better qualified.
The offices of the secretary of the province, register, clerk of
the council, commissary of stores and provisions, provost mar-
shal, etc., were given by patent to men of interest in England,
who let them out to the best bidders, and so little considered
the capacity of their representatives that not one of them
understood the language of the natives The heavy tasks,
and the rapacity of the English lawyers, was severely felt by
the poor Canadians.
The Government was inclined to be tolerant, but it feared the
harsh criticism of the more ardent Protestants. Mixed with senti-
ments of toleration was a vague expectation of converting the Cana-
dians. Burke's enlightened views led him to advocate their cause.
Lord Mansfield, who knew something of the disadvantages of per-
secution, was not less liberal in his opinions on religion. The Whig
ministry had feebly resolved on a measure of justice to the French,
but by the opposition of a madman, Lord Northington, their good
intentions came to naught and, after a year in office, they were driven
from power. In the colonies this event corresponded with the repeal
(1766) of the Stamp Act. The English political landscape of that
day was swept by many an adverse blast, but the most violent was
the tempest aroused by the ultra-Protestants. Their opposition to
the Quebec Act, presently to be noticed, is an enduring monument to
122 NEW BOOKS [Oct.,
their fanaticism. But before that event George III. was rehearsing
royal functions, and had just transferred his affections from Lord
Shelburne to the Duke of Grafton, a statesman immortalized by
the literary art of Junius. About January, 1768, Chatham and Shel-
burne left the ship of state to be navigated by other pilots.
" The Quebec Act," says the author, " was passed for the pur-
pose of correcting, after a lapse of almost eleven years, the wrongs
inflicted on the French-Canadians by the blunder of 1763." If one
but consider the temper of the times, the measure was bold and
statesman-like, for Englishmen of influence did not at the Restora-
tion cast aside the principles of Puritanism. They have, indeed,
long since abandoned the tenets and the jargon of the Roundheads,
but in 1774 they had not done so. Like other great Anglo-Irish
Protestants, Shelburne was tolerant in the matter of religious belief.
The first phase of British colonial policy came to an end No-
vember 5, 1768, when the treaty of Fort Stanwix was signed. By
the new compromise system the limits of the hunting grounds were
to be fixed by the empire, while the management of Indian trade was
left to the colonies. Keith had referred to the benefits of a union
of the colonies for regulating traffic. In fact, it was primarily to
promote commerce that he urged their federation. Could the fron-
tiersmen be induced to respect the boundary line without the assist-
ance of imperial officers empowered to punish trespassers? What,
under the new plan, would compensate them for the incentive to
profit by land speculation? These questions were grave and they
were seriously considered.
Before 1763 France had sought to confine the British colonists
to the eastern slope of the Alleghanies, and by reason of that attempt
brought on a war in which she lost everything. In the endeavor to
impose similar restraints on her subjects England was destined to
witness the dismemberment of her empire.
In its essence, says Doctor Alvord, the Quebec Bill was " the
product of the period of imperialistic thought and of kindly feeling
toward the colonies." Its primary purpose was to alleviate the
wrongs of the alien [French] population of the North, but that law
was made the channel for communicating a new Western policy.
The principle of toleration embodied in this celebrated law is largely
to be ascribed to Lord Mansfield, who was ably supported by Lord
North and Alexander Wedderburn. In breadth of view the states-
men of Scottish connections, so greatly disliked by Junius, appear
to advantage when compared with many of their English contem-
1917.] NEW BOOKS 123
poraries. As was always the case, Burke was found on the side of
civilization. The Earl of Chatham was not abreast of the Irish
statesman or Lord Mansfield. He feared that the measure
" might shake the confidence of His Majesty's Protestant subjects
in England and Ireland; and finally lose the hearts of all His Ma-
jesty's American subjects." But believing that it was founded on
" the clearest principles of justice and humanity," King George gave
his assent to the bill.
In the North American Colonies the Quebec Act aroused the
greatest opposition. In fact, it was one of the causes of the war for
independence. Grave and learned lawyers as well as college fresh-
men such as Alexander Hamilton, then a boy of seventeen at King's
College (now Columbia University), participated in the pamphlet
war that followed. Among many London Protestants there was
dismay, real or affected. In America the feeling was a mixture of
fear and intolerance. Meetings in considerable number were held
for the purpose of protest; clamor was advised, and generally rest-
lessness was stimulated. From the expressions of sentiment and the
resolutions of meetings one could compile an interesting anthology
illustrating the fact that on the eve of the Revolutionary War, ultra-
Protestantism was separated from frenzy by only a thin partition.
In a form better suited to an enlightened posterity the Declaration
of Independence states that the King had given his assent to acts of
pretended legislation "for abolishing the free system of English laws
in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary gov-
ernment and enlarging its boundaries, so as to render it at once an
example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule
into these colonies." This is but one of the many proofs that the reso-
lutions of the Continental Congress suffered nothing from Jeffer-
son's rhetorical skill. This declaration concerning Canada, for in-
stance, is much easier to explain than the address of Rev. Sam-
uel Langdon, President of Harvard College, delivered May 31, 1775.
Among other statements, that gentleman said: " The I9th of April,
1775, is the date of an unhappy war openly begun by the ministers
of the King of Great Britain against the good subjects of his colo-
nies and implicitly against all other colonies. But for what?
Because they have made a noble stand for their natural and consti-
tutional rights, in opposition to the machinations of wicked men who
are betraying their royal master, establishing Popery in the British
Dominions, and aiming to enslave and ruin the whole nation."
Lest perchance there should be any lack of vigor in colonial de-
124 NEW BOOKS [Oct.,
nunciations of the Quebec Act, English correspondents endeavored
to inflame the Puritan intolerance of America. The author's exami-
nation of this famous legislation could have been illustrated by ex-
cerpts from sermons as well as contemporary letters and from the
resolutions of public meetings, but he merely suggests the excite-
ment and dismisses the subject after fairly considering its larger
outlines. While it was one of the causes of the American Revolu-
tion it was not a major cause. In our country railing at Popery
has often relieved and composed the popular mind, without in the
least interfering with the ordinary course of affairs. It appears to
have been so after the passage of the Quebec Act.
A splendid bibliography and a good index complete this schol-
arly inquiry. In its extent the literature on the era of independence
is immense. Formal histories of the epoch are nearly without num-
ber. We have narratives of marches, of campaigns, and of sieges,
biographies, and diaries by many, of the participants in that event-
ful struggle. If we reflect on this preceding activity, the contribu-
tion of Mr. Alvord is remarkable. Its worth is enhanced by the use
of a clever and dignified style and by an evident purpose to confine
himself to facts.
THE LIVING PRESENT. By Gertrude Atherton. New York:
Frederick A. Stokes Co. $1.50 net.
This, the latest of Mrs. Atherton's works deals directly and at
first-hand with one phase of the stupendous War — the women of
France and the magnificent manner in which they came forward in
their country's hour of trial — and may be described as a book of
facts and theories: facts shrewdly and carefully observed and in-
terestingly set down, and theories built upon them.
The first and much larger part of the present volume, entitled
" French Women in War Time," treats of those countless relief
organizations known as " ceuvres " that have been springing up in
France since the beginning of the conflict, in response to innumer-
able and ever-growing needs. Letters and packages to the men at
the front, care of children brought in from the occupied districts, en-
tertainments to raise funds, relief of women thrown out of work or
suddenly cast on their own resources and the finding of suitable em-
ployment for them, the supply of certain delicacies necessary to the
convalescent wounded unable to eat eggs or drink milk, which are
the only two articles furnished by the Government — these are but
a few of the many activities in which French women have been
1917.] NEW BOOKS 125
called upon to engage, over and above that great body busied in
nursing, and that still larger number who have taken the places of
men in the fields, the shops, the factories and the munition works.
As with every form of organized effort, however inevitable or
smoothly running it may appear, there is behind each of these
" ceuvres " one outstanding personality, responsible either for its
initiation or continuance and usually for both ; and it is around the
personalties of these founders and organizers that Mrs. Atherton
has wisely chosen to weave her story.
To the general reader it is probable that the most interesting
portions of the book will be those affording insight into the intricate
structure of French society — wheels within wheels, sets within sets,
and a veritable terra incognita to the average American. Mrs.
Atherton sets forth clearly these hard and fast social classes — the
noblesse at the top and the industrials and peasant proprietors at
the bottom, and between these two extremes the great central mass
known as the bourgeoisie.
The last is the most exclusive and self-contained of the classes,
and it is far more difficult for a nobleman to enter their circle than
for an " intellectual " from the lower ranks to be received by the
noblesse; " its top stratum regards itself as the real aristocracy of
the Republique Franchise, the families bearing ancient titles as ana-
chronistic."
In the last five chapters of her book dealing with " Feminism
in Peace and War," Mrs. Atherton takes up the tremendous prob-
lems that will clamor for solution with the end of the present strug-
gle ; and it is here that her want of a definite spiritual philosophy, or
in fact of any philosophy, makes itself painfully evident. She speaks
indeed of men and especially women from a strictly biological view-
point, verging at times on the animalistic.
The second part of the present volume is worthless; but the
first part where the author states facts, and does not attempt to
philosophize, is interesting and even inspiring ; for it deals with the
noble manifestation of French womanhood, and " without the help
of the women France could not have remained in the field six
months."
THE POETIC YEAR OF 1916. A Critical Anthology. By Wil-
liam Stanley Braithwaite. Boston: Small, Maynard & Co.
The last half-dozen years here in America have been great
times for the poet, especially for the minor poet, and even for that
126 NEW BOOKS [Oct.,
lately discovered species, the sub-minor poet. Magazines devoted
to verse are now so common as to cause no comment, and the an-
thologies are thick about us. This, we believe, is a phenomenon of
good import, for it has served to mark the appearance of a sym-
pathetic atmosphere wherein the poet might freely unfold his wings
and pour forth the song which otherwise might have been chilled at
its source.
For the bringing about of this favorable condition none has
labored more valiantly and unselfishly than Mr. Braithwaite; and
for his really arduous toil in the service of modern American poetry
he deserves a great measure of credit and esteem. Only a man
highly enthusiastic and persevering could ever have made his way
through the mass of contemporary verse he has examined.
So much having been premised, we can with fair grace go on to
register our conviction that Mr. Braithwaite never was, and never
will be, a critic; and to say this is only to say something which we
have long felt, but have never before had so strongly brought home
to us as by the present volume. ' In this latest book of his he has
adopted a new plan for the presentation of his poets, namely, that of
conversation about them. The scheme of the book is, that four
people — two men and two women — meet once a week, usually out
of doors, to discuss the new poets they have just been reading; and
the result is a bulky volume of over four hundred pages of contem-
porary poetical criticism. Hence the present work, having a larger
share of Mr. Braithwaite's personal utterances, has merely empha-
sized and drawn out at length the bad qualities which, from the
notes to his various anthologies, we had previously known him to
possess.
Mr. Braithwaite's faults are in fact many and flagrant, rang-
ing from a disregard of grammar to a lack of definite critical prin-
ciples; but there are two that lie somewhere in between, which we
find especially irritating; one being his apparently constitutional
inclination to rhapsody — sometimes over good work, sometimes
over worthless ; and the other is his want of a sense of the meaning
and value of words. Here he is, for instance, speaking of Walter
Conrad Arensburg: "A poet of exceptional attainments. One of
the most subtle craftsmen in American poetry. A poet with a mind
alluringly symbolic. With a touch of prismatic irony. Carving and
polishing ivory and jade; chiseling marble, sardonyx and beryl."
This is Mr. Braithwaite in characteristic action, and though the
precision may wince at a mind that is called symbolic or wonder
1917.] NEW BOOKS 127
what is the nature of that irony which is prismatic, these are by no
means the worst, and he may go on to exercise his ingenuity on such
phrases and sentences as these : " Through it stream rays of vision
embodied in an art of melodic and figured phrase;" "marvelously
chiseled gems," or " the poignant essences of the flesh !"
That a writer who thus abuses words will walk frequently
astray in the region of ideas is inevitable; and therefore it is no
matter of surprise to us to find Psyche, one of the characters, speak-
ing to the following effect : " We do not break laws, we break their
restraints, and establish on their foundations higher laws towards
which we reach. It's an unalterable truth in life as well as art."
High-sounding nonsense is nonsense still, no matter how ex
cathedra the manner of its pronouncement ; and though, as we said,
we must give credit to Mr. Braithwaite for his labors, and even
wonder at his industry, it is in the character of a collector and not
that of a critic that his real value consists. A man may have suffi-
cient taste — though Mr. Braithwaite's is by no means impeccable —
to make a creditable collection of poems, and yet be incompetent to
talk well about them; and hence a bare presentation of his favorites
is much to be preferred to this latest method, where the poems are
drowned in a sea of talk. For it is talk of the most insufferable sort,
namely, that of a literary tea-party — emotional, vague, diffuse,
grandiloquent, pompously platitudinous.
SUMMER. By Edith Wharton. New York : D. Appleton & Co.
$1.50 net.
Mrs. Wharton is a serious novelist with an established reputa-
tion. She startled the reading world a few years ago with a social
study called The House of Mirth. In much of her work she has
made herself the spokesman for the " higher " social ranks. But
also she has given us such genre studies as Ethan Frame — a bit of
stark realism that seemed an actual " slice of life." In her latest
story, Summer, she has again ventured on to Thomas Hardy ground,
so to speak, endeavoring to portray life in a small section of the
country into which is focused the struggle and tragedy which char-
acterizes the whole human race. The writer who succeeds in pictur-
ing life at its fullest in a small compass, does a big thing — the big-
gest thing, in fact, that literature can boast of. But to so succeed
a universal chord must be struck. The story may be of New Eng-
land, or of Wessex, or of the Creole South : no matter what its
geography; but it must be the story of human life, in which men
128 NEW BOOKS [Oct.,
and women the world over may recognize themselves, their own
struggles, their own problems, their own resisting or yielding to
temptation, and the fruits thereof. Insofar .as the author achieves
this universal appeal, is his success to be measured. Given all the
arts of the writer, yet lacking the universal appeal, the common
touchstone of sympathy, he will fail.
Mrs. Wharton has failed in Summer. It is a wonderfully well-
written book so far as the marshaling of words and phrases goes;
yet when he is through with it, the reader inevitably asks : " What
was it all about?" Slimmer tells a very simple and a very sordid
story — the old, old story of rustic innocence betrayed. The art of
the author is revealed in her remarkable sustaining of the element
of suspense; she puts off the catastrophe with consummate skill.
This she achieves by delineating her characters in a very human
light — not highly colored, all bad or all good, but compounded of
the mixture that goes to make up common humanity. And yet, all
this is, somehow, mere art: artifice, not life. We can wonder
from the first what is to be the outcome of the meeting of Lucius
Harney and Charity Royall — but we wonder more in the spirit of
the uninitiated watching the tricks of the magician, than in the
mood of men and women beholding a palpitating life story unrolling
before our eyes. Was Charity real to Mrs. Wharton? She is not
to us : there are only one or two vague moments when we feel with
her at all. Most of the time she is but a figure, moving.
We are denied even the momentary pleasure of complete il-
lusion, and have to endure some touches that are decidedly dis-
tasteful and unpleasant. There is nothing to think over when the
book is put away. We are no richer by our experience of it. We
have been stirred only to the vaguest feeling of resentment against
Harney for his wrong doing; we are likewise stirred only to a half-
hearted pity for Charity Royall. Never once has she swept our
souls with the tenderness or compassion that would have acclaimed
her a genuine figure of tragedy. We have not been lifted up nor
taken out of ourselves. Maurice Francis Egan says: " Life has al-
ways turned to God, and literature, echoing life, has always written
the symbol of God." But in Summer there is no echo of life, no
symbol — nothing but a dead level and flatness, arid and barren.
IRecent JEvents*
It would be too much to say that the
France. " sacred union " has been dissolved, but
it cannot but be admitted that it has been
weakened by recent events in France. For the fifth time since the
commencement of the War, a change of Cabinets has taken place.
M. Vivani, the Prime Minister at the beginning of the War, was
succeeded by M. Briand. M. Briand presided over two Cabinets,
the latter being a reconstitution of his first. On his resignation
M. Ribot became Prime Minister. M. Ribot has now been forced
to resign by the refusal of the Unified Socialists to act with him.
M. Painleve, M. Ribot's Minister, was chosen by the President to
form a new Cabinet of War. This, after some difficulty, he has
succeeded in doing, retaining with the Premiership the Ministry
of War. M. Ribot retains the office of Foreign Secretary. The
recent change is due to the Socialists who took up an attitude of
firm opposition to M. Ribot for having refused to give passports
to the members of their body who had been chosen to represent
them at that Stockholm Conference which has been the occasion of
much trouble in many countries. Their refusal to cooperate in-
volves the elimination of the Unified Socialists and the much-to-be-
regretted departure from public life of M. Alfred Thomas, who has
been a most efficient Minister of Munitions. The new Ministry
with this exception is a National Ministry, containing representa-
tives of all parties. It involves also a reversion to the system of
large Cabinets, for it has no fewer than eighteen members, with
eleven Under-Secretaries. Sixteen of the Ministers have held office
in former governments, while three have been Prime Ministers.
The most noteworthy addition to the Cabinet is that of M. Barthou.
Whether the self-excluded Unified Socialists will remain quiescent
to or offer an active opposition remains to be seen.
In one respect the change of Cabinet involves no change of
policy — the determination to carry on the War. In the ministerial
declaration to the Chamber, M. Painleve reaffirmed the determina-
tion to continue it until Alsace and Lorraine should be restored to
France, as well as full reparation made for the damage done by
the Germans in the northern provinces which they have occupied.
VOL. cvi.— 9
130 RECENT EYENTS [Oct.,
Even the Socialists, who stand aloof from the Government, concur
in this policy. Their object in wishing to go to the Stockholm Con-
ference was not to bring about a premature peace, but to counter-
act the efforts of the German Socialists.
The widely-circulated assertion that France had been bled
white and was no longer able even to hold her own has been refuted
by the brilliant offensive which resulted in driving back the Ger-
mans at Verdun, and in forcing them to relinquish the most impor-
tant parts of the ground for which the Crown Prince had sacrificed
the lives of tens of thousands of his men. One after another the
bastions of that defence which the Germans won in the spring of
1916 have been regained. As worthy of note as the achievement
itself is the spirit of the soldiers of France which rendered it pos-
sible, and this shows that in them lives again the spirit of the France
which in past ages has done so many things for God — the extraor-
dinary patience of the French soldiers. "This combined with his
excellent physique, makes his mind and body so untired in spite of
the mental and bodily strain of the War that he seems today just as
full of energy and even more determined than in the first enthusiasm
of the rush into Alsace and Lorraine." Faithful Catholics may well
believe that the twenty thousand Masses daily said in the trenches
and the three thousand priests who have shed their blood for
France have had no small influence in contributing to so sublime a
result.
Russia has definitely been proclaimed a Re-
Russia, public, so far as it is in the power of the
five men who now constitute the War Com-
mittee of the Cabinet, of which M. Kerensky is the head with prac-
tically dictatorial powers. This proclamation made on the four-
teenth of September is based upon the necessity of putting an end
to the external indefiniteness of the State's organization, and finds
its sanction in the unanimous and " rapturous " approval of a Re-
public at the Conference held at Moscow in the last week of August.
Whether and how far this proclamation will be accepted by the one
hundred and eighty millions for whom it is meant to decide their
form of government, is a thing which the future course of events
will disclose. Nothing is said in the proclamation as to who is to be
the President, how he is to be elected, or what his powers are to be.
" The Russian State," the Provisional Government declares, " is to
have the Constitutional organization according to which it is to be
1917.] RECENT EVENTS 131
ruled as a republican organization." Everything beyond this is
left undefined, as are its future prospects of maintaining itself in
existence. All the powers of the State are intrusted by the Provi-
sional Government to five of its members, two of whom, including
M. Kerensky, are Social Revolutionists, while the rest are not mem-
bers of any party. The Cossacks who, on account of their discipline,
warlike spirit and special privileges, form one of the most powerful
and influential elements of the population, have taken towards the
new Government a somewhat doubtful attitude, but the even more
powerful or at least self-assertive Council of the Workmen's
and Soldiers' Delegates as well as the Committee of the Peasants'
Delegates which represents some eighty- five per cent of the popula-
tion have, by large majorities, given their approval to the proclama-
tion. Open opposition is, however, being offered by the Extreme
Radicals, Maximalists and Bolshevikis, whose demands include
the exclusion from all share in the government of the representa-
tives of the propertied classes and the abolition of all private prop-
erty. The new Government leans indeed in that direction, but is
not prepared to go to such extremes. Amid all these dangers and
transformations the resolution to continue the war remains un-
shaken. In fact, once more the Germans are being forced back,
both before Riga and in the southwestern front, but not to any
appreciable extent. Russia's safety from her enemy depends more
upon the weather than upon her own strength or steadfastness.
Perhaps German irresolution may be taken into account, the fate
of Napoleon being a warning not to venture too far into the heart
of Russia. Space does not permit more than a reference to the
events which led up to the settlement, if such it may be called,
which has now been reached.
The brief and successful offensive of General Korniloff,
who was hailed at the time as the saviour of his country and is
now in prison as a rebel and traitor on account of his want of
success in the attempt to bring order out of chaos, was followed
by the complete collapse of the Galicia offensive, owing to the
desertion of their posts by thousands of soldiers. In many cases
this took place without any pressure on the part of the Germans.
The gallantry of the officers was noteworthy. The retreat was not
stayed until the whole of Galicia had been evacuated, as well as
the Bukowina. No further advance has yet been made by the
enemy towards Odessa or into the wheat-growing province of
Bessarabia. At the other end of the line, however, an advance,
132 RECENT EVENTS [Oct.,
not so extensive, has been made, but one which has had per-
haps a greater moral influence. Riga, after a long resistance, is
now in German hands, and thereby a step, although only a short
one, has been taken towards Petrograd. The former of these
events so evidently placed the country in danger that unlimited
power was given to the Provisional Government by the Council
of Workmen's and Soldiers' Delegates, a body which is itself prac-
tically a usurper of power, and to whose malign influence must be
attributed the disorganization both of the army and of the coun-
try, and to a certain extent of the relations of Russia with her
Allies. M. Kerensky, having received this authority, proceeded
to take such measures as were in his power to bring to an end the
anarchy which threatened ruin to the Fatherland. At the State
Conference, held a short time after at Moscow, the hopes entertained
of his acting effectively did not mature, or at least were not fully
realized. As he himself sprang from the Revolutionary Socialists
and was dependent upon them for his power, he hesitated to take
the steps which the more conservative members judged to be neces-
sary. Of these General Korniloff made himself the spokesman,
and when he was not listened to he took the extreme step of re-
volting against the Government. His attempt proved abortive, and
he is now a prisoner. Thereupon a Republic was proclaimed, men-
tion of which has already been made. The prospects of its stability
are, however, by no means hopeful; still less is it to be expected
that there will be an effective carrying on of the war.
So many have been the disappointments since Russia has set
herself free from the absolute rule under which she suffered such
long-continued degradation, that the temptation is strong to regret
that the attempt to secure this freedom has ever been made. The
habits of freemen fit for self-government are not easily formed;
the chaos and anarchy which have manifested themselves since the
deposition of the Tsar seem to make this clear. Yet so rotten had
become the autocratic government of the Tsar that there was no
alternative: it fell by its own weight. A regime, under which a
wretch like Rasputin was able to control the destinies of millions,
was beyond endurance, and he was only one of the many traitors
who were acting against their own country. The collapse of Ru-
mania was long a puzzle. It is now ascertained as fairly certain
that that country was forced into the war, although it was known
not to be prepared by an ultimatum sent by the pro-German Prime
Minister of Russia, Boris Sturmer, and that through his agency
1917-] RECENT EVENTS 133
the plans of the military campaign were divulged to the German
army chiefs. This act of treachery, however, was not the first.
The Minister of War in the first stages of the conflict, General
Soukhomlinoff, is now under trial for his conducct. He is ac-
cused by witnesses of the highest integrity, such as the President
of the Duma, of a series of almost incredible crimes. He deliber-
ately kept the armies short of the ammunition of which they were
in absolute need. Two shells a day were for a considerable period
as much as some batteries were able to fire. In many instances
soldiers were sent into the field who had absolutely no arms of
any kind, and were consequently mown down by the tens of thou-
sands. Worst of all, to agents of the Kaiser he is said to have
communicated important plans of forthcoming movements. For
the honor of human nature it is to be hoped that a vindication may
be found. In these cases the Tsar himself does not seem to have
been implicated. Revelations, however, have been made that show
that he was as willing to betray his Ally as his ministers were to
betray him. Between him and the Kaiser, behind the back of his
Foreign Secretary, a secret treaty between Germany and Russia
was on the point of being made, the result of which would have
been to have placed his own ally, France, in a state of complete
subservience to Germany in the event of France not being willing
to wage war against both Germany and Russia. That the " Wil-
lies " and the " Nickies," as they style themselves, should have it
in their power to toy with the destinies of nations is soon, it is
hoped, to become a thing of the past. However discouraging the
prospects of Free Russia may be at the present moment, it cannot
fall so low as the Russia of the Tsar had fallen. Self-interest alone
will prevent her from making a separate peace with her enemy,
for such a peace would result in her becoming a German colony,
a place where Germany would help herself to foodstuffs and men
for her armies.
•
With the exception of the French successes
Italy. before Verdun nothing of special impor-
tance has been achieved except by the Ital-
ians. On a front, forty miles in length, extending from Tolmino
to the Adriatic, in a region of stupendous mountains, Italy has
advanced into Austrian territory on the way to Laibach. The
crowning victory of all has been the capture of Monte San Gabrile,
of which the slope on one side and the summit are now in Italian
134 RECENT EVENTS [Oct.,
hands. More than thirty thousand prisoners have been taken and
losses amounting to one hundred and thirty thousand inflicted upon
the enemy. Such are in broad outline the chief results of a battle
which lasted for three weeks. On account of the locality in which
the conflict took place, the strong positions held by the enemy, so
strong as to be looked upon as quite impregnable, the means taken
by General Cadorna by which he accomplished the impossible, the
battle must be considered as one of the most stupendous in history.
The Austrians have now brought up reserves, among whom there
are said to be Turks, and have in some instances made a counter-
offensive. These so far have failed.
After the reply made by the President to
Germany. the Holy Father's Peace Circular, the chief
point upon which Americans will fix their
attention, so far as the enemy is concerned, is the prospect of the
transfer of power from the ruling Hohenzollern family to the
people upon whom their rule has brought so many miseries. The
President relegated all questions of territorial restitutions to the
second place, making the primary question the formation of a
government in whose word trust can be reposed. He refused
to take even into consideration making peace with the present
rulers of Germany so long as they retain their present powers.
This demand does not, indeed, in its very terms involve the deposi-
tion of the present ruling house. If, by a change in the forms of
government, the Kaiser were brought under the real control of a
Parliament, truly representative of the German people and giving
the controlling voice to its will, the first condition demanded by the
President would be fulfilled. So great a change is, however, very
unlikely. Some few steps in that direction have been taken, or
rather promises, whatever they may be worth, have been made.
Prussia is at once the chief obstacle to reform and the dominating
State among the States which make up the Empire. The franchise
is of such a character as to place the voting power in the hands
of a small upper class. Last Easter the Kaiser, as King of Prussia,
declared that he had come to the conclusion that there was no more
room in Prussia for this class-franchise. He, therefore, ordered
the Minister-President to conclude preparations for the necessary
change in order in this way to liberate the people — a step which he
declared to be most dear to his heart. The carrying into effect of
1917-] RECENT EVENTS 135
these preparations was to be deferred until the end of the War,
which he declared to be near at hand. In the course, however, of
the political crisis which resulted in the resignation of Herr von
Bethman Hollweg, the King took a further step in the democratic
direction. As a supplement to the Easter decree he enjoined upon
the Minister-President the duty of drawing up the electoral law on a
basis of equal franchise. Moreover, the bill making this change was
to be presented early enough for the next elections, and these were
to take place according to the new franchise. Nothing is said, how-
ever, as to the time when these elections are to be held, whether
before or after the ending of the War. The second message of
the King marked a considerable advance upon the first. This, in-
deed, announced the abandonment of the three-class voting system
and proposed direct and secret voting, but did not point to the grant
of universal manhood suffrage, similar to that by which members
of the Reichstag are elected. This is the concession announced by
the second message. No effect has as yet been given to either of
these decrees. Even when full effect is given, the King of Prussia
will still be far from being under the control of his subjects, and
the President's first condition of negotiations will be a long way
from being fulfilled.
The prospect of this fulfillment must be looked for in another
direction. At least this is the more probable course of events.
The German people must have it so clearly brought home to them
that Hohenzollern rule is ruining the Empire, that they will be
ready to force submission as the one condition of their own salva-
tion. This is being steadily accomplished, although some little
time may yet elapse before the real state of the case is learned by a
sufficiently large number. Germany's losses have been calculated
with all the accuracy possible under the circumstances by the French
Military Staff, and this calculation is in almost complete agreement
with that of one of the best informed students in this country of the
military situation. Out of the eleven million two hundred thou-
sand men available for service at the beginning of the War, four
million have been permanently lost. Germany now has five mil-
lion six hundred thousand men on the line and behind the line in
necessary services. From three to three and one-half millions is
probably the number of those engaged in fighting or in immediate
reserve. About five hundred thousand are in hospitals with the
prospect of returning to the battlefield, while there are some six
hundred thousand besides, mostly boys of the class of 1920,
136 RECENT EVENTS [Oct.,
sooner or later available for service. Losses average fifty thousand
a month. Three-quarters of the reserves upon which Germany
will be able to draw for the campaign next year will consist of
boys of nineteen and under. In the event of the War being pro-
longed through 1919, Germany would be unable to bring into the
field no fresh troops older than eighteen, of the class of 1925.
France, on the other hand, has not yet called up any of the class
of 1920, or put into the fighting line any of the class of 1919.
These facts point to the gradual weakening of Germany's
military strength, for youths so young cannot rival the achieve-
ments of older men. This has been proved in the Napoleonic wars,
and, in fact, to a certain extent in the present. A more important
point, however, must be noted. The older soldiers of Germany,
so many of whom have been killed, came into the War full of
confidence in a speedy triumph, derived from their victories in
recent wars and with a morale which had been unbroken. The boys
now coming in hope for nothing more than to save the situation
and to escape defeat, and, if reliance can be placed on travelers in
Germany, imbued with a growing distrust of the wisdom of their
rulers, and with the desire for a change on account of the losses
which the people at large are sustaining. They have, in fact, be-
come politicians. This spirit may be expected to grow more and
more strong, and may in the end bring about that change which our
President desiderates as a condition of negotiation. In the last
chapter of Mr. Gerard's Four Years in Germany will be found a
valuable exposition of the political situation in Germany and of
the probability of the formation of a Liberal Party, which may ef-
fect the necessary changes in the German Constitution.
With Our Readers.
THE sound or the sight of Latin gives at once to hearer or reader
a sense of human security. It links him with his fathers. It
binds all of us, members of one race, by a common bond. It breathes
that human solidarity without a sense of which we are lost, dis-
connected, aimless and purposeless elements in unmeaning space. It
bridges the past and the future. Yesterday is not meaningless dark-
ness ; nor is the sunlight of today to fade into hopeless night. Latin
is essentially the tongue that speaks of human hope and human unity.
A too radical present will oftentimes have none of it, and therefore
it is at times banished from school and college. The only result is
that modernity loses much in forfeiting the treasures that belong to
antiquity alone, or, it would be truer to say, the treasures that are the
permanent possession of the race. It will ever remain true that no
man is well educated, not even in English literature who does not
know Latin.
To scout it is but to show oneself an inconsequent and irresponsible
child of the rebellious moment that protests because it is a part of
the hour; that is historically absurd because it denies its essential
dependence on the moment that gave it birth and the moment that will
be its child.
Consequently Latin has become and will remain the language of
that Faith which is the common inheritance from the Son of God,
the one bond that unites us all before God, the one and only road of
salvation for all humanity. That Faith binds us to God, and in God
unites us all forever — our fathers of the long centuries past, our
children of the long centuries to come.
The earthly language of the Communion of Saints is Latin. It
echoes eternity. It speaks the common spiritual aspirations of hu-
manity. It brings heaven a little nearer to earth.
IT was no source of wonder then that the Latin of the Pope's peace
appeal to the nations did of itself stir the hearts of thinking men.
It showed plainly the Holy Father's high and sole position, indepen-
dent of nations, the representative of Christ, the teacher and guide
of truths spiritual to the whole world. It reechoed clearly, so that all
might understand, that Voice of the Centuries which established peace
in Europe, which dictated the truths on which civilization is founded,
138 WITH OUR READERS [Oct.,
and which, above the turmoil of human strife, human passion, of
brute force and material aims, still dares to declare those fundamental
truths of justice and of truth upon which any peace that is endur-
ing must be founded. Thus was Latin recognized by some of the
more thoughtful journals of America, as for example by the Evening
Post of New York, as singularly appropriate for -the peace message
of the Holy Father. A further and singular evidence to Latin as the
mother language of Christian unity is furnished by The World Con-
ference on Christian Unity of Gardiner, Maine. The Conference is
composed principally of Episcopalians. All of its pamphlets have,
of course, been published in English. But to our amazement on re-
ceiving its latest publication we found it entitled De Unione Eccle-
slarum, and while the plural gave us a shock, the very use of Latin,
for the entire thirty-two pages are written in Latin, we say the very
sight of the Latin, made us feel at once that we were in touch with the
one, age-long Church of Christ. May we not hope that the longing
to use Latin may beget a desire to know the Truth of the ages and
a willingness to accept it, and thus enter into the common inheritance
of humanity, bestowed by Our Lord and Saviour.
A PROPOS of the use of Latin, it may be entertaining to recall
•t\. a passage from Hilaire Belloc's Road to Rome, which is not
the story of a conversion, but the pilgrim song of a believer on his
way to the city of the spiritual Mother of the race. The traveler
has committed the folly of starting on his day's walk without bread
or coffee. Later when he meets a man and asks for coffee, he loses
his good temper because the man refuses, and also because the man
speaks a language different from his own.
" I took him to be a heretic," says Belloc, " and went down the
road making up verses against all such and singing them loudly
through the forest that now arched over me and grew deeper as I
descended. And my first verse was :
Heretics all, whoever you be,
In Tarbes or Nimes, or over the sea,
You never shall have good words from me,
Caritas non conturbat me.
If you ask me why I put a Latin line at the end, it was because
I had to show that it was a song connected with the Universal Foun-
tain and with European culture, and with all that heresy combats."
A better mood takes possession of him, however, and he adds :
" There is no doubt, however, that if one is really doing a Catholic
1917-] WITH OUR READERS 139
work, and expressing one's attitude to the world, charity, pity and a
great sense of fear should possess one, or at least, appear. So I made
up this verse:
On childing women that are forlorn,
And men that sweat in nothing but scorn:
That is on all that ever were born,
Miserere Domine.
Then as everything ends in death, and as that is just what heretics
least like to be reminded of, I ended thus:
To my poor self on my deathbed,
And all my poor companions dead,
Because of the love I bore them,
Dona Eis Requiem."
IN thinking of the universal appeal of Latin, we are reminded of
another portion of the same book when the traveler hears a Catho-
lic congregation sing a Latin hymn. He had seen the whole village
pouring into the little church. "At this I was very much surprised,
not having been used at any time of my life to the unanimous devo-
tion of an entire population, but having always thought of the Faith
as something fighting odds, and having seen unanimity only in places
where some sham religion or other glozed over our tragedies and
excused our sins. Certainly to see all the men, women, and children
of a place taking Catholicism for granted was a new sight, and so
I put my cigar carefully down under a stone on the top of the wall
and went in with them. I then saw that what they were at was
vespers.
"All the village sang, knowing the Psalms very well, and I
noticed that their Latin was nearer German than French ; but what
was most pleasing of all was to hear from all the men and women
together that very noble good-night and salutation to God which
begins 'Te, lucis ante terminum.' My whole mind was taken up and
transfigured by this collective act, and I saw for a moment the
Catholic Church quite plain, and I remembered Europe and the cen-
turies."
* * * *
'PHIS Latin pamphlet, De Unione Ecdesiarum, contains many state-
» ments upon which it would be interesting to comment. One of
its most important admissions or statements is contained in Caput III.
" Ecclesia Episcopalis Americana." Therein we read Ecclesia Episco-
palis Americana, ab ea (Anglicana Ecclesia) tanquam surculus virens
processit. " The American Episcopal Church springs as a green
branch from the Anglican Church." Antiquity thus called upon to
HO WITH OUR READERS [Oct.,
bear witness may give testimony not to the liking of those who have
summoned her.
THE claim of those who have fathered " The World Conference " is
that they are not Protestants : that the Episcopal Church of Amer-
ica is not Protestant but Catholic. But here they admit that the
Episcopal Church of America is the child of the Anglican Church of
England, and there is no plainer historical truth than that the Anglican
Church of England was born immediately of the Protestant Reforma-
tion in England, and is officially Protestant today. Today, the King
of England at his coronation swears to maintain " the Protestant
Church as by law established," and that Church by law established
is the Anglican Church. It is unquestionable that the Anglican Church
of England was founded on a denial of that truth which is the test
of Catholic Faith, obedience and submission to the Bishop of Rome,
the Pope, as the Vicar of Christ in all matters that concern faith and.
morals.
Let us take a concrete example, prayers for the dead, belief
in purgatory, as a place of temporal suffering after death, has always
been and still is a matter of faith to every Catholic, and a cardinal
matter of faith. In other words anyone who would deny these truths
would cut himself off from the Catholic Church. The Anglican
Church officially denied these truths at its inception. In framing its
liturgy in 1552, as the London Tablet recently said, it deliberately
and advisedly excluded every vestige of prayers for the dead. What-
ever else may be said for such a proceeding this at least must be
evident to ever}7 thinking man — that by such an act the Anglican
Church broke with, protested against the teachings of the Catholic
Church which then as now was known of all the world. Consequently
and undeniably the Anglican Church is a Protestant Church. And the
Ecclesia Episcopalis Americana, even if the title is written in Latin,
is a Protestant Church also, for it springs as a green branch from the
former.
* * * *
''PHE London Tablet continues: "The exclusion is so thorough and
J- ruthless, that a man with a microscope might search the Anglican
formularies from cover to cover and find no trace of any such belief.
It is not merely that the 'Memento for the Dead' was swept out of
the Communion service, but lest by any chance the words, 'let us
pray for the whole state of Christ's Church,' should seem to include
the Church suffering, or faithful departed, the limiting words, 'mil-
itant here on .earth,' were pertinently added to them to shut out all
possibility of such an interpretation. Even in the burial service,
1917-] WITH OUR READERS 141
where it would be found, if at all, there is not a breath of interces-
sion for the soul of the Christian who is being laid to rest."
* * * *
AND the reason for this definite and drastic exclusion was that the
creators of the Anglican Church were Protestants ; they believed in
the essentially Protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone.
There was no need of any middle state after death. The soul was
justified by the merits of Christ or it was not. If it were, it merited
immediate entrance into heaven; if it were not, it had no chance of
salvation whatever and went at once to hell. It may be hard for
Protestants of today to realize or to feel any sympathy with the mind
of their forefathers who could believe and act on any such inhuman
and blasphemous doctrine as justification by faith alone. But they
should not blink the fact that upon this doctrine rested the structure
of their forefathers, and that, though much of the foundation has
crumbled, much of the superstructure still remains. Many Protestants
cannot today understand the Catholic doctrine of purgatory and pray-
ers for the dead, because their minds have never been enlightened
as to the true teaching concerning justification and the supernatural
life. That the multitude of them have rejected the doctrine of justi-
fication by faith alone which is so opposed to human reason is beyond
question. The New Testament printed by the American Bible Society,
to be distributed to the members of the Army and Navy, prints the
Epistle of James and puts in large type the caption : " Faith without
works is dead." But to this refusal to accept Luther's doctrine, must
be added a positive and definite explanation of Catholic teaching
before enlightenment, understanding and acceptance can come.
* * * *
A FURTHER indication that the elimination by the Anglican
Church of prayers for the dead was due to the belief by that
Church in justification by faith alone, is pointed out by the London
Tablet:
" In 1662 the Anglican Church proceeded to revise its liturgy.
There and then was its opportunity to introduce some intercession for
the dead if it wished to do so. For more than a hundred years
Protestantism had been in full possession, and the bulk of the popula-
tion of England belonged to the Established Church, and the genera-
tion of people who had been charged with the abuses of the Catho-
lic doctrine had long since passed away. Yet, in the work of revision,
the elimination of all intercession for the dead was by Convocation
rigidly maintained and confirmed, and that, in spite of the fact that
a suggestion for some prayer for the departed had actually been made
in the documents which the revisers had to deal. The danger of abuse
142 WITH OUR READERS [Oct.,
had disappeared: the root-reason remained. In 1662, as in 1552,
the Anglican Church would tolerate no prayer for the dead in its
liturgy."
* * * *
A PARTICULAR incident may be noted here which proves emphat-
1\ ically the accepted tradition in England. An English divisional
commander on the Western Front recently noticed that the letters
R. I. P. were written indiscriminately on the soldiers' graves. Elo-
quent testimony to a universal human prayer. But the officer ordered
that in future these letters should be written over only the graves of
soldiers who were Roman Catholics — not over those of Protestants
and non-Conformists.
* * * *
THE question is treated at some length here because when our Amer-
ican troops enter the firing line, when the casualty lists are pub-
lished in our own country and the fearful meaning of war comes
home directly to our own hearts, human nature will assert itself,
will seek the comforting word from God, of mercy and rest for those
of our beloved ones who have been taken by death. Catholic faith
leaves unanswered no worthy longing of the human heart. It com-
pletes everything that is good in nature. Christ came not to destroy
but to fulfill. A sorrowing mother instinctively asks prayers for her
dead son. And this war, if it continue, will bear one further testi-
mony, as it has borne many others already, to the necessity and the
supernatural worth of Catholic truth.
IN some paragraphs above we spoke of the worth of those lessons
learned by, and taught to us, by our fathers. Certain fundamental
" primer " truths, they might be called, and absolutely necessary at all
times for the well-being of society and of all its members. It has
been repeatedly stated that the coming world is to be a new world,
radically different from everything that has gone before. But the
conviction is now growing stronger, in the light of world events, that
as we must seek a peace, bounded upon justice, so must we return
to the truths that have an old sound but an ever fresh, living value.
* * * *
F) EADERS of the secular press of today have no doubt been sur-
lv feited with theories of education wherein all the rules of the old
school were turned upside down. These did not remain mere theories.
They were widely adopted in practice, and our country is now real-
izing how bitter are the fruits of such seeds. Education without
religion is proving not the ally, but the destroyer of democracy.
From every side, even the most unexpected quarters, we read of the
1917.] WITH OUR READERS 143
necessity of a return to old standards. The worth of Catholic educa-
tion, the training given to Catholic children, simply from the view-
point of citizenship, is becoming more apparent to those who never
before realized it, and is being preached as an ideal by many who
formerly condemned it.
The instance of the commanding officer at the training camp at
Plattsburg dismissing the Boy Scouts because they were unruly and
undisciplined and therefore useless, and the substitution of boys
trained in Catholic schools, is typical.
The conduct of the Catholic soldiers when on service at the
Mexican border; their morality, their discipline and consequently
their greater worth to the service of our country has been an en-
lightening example.
The extremes to which the youth of the country have gone in
lack of discipline, disregard for law and authority, disrespect for
parents are proving to a people who have long experimented with an
education without religion that unless something effective is done the
coming generations will be not a support but a menace to democracy.
* * * *
THE New York Times in a recent article made a strong appeal for
a more wholesome training of children; a training to which
moral responsibility and all that it entails should be brought home
to the child. The article pleaded for home discipline, home unity, the
sanctity of the family — that without these the way to national dis-
cipline, national unity and efficiency was forever closed. True democ-
racy, it said, demands discipline. Upon our children rests the per-
manency of that democracy for which we are now fighting. But the
old healthy discipline has gone by the board. The old-fashioned
habits of obedience, promptness, self-control, patience and humility
have disappeared; and with their disappearance rise the just fears
of those who love American ideals. Morality was never yet success-
fully inculcated in the minds of the young without the sanction of
religion. Is it too much to hope that the deeper realization of the
former may lead to a true sense of the necessity of the latter in the
training of children?
A LETTER.
PHILADELPHIA, August 30, 1917.
EDITOR OF THE CATHOLIC WORLD :
DEAR SIR: In reference to article in present issue of THE CATHOLIC WORLD
by Margaret B. Downing, I wish to say that it is my opinion that the city of
Washington was laid out not from the plans of L'Enfant, but the improved plan
of James E. Dermott. L'Enfant drew the first plans in 1791.
Very truly,
W. L. J. GRIFFIN.
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THE
CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. CVI. NOVEMBER, 1917. No. 632.
"SPECIAL CREATION."
BY SIR BERTRAM C. A. WINDLE, M.D., SC.D., LL.D., F.R.S., K.S.G.,
President of University College, Cork.
ROFESSOR SCOTT of Princeton has recently given
to the public in his Westbrook Lectures1 an exceed-
ingly impartial, convincing and lucid statement of
the evidence for the theory of evolution or trans-
formism. On one point of terminology a few ob-
servations may not be amiss, since there is a certain amount of con-
fusion still existing in the minds of many persons which can be and
ought to be cleared up. Throughout his book Professor Scott con-
trasts evolution with what he calls " special creation." In so doing
he is evidently in no way anxious to deny the fact that there is a
Creator and that evolution may fairly be regarded as His method
of creation. In one passage he expressly states that " acceptance of
the theory of evolution by no means excludes belief in a creative
plan."
And again, when dealing with the palseontological evidence in
favor of evolution, he points out that Cuvier and Agassiz, examining
it as it was known in their day, interpreted the facts as the carrying
out of a systematic creative plan, an interpretation which the author
claims " is not at all invalidated by the acceptance of the evolution-
*The Theory of Evolution. By William Berryman Scott. New York: The
Macmillan Co.
Copyright. 1917. THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY OF ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE
IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK.
VOL. CVI. — IO
146 "SPECIAL CREATION" [Nov.,
ary theory." He is not, we need hardly say, in any way singular
in taking up this attitude since it was held by Darwin, by Wallace,
by Huxley, and by other sturdy defenders of the doctrine of evolu-
tion.
Yet, just as at the time that Darwin's views were first made
public, many thought that they were subversive of Christianity, so,
even now, some whose acquaintance with the problem and its his-
tory is of a superficial character, are inclined when they see the
word creation, even with the qualifying adjective " special " pre-
fixed to it, used in contradistinction to evolution, to imagine that
the theory of creation, and of course of a Creator, must fall to the
ground if evolution should be proved to be the true explanation of
living things and their diversities.
It is more than a little difficult for us, living at the present
day, to understand this curious frame of mind; yet it certainly ex-
isted and existed where it might least have been expected to exist.
Nor is it quite extinct today, though it only lingers in the less in-
structed class of persons. The misconception arose from a con-
fusion between the fact and the method of creation. As to the
former no Catholic, no Christian, no theist has any kind of doubt ;
indeed there are those who would not be classified under any of
those categories who still would be prepared to admit that there must
be a First Cause as the explanation of the universe. Some of them,
whose reasoning is a little difficult to follow, seem to be content
with an immanent, blind god, a mere mainspring to the clock,
making it move, no doubt, but otherwise powerless. If we neglect
— in a mathematical sense — those who adopt the agnostic attitude;
content themselves with the formula ignoramus et ignorabimus of
Dubois Reymond, and confine their investigations to the machine
as a going machine without inquiring how it came to be a machine
or what set it to work, we shall, I think, find that most people who
have really thought out the question admit that the only reasonable
explanation of things as they are, is the postulation of a Free First
Cause, in other words an Omnipotent Creator of the universe.
Such, of course, is the teaching of the Scriptures and of the Church,
and it must be admitted that neither of them carries us very much
further in this matter. In other words, whilst both are perfectly
clear and definite about the fact of creation, neither of them has
much to say about the method. Yet, as all admit, evolution con-
cerns only the method and tells us absolutely nothing about the
cause.
1917.] "SPECIAL CREATION" 147
Being omnipotent, it is obvious that its Maker might have
created the universe in any way which seemed good to Him — for
example, all at once out of nothing just as it stands at this moment.
Such a thing would not be impossible to Omnipotence and as we
know Fallopius, suddenly confronted by the problems of fossils in
the sixteenth century, did suggest that they were created just as
they were, and that they had never been anything else.
There is nothing more sure than that the world was not created
just as it is. Reason and Scripture both teach us that, and geology
makes it quite clear that the appearance of living things upon the
earth has been successive ; that groups of living things, like the giant
saurians, which were once the dominant zoological objects, had their
day and have gone, as we may suppose, forever. A few very lowly
forms, like the lamp-shells, have persisted almost throughout the
history of life on the earth, but on the whole the picture which we
see is one of appearances, culminations and disappearances of suc-
cessive races of living things. There was a time when Trilobites,
crustaceans whose nearest living representatives are the King-Crabs,
first became features of the fauna of the earth. Then they in-
creased to such an extent as to become the most prominent feature.
Then they declined in importance, disappeared and for uncounted
ages have existed only as fossils. Thus we conclude that the
creation of species was a progressive affair just as the creation of
individuals is a successive affair, for every living thing, coming as
it does into existence by the power of the Creator, is His creation
and in a very real sense a special creation. Now we know very well
how living things come into existence today ; can we form any idea
as to how they originated in the beginning? Milton in his crude
description in Paradise Lost pictured living things as gradually ris-
ing out of and extricating themselves from the soil.
The grassy clods now calved, now half appeared
The tawny lion, pawing to get free
His hinder parts, then springs as broke from bonds,
And rampant shakes his brindled mane; the ounce,
The libbard and the tiger, as the mole
Rising, the crumbled earth above them threw
In hillocks : the swift stag from underground
Bore up his branching head : scarce from his mould
Behemoth, biggest born of earth, upheaved
His vastness.
148 "SPECIAL CREATION" [Nov.,
In this description Milton probably represented the ideas of his
day — a day penetrated with literal interpretation of the Scripture,
though it is well to recall to our minds the fact that not one word
or idea of the above is contained in the Bible. The only sugges-
tion is that the body of Adam was fashioned from the " slime of the
earth," the precise meaning of which phrase has never been defined
by the Church.
Again we have to say that the Miltonic scheme is not impos-
sible, any more than any other scheme is impossible, but we may
further say that it is more than improbable, and with every reverence
we may add that to us it does not seem to be specially consonant
with the greatness and wisdom of God. There remains the deriva-
tive form of creation, compendiously styled evolution. That this
also is a possible method of creation no one will deny, and it has been
discussed as such by many of the greatest thinkers in the history of
the Church. We can consider it, therefore, from the point of fact or
of knowledge as we now possess it, and we can do so without imag-
ining that, in so doing, we are contemplating a method which is any-
thing else but the carrying out of a creative plan, existing perfect
and complete and from all eternity in the mind of the Being Whose
conception it was and by whose fiat it came to pass. Moreover, each
form produced is a special creation since it was specially designed
to be as it is and to appear when it did just as the clockmaker in-
tends his clock to strike twelve at noon, though he can hardly be
said to make it strike at that moment. Hence to place special crea-
tion in antagonism to evolution is really to use an ambiguous phrase-
ology. No doubt, it is not easy to find the proper phraseology. Some
have employed the terms "immediate" and "mediate," to which also
a certain amount of ambiguity is attached. Perhaps " direct " and
" derivative " might convey more accurate ideas, but whatever termi-
nology we adopt, we are still safe in saying that whether God makes
thing's or makes them make themselves He is creating them and
specially creating them. This is not the place to enter into any
elaborate discussion as to the truth of the theory of evolution. Few
will be found to deny the statement that it is a theory which does
explain nature as we see it and as we learn its history in the past, but
that does not necessarily prove that it is true. St. Thomas Aquinas,
dealing with the movements of the planets, makes a very important
statement when he tells us, in so many words, that though the hy-
pothesis with which he is dealing would explain the appearances
which he was seeking to explain, that does not prove that it is the
I9I7-] "SPECIAL CREATION" 149
true explanation, since the real answer to the riddle may be one then
unknown to him. There are, however, one or two points it may be
useful to consider before we leave the question. That evolution may
occur within a class seems to be quite certain. The case of the
Porto Santo rabbits, one of many cited by Darwin or brought to
knowledge since his time, will make clear what is meant. Porto
Santo is a small island, not far from Madeira, on which a Portu-
p
guese navigator, named Zarco, let loose, somewhere about the year
1420, a doe and a recently born litter of rabbits, which we may feel
quite sure belonged to one of those domestic breeds which have all
been derived from the wild rabbit of Europe known to zoologists as
Lepus Cuniculus. The island was a favorable spot for the rabbits,
for there do not appear to have been any carnivorous beasts or birds
to harry them, nor were there other land mammals competing with
them for food ; and, as a result, we are told that they had so far in-
creased and multiplied in forty years as to be described as " innum-
erable." In four and a half centuries these rabbits had become so
different from any European rabbits that Haeckel described them as
a species apart and named it Lepus Huxlei. This rabbit was much
smaller than the European form, being described as more like a large
rat than a rabbit. Its color is very different from its European rela-
tives ; it has curious nocturnal habits ; it is exceedingly wild and un-
tameable. Most remarkable of all and most conclusive as to spe-
cific difference, Mr. Bartlett, the highly skilled head keeper of the
London Zoological Gardens, utterly failed to induce the two males
which were brought over to those gardens to associate with or to
breed with the females of various other breeds of rabbits which were
repeatedly placed with them. If the history of these Porto Santo
rabbits had been unknown to us, instead of being a matter as to
which there can be no doubt, every naturalist would at once have
accepted them as a separate species. We need not hesitate, it ap-
pears, to do so and to admit that it is a new species which has been
produced within historic times and under conditions with which we
are fully acquainted. It may, however, be argued and quite fairly
argued that such a process of evolution, though definitely proved, is
a very different thing from such an evolution as would permit of
a common ancestry for animals so far apart, for example, as a
whale and a rabbit, or perhaps even nearer in relationship as be-
tween a lion and a seal. To discuss this further would require a
dissertation on the highly involved question of species and varieties
and that is not now to be attempted. What, however, may be said
ISO "SPECIAL CREATION" [Nov.,
is that the difficulties presented by what is called phylogeny, that is
the relationships of different classes to one another, are so great as
to have led more than one man of science to proclaim his belief that
evolution has been poly — and not mono — phyletic. Such is the view
which has been enunciated by Father Wasmann, S.J., whose author-
ity on a point of this kind is paramount. It has also been upheld by
Professor Bateson, a man widely separated from the Jesuit in all
but attachment to science. Professor Bateson summed up his belief
in the text which he placed on the title-page of his first great work
on Variation: the text which proclaims that there is a flesh of men,
another of beasts, another of birds, another of fishes.
Darwin remained to the end of his life undecided between the
two views, for he allowed his original statement as to life having
been breathed into one or more forms by the Creator, to pass from
edition to edition of the Origin of Species. If the polyphyletic the-
ory be adopted, it must be said that the position of the materialist
is made far more difficult than it is at present. Let us see what
it means. On the materialistic hypothesis, and the same may be
said of the pantheistic or any other hypothesis not theistic in nature,
a certain cell came by chance to acquire the attributes of life. From
this descended plants and animals of all kinds in divergent series
till the edifice was crowned by man. I have elsewhere endeavored
to point out all that is involved in this assumption which, it must
be confessed, is a very large mouthful to swallow. Let us now con-
sider what the polyphyletic hypothesis involves. According to this
view one cell accidentally developed the attributes of vegetable life;
a further accident leads another cell to initiate the line of inverte-
brates ; another that of fishes, let us say ; another of mammals : the
number varying according to the views of the theorist on phylogeny.
Let us not forget that the cell or cells which accidentally acquired
the attributes of life, had accidentally to shape themselves from
dead materials into something of a character wholly unknown in
the inorganic world. If one seriously considers the matter it is —
so it seems to me — utterly impossible to subscribe to the accidental
theory of which the immanent god — the blind god of Bergson — is
a mere variant. One must agree with the late Lord Kelvin that
" science positively affirms creative power which (she) com-
pels us to accept as an article of belief." But what are we to say
with regard to the series of repeated accidents which the polyphy-
letic hypothesis would seem to demand? Is it really possible that
any man could bring himself to place credence in such a marvelous
1917.] THE WRITINGS OF ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS 151
series of occurrences? I once read a book on spiritualism which pur-
ported to explain the mechanical methods whereby the occurrences
of the seance were produced, and I must confess that the explana-
tions were so wonderful as almost to lead one to the conclusion that
the spiritistic theory was the simpler of the two ways of explaining
the facts. Monophyletic or polyphyletic evolution whichever, if
either, it may have been, presents no difficulty on the creation
hypothesis.
The Divine plan might have embraced either method. It is not
merely revelation but ordinary reason which shows us that the won-
derful things which we know, not to speak of the far more wonder-
ful tilings at which we can only guess, cannot possibly be explained
on any other hypothesis than that of a Free First Cause — a Creator.
THE WRITINGS OF ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS.
BY MARY T. WAGGAMAN.
SWEET lore aflame with mysteries,
Words from the core of Heaven caught,
O marvelous antimonies!
O paradoxes power-fraught!
Restraint is proved unguessed release,
Earth loss, illimitable gain;
Cold dearth, a plenitude of peace
Where ecstasy is one with pain !
Counsels which freeze and burn the soul !
Mad maxims which allure, affright,
And urge unto an endless goal —
The Heart of All— the Infinite !
THE PROPAGANDA OF PAGANISM.1
BY DUDLEY G. WOOTEN.
II.
HE Thirty Years' War, concluded in 1648, reduced all
of the Teutonic and Scandinavian countries to the
sway of the politico-religious system inaugurated by
the Reformation. England had already fallen under
the same influences by methods somewhat peculiar to
her own situation. . In Germany, for more than a century after
the Treaty of Westphalia, the conditions were dismal in the extreme.
The intrigues and rivalries of petty principalities paralyzed the
energies and aspirations of real nationality; social and religious
life was shadowed by the gloomy introspection of the new theology,
or disordered by the fanatical zeal of discordant proselytizers ; and,
despite the activities of the Renaissance in other parts of Europe,
the intellectual and artistic capacities of the people were either held
dormant or hopelessly distorted by the obscurantism of the preva-
lent propaganda. It was at this period, however, that the impress
of subjectivism, which is the soul of Protestantism, was graven
deep on the German mind and heart, developing in later times that
type of culture that is rooted in the arrogance of human reason and
has found its fruition in the autocracy of intellectual and material
pride.
Under the reign of Frederick the Great the potential su-
premacy of Prussia became apparent, although that monarch de-
spised the talents of his own subjects and fostered foreign influences
as represented by the brilliant coterie of French skeptics led by
Voltaire. But Frederick was tolerant in his religious views and
his liberality afforded a grateful relief from the narrow bigotry of
the dominant sectaries. By the latter half of the eighteenth century
the foundations of modern German literature, philosophy, science
and art were securely laid, and with them began to be evolved that
splendid machinery of military and governmental power whose per-
fection and efficiency, increasing with the subsequent years, is the
masterful marvel of our own day. As we have seen, the two es-
sential products of the Lutheran movement were the dogma of
1 Concluded from the October, 1917, CATHOLIC WORLD.
1917-] THE PROPAGANDA OF PAGANISM 153
orivate judgment in matters of faith and morals, and the doctrine
that the religion of the prince is the religion of the land ; which are
indeed complements and corollaries of each other. It is the opera-
tion of these two factors in the equation of modern civilization in all
Protestant lands that has produced existing conditions, and espe-
cially was it so in Germany. The genius of German institutions
and life, in whatever aspect they may be considered, is that of a
supreme confidence in the prowess and infallibility of man's mental
and physical resources, a sublime presumption and audacity of mere
human capability. In the course of four hundred years, the initial
dogmas of Lutheranism have so far developed their logical conse-
quences in that empire as to bring about two notable and concurrent
results. Religion, and moral truth as its necessary concomitant,
instead of being relative — a system of commands and promises
from God to man, communicated by revelation and to be accepted
without argument or proof, upon the sole testimony of the Church
— are purely subjective, a matter of man's own choosing and con-
struction, the evidences of which are to be apprehended by the
mind, examined by the reason, and approved or rejected by the
judgment of each individual. This, of course, reverses the order of
the divine plan, substituting the creature for the Creator as the
source of truth, and making religion proceed, not from the bosom
and bounty of God, but from the brain and bias of man. It is the
apotheosis of humanity and the dethronement of Deity in the moral
government of the world. Its product is the Superman, a monster
of mentality and brute force.
To accomplish the ends and ideals of such a philosophy of life,
state absolutism is a necessary and a logical postulate, and accord-
ingly it has been so ordered in the development of German na-
tionality. A vast and enveloping paternalism, benevolent in its
professions but despotic in its practice, absorbs and appropriates
every aspiration and interest of the people, to secure the maximum
of strength and efficiency with the minimum of individual distrac-
tion or dependence. The citizen must minister to the state, in all
his relations, a slave to the system that vaunts itself upon the theory
of the sovereignty of personal volition and private decision; and
the whole mechanism of social order and political administration
revolves around the common centre of imperial authority. This is
the practical realization of Schiller's maxim — -"Die Welt-Geschichte
ist das Welt-Gericht;" which is just the opposite of Bulwer-Lyt-
ton's saying: "Strike from mankind the principle of faith, and
154 THE PROPAGANDA OF PAGANISM [Nov.,
men would have no more history than a flock of sheep." It is like-
wise the triumph of four hundred years of subjective rationalism
applied to every human interest, temporal and eternal. The instru-
ments relied upon to achieve these results have been the purely
human ones of law and education — an arbitrary code of verbotens
based upon exclusively material considerations, and an artificial
curriculum of studies addressed to no higher sense than the intel-
lect. Both legislation and education have been sterilized of any
moral tone or religious meaning, to accommodate their functions
to the basic principles of the Protestant cult.2 Those who indict
the crimes of German autocracy and imperialism, civil and military,
and seek to marshal the world's forces for their destruction, should
first understand their genesis and genius.
The case of England, since the Reformation, has been different
from that of France or Germany, but the conditions and tendencies
approximate the same general conclusion. The revolt against the
Holy See and the adoption of a national religion, in the sixteenth
century, were accomplished by the fiat of the government, not by the
wish or consent of the masses of the English people. By that token,
the transition was political rather than a fundamental choice be-
tween two systems of faith and worship. National and interna-
tional prejudices soon widened the breach between the British mon-
archy and the Roman allegiance, and the hereditary traits of the
English character, emphasized by the insular position of the country
and the growing isolation and individuality of its commercial am-
bitions, speedily aroused a racial and patriotic hostility to " Popery "
and all " Papists." The intrigues and sinister aims of France and
Spain — both Catholic — and the alliances brought about by the holy
wars on the Continent, contributed to cement and embitter public
opinion against everything pertaining to the Church, the more es-
pecially as the cause of the common people against the usurpations
of the crown more than once seemed or was made to appear imper-
iled by Catholic influences. The Church of England was estab-
lished to satisfy the national conscience and to gratify a traditional
devotion to institutional forms. It has served much the same pur-
pose as the institutions of King, Lords and Commons, in the con-
stitutional fabric of the British government. Its mutilated creed
and ritual, with its genteel formalism, appealed to the taste and
*" Cult is a term which, as we value exactness, we can ill do without, seeing
how completely religion has lost its original significance." F. Hall, Modern Eng-
lish, p. 172.
1917-] THE PROPAGANDA OF PAGANISM 155
pride of the aristocracy, while they soothed the complacency of the
middle classes and awed the respect of the lower orders. To such
as still retained the devout inheritance of an attachment to the true
Faith, the new Anglican communion, despite its more than doubt-
ful origin and its wholly inadequate worship, appeased their pious
longings by the reflected glory and blessing that seemed to linger
above the barren altars of the royal religion. Meanwhile, the an-
cient bond of Christian union and authority being removed, and the
artificial rites of a secular substitute failing to enlist the serious sym-
pathies of a people naturally responsive to the deeper emotions of
real piety, the disintegrating dogmas of the New Evangel found
ready acceptance among the masses, who distrusted the sincerity of
kings and courtiers and looked askance at ceremonies reminiscent
of Rome, and therefore detestable to the stubborn prejudices of
British patriotism.
The majority of the English considered civil and individual
liberty as a birthright, and their inherited love for the subjective
pleasures of personal independence had become a racial and national
trait. To them the doctrines of Protestantism appealed with pe-
culiar attraction, under existing political conditions, and they es-
poused the new politico-religious cult with a fervor that flamed into
fanaticism, gradually fusing into a sullen fire of fierce intolerance,
that radiated the gloomy ardors of a harsh and narrow creed. It
was a temper keenly adapted to the task of persecution and singu-
larly alluring to that innate spirit of self-righteous assurance that
has ever been a characteristic of the true Briton. Also, it had un-
limited possibilities for indefinite expansion. The " right of private
judgment " ran all the phases of independentism in religion, gather-
ing fresh vigor from repression and odium, and finally issuing in
a multitude of incongruous sects whose discordant contentions and
subjective sophistries have largely neutralized their own potency for
the promotion of Christianity, and alienated many a noble spirit
from all semblance of religious belief. Three hundred years and
more of this chaotic struggle, alternating between a dismal des-
potism over intellectual and moral freedom and the waste of pious
energy in fruitless controversies about speculative absurdities
— united upon nothing but an insensate hatred of Catholicism —
caused the poet Shelley to exclaim that he had " rather be damned
with Newton and Kepler than be saved with Paley and Malthus."
The same feeling made Tennyson write, " There is more faith in
honest doubt than half the creeds;" and it led Huxley to invent
156- THE PROPAGANDA OF PAGANISM [Nov.,
the word " agnostic," to describe the last refuge of a great mind
baffled and groping for the light in a man-made darkness.
The Established Church, like many another British institution
that has outlived its purpose and usefulness, still " lags loitering on
the stage," preserved by force of ancient custom, by the traditional
conservatism of the nation, and by that attenuated thread of histor-
ical association that links it to the Mother Church. Its gentle leading
frequently draws some yearning wanderer back to the ancestral
fold. For the rest, its condition is one of monotonous pietism
or sporadic zeal, tending more and more towards the decadence of
faith and the collapse of the whole crumbling system.
Our own country presents the record and results of composite
influences, including the elements that have controlled the course of
events in the three countries just considered, with admixtures de-
rived from the various other components of our citizenship, and cer-
tain features particular to ourselves and which have been the out-
growth of our institutions and methods of life and thought. Fun-
damentally, this is a Christian country. There should be no mistake
about that. From the inception of the government, the courts, state
and federal, high and low, have uniformly held that Christianity is
a part of the common law of the land; that no other religion is
known to our laws or recognized in the social and moral constitution
of our people; that, although all religions, or the lack of any at all,
are tolerated and protected under our system, so long as they do not
violate decency or cause acts and utterances illegal or injurious to
public peace and morals, the religion of the American Republic is
that of the Christian's Bible.3 The organic law of the land does
not undertake to define, nor does it permit any department of the
government to define, what particular form of Christian faith and
worship is to be accepted as the norm of the national religious senti-
ment. The courts have simply said that our institutions and civili-
zation are based upon " broad and tolerant Christianity ;" and it
necessarily must be assumed that this means the kind of Christianity
that bears the stamp of divine approval and can furnish the proofs
of historic authenticity and authority. It would seem, therefore,
that one of the highest duties of true Americanism should be to
find out and to follow the teachings of that Christian body that
possesses these credentials. From what has been said, it is clear
*Holy Trinity Church v. United States, 143 U. S., 472 ; Vidal v. Girard, a How.,
198 (42 U. S.) ; Updegraph v. Com., n Serg. & R., 394; Com. v. Kneeland, 20
Pick., 218; Chancellor Kent in People v. Ruggles, 8 Johns., 289.
I9J7-] THE PROPAGANDA OF PAGANISM 157
that neither Protestantism nor Catholicism can claim the recognition
of our laws and constitutions, but at the time of the original settle-
ments the former was established and enforced as the state religion
in all but one of the thirteen Colonies. The exception was the Cath-
olic colony of Maryland, where universal religious freedom and tol-
eration were guaranteed. All of the Protestant colonies compelled
conformity to the religious creed and worship of the dominant ma-
jority, not only against Catholics but dissenting Protestants as well.
This was in accord with the dogma that the religion of the ruler
shall be the religion of the land. But the wise and liberal statesmen
who secured American independence and framed the institutions of
republican freedom, expressly repudiated that historic tenet of
Lutheranism, and fixed the permanent policy of our government by
prohibiting forever religious tests and discriminations or the estab-
lishment and maintenance of state churches of any kind. The legal
and constitutional safeguards of religious liberty and freedom of
conscience, so proudly acclaimed by all Americans, are perpetual
memorials of the fact that proscription and persecution were the
earliest and exclusive fruits of Protestant bigotry in the United
States; and it should be remembered that several of the states re-
tained and enforced the most rigid penal statutes against Catholics
for years after the formation of the Union.
It must be conceded, however, that historically and by the rule
of majorities, this has been and is today a Protestant country. Its
prevalent religious sentiment is of that sect ; the ruling classes every-
where and in all those departments of activity and influence that
give color and tone to the life and opinions of the people have been
under the control of that element; great care has been taken by
those who shape the culture and prescribe the studies in the public
educational institutions to inculcate the Protestant view of history
and humanity and to teach no substantial fact favorable to any other
Christian body of believers. This can be demonstrated by a casual
examination of the textbooks used. In a considerable part of the
Union to be a Catholic is equivalent to disqualification for office,
and in all sections the participation by Catholics in political affairs
is regarded with suspicion and disfavor. The influence of the
Church and of her splendid membership has been and is a tremen-
dous force for good and for all that is stable, safe and sound in the
social, domestic and public character of the nation ; but it is a minor-
ity influence, discountenanced and discredited by every hostile de-
vice and discrimination that bigotry, ignorance, fanaticism and
158 THE PROPAGANDA OF PAGANISM [Nov.,
falsehood can invoke, while all the vile and destructive agencies
of atheism, anarchy and rabid iconoclasm are welcomed apparently
as valued allies in the war of hate and proscription. These easily
obvious conditions are mentioned here, not for purposes of recrimi-
nation, nor even by way of protest, but to emphasize and enforce
the outstanding truth about American religion, morals, politics and
social relations, namely, that, if there be any blemishes in the na-
tional character, or any stains upon the national virtue, or any
signs of disintegration, decay and degeneracy in the ideals and in-
stitutions of the Republic, the sole responsibility rests upon the
Protestant majority that has dominated the religious field, dictated
the social conventions and monopolized the political functions of
the American commonwealth since its history began. Nor can this
enormous liability be offset or liquidated by pleading the value of
the country's material assets or its intellectual trophies. These have
no logical or necessary relevancy to the issue. It is a fact familiar
to every student of sociology and philosophy of history, that wealth,
luxury, power, the brilliant products of intellectual genius and the
highest perfection of social and political organization are entirely
compatible with the grossest corruption of morals, the deepest deg-
radation of civic ideals, the complete loss of religious faith and
the worst abuses of political absolutism. The most splendid periods
of material prosperity and mental achievement have often been
those of the lowest standards of public and private virtue and the
heaviest burdens of governmental exaction. It is the merest folly
of national egotism — a delusion of visionary vanity — to imagine
that this age or these people are exempt from the same influences
or superior to the same deteriorating agencies that have operated in
other lands and distant times. There is profound truth and a prac-
tical philosophy in the soliloquy of Byron's gloomy hero, as he gazed
upon the mournful ruins of classic greatness —
There is the moral of all human tales :
'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past.
First freedom, then glory — when that fails,
Wealth, vice, corruption, barbarism at last,
And History, with all her volumes vast,
Hath but one page.
The complete emancipation of mind and conscience from all
superior authority and artificial restraints, which is at once a virtue
and a hazard of a democracy like ours, has permitted the peculiar
1917-] THE PROPAGANDA OF PAGANISM 159
implication of Protestantism to have full sway and abundant fruition
in the United States; and the intensiveness of the American spirit,
in whatever direction its energies are displayed, has wrought start-
ling results with amazing rapidity. No other era in any other
country in the world has witnessed such activity and achievement in
so short a time, unless it was the age of Pericles, and that was an
age distinctively preeminent for intellectual and artistic brilliancy —
its triumphs were essentially those of man's nobler faculties. It is
significant, too, that the fires of Grecian genius, stimulated by the
" fierce democracy " of that period, burned themselves out in the
short space of sixty years. Pretermitting what may be called the
heroic age of the Republic, whose teachings are now for the most
part falling into desuetude or are regarded with indifference, the
aspirations and accomplishments of our national life during the
later decades have become almost wholly material and more or less
SDrdid. The accumulation of wealth, the conservation or develop-
ment of physical resources, the ingenuity and enterprises of inven-
tion, discovery and applied science, the adaptation of a vast system
of state education to the cultivation of acquisitiveness and the per-
fection of industrial organization — these in the main are the motive
and the measure of our present-day civilization. We are deifying,
not the Superman, but the Economic man, which, for all moral and
spiritual purposes, is the same thing. Like symptoms are prevalent
in all the leading Protestant nations, but their pernicious effects are
more violent and distressing here, because we live faster and more
furiously and are less restrained by traditional conservatism and in-
stitutional safeguards than the people of older lands.
With characteristic assurance and audacity, we have been en-
gaged for some years in the making of a nation that shall be un-
surpassed in its physical and mental capacity and efficiency for dom-
inance, and we are confident in the belief that this can be done by
the exaltation of merely human virtues and the mastery of the -ma-
terial world. Meantime, we have been losing steadily and not
slowly the virtues that make for botli national and individual sanity,
strength and security. It is remarkable and not gratifying to
thoughtful minds to note the distinct absence of reverence for ul-
timate truth and a pious recognition of the supreme rulership of
God in the utterances of our public men. A comparison of the offi-
cial records of the first three-quarters of a century of our history as
a nation with those of the past twenty years, and particularly the
past ten years, discloses a painful decadence in the spirit and send-
160 THE PROPAGANDA OF PAGANISM [Nov.,
ment of religious faith among the statesmen whose voice is pre-
sumably the voice of the people in their corporate sovereignty.
Judged by all outward expressions and by the general tone of politi-
cal and social discussions, official and otherwise, the American gov-
ernment has ceased to stand for any kind of faith, except belief in
itself and in the divinity of some sort of destiny that is able to set
at defiance the precepts of its founders and to ignore the lessons of
all other lands and all other times. Social consciousness, civic wel-
fare, economic justice, service to humanity, universal democracy,
the brotherhood of man, the gospel of service — these are the pet
phrases of the new deliverance; but in all the cant and jargon of this
current philosophy, the mind and soul are called to contemplate
no higher source of authority, no more reliable test of fundamental
truth, than the subjective standards erected by human reason and to
be enforced by human agencies. By taking thought we are to add to
our stature the perfect proportions of a manhood that makes civili-
zation in its own image. One of the most brilliant of the young
apostles of this new cult of Humanism has said that it " has no
quarrel with the previous civilizations; they were necessary in the
development of man. But their purpose is fulfilled, and they may
as well pass, leaving man to build a new and higher civilization that
will exposit itself in terms of love, service and brotherhood. We
know how gods were made ; comes now the time to make the world."
This is a bold and candid expression of the motive and purpose of
that militant element whose desolating influence upon American life
and institutions can be seen in many manifestations of the times. It
is the culminating coalescence of Rousseau's atheistical democracy
and Comte's altruistic positivism — the Infallibility of the People
dedicated to the service of the Great Being of Social Organism.
There are in it and its implications no element of divinity, no prom-
ise of permanent progress, no hope beyond the frail and variable
standards which man, in his selfishness and cupidity, may erect at
the bidding of the multitude.
An inevitable effect of this theory of social and political evolu-
tion is the overthrow of constitutional government, whose necessary
predicate is the existence of fundamental principles and permanent
rules for the organization and functioning of civil authority; and
accordingly we find that the practical application of the theory is
rapidly destroying all idea of durability or continuity in the basic
institutions of social and political order. Having repudiated the
divine source of real justice, truth and righteousness, and com-
1917-] THE PROPAGANDA OF PAGANISM 161
mitted the destiny of mankind to the vague and vagrant arbitra-
ments of human judgment, there is no longer any stable foundation
for a constitution that shall restrain alike the absolutism of the
one and the despotism of the many. Absolutism in any form,
whether of the majority or of an oligarchy or of a tyrant, is abhor-
rent to the idea of constitutional government, and the unrestricted
power of the multitude is of all forms of absolutism the most intol-
erable and immoral. To supplant the lost value and virtue of safe,
sane and stable organic law, the new school of reformers rely, as
have the Prussian absolutists, upon education and law to furnish
the necessary factors of regulation and enlightenment ; but since the
system of state education is avowedly without moral and religious
meaning, and addressed solely to the material and intellectual in-
terests of society, and the legislation of the day is merely a collection
of arbitrary commands and inhibitions, framed to meet isolated con-
tingencies, the whole structure of social regulation is without any
sustaining strength of living, abiding, ultimate purpose. Culture is
merely the expression of current tastes and sentiments; law is a
" wilderness of single instances," without informing motive or en-
during wisdom; and government itself is a " rope of sand," dissolu-
ble at the caprice or the self-interest of whatever faction may for
the time being muster a popular majority. Constitutionalism — that
principle of social and political organization which postulates gov-
ernment and law upon fixed and immutable rules and methods of
action — be it remembered, is distinctively mediaeval in its origin and
application. Like so many other of the most valuable things in the
life of the world, it was the product of the Christian conception of
government as advocated and adopted by the Church of the Middle
Ages. It never existed among the ancient nations, and its modern
development has been one of the characteristic blessings of Catholic
Christianity.4 It is, therefore, entirely logical that the decay of
Christian ideals and the loss of religious integrity should involve
the impairment of constitutional authority and the gradual disin-
tegration of constitutional forms.
It would be a dismal task of supererogation to discuss at length
the moral deterioration consequent upon these teachings and ten-
*Lord Acton's History of Freedom and Other Essays: I. "History of Freedom
in Antiquity," II. " History of Freedom in Christianity," passim. Lectures on Mod-
ern History, by same author: I. "Beginning of the Modern State," pp. 31, 32.
Freeman's Historical Essays, iv., 253. McCabe's Crises in the History of the
Papacy, chapters on Gregory VII. and Hadrian I. Nevin, Mercersburg Review,
iv., 48. Lecky, The Value of History, 21. Harrison, The Meaning of History.
VOL. CVI. — II
162 THE PROPAGANDA OF PAGANISM [Nov.,
dencies. It is too palpable to escape notice or to evade disapproba-
tion among right-minded men. The sanctities and obligations of
domestic life are openly questioned and shamelessly abused. The
very decencies of normal existence are disregarded and the primitive
proprieties of humanity are scandalized by a publicity that shrinks
from no obscenity. The literature, drama and art most in vogue are
either psychopathic or pornographic, with violent variations into the
realms of forbidden lusts and the primal passions of savagery. And
it is all excused in the name of a moral code that proclaims man's
and woman's right to live the life God gave them according to each
one's conception of the truth. It bespeaks the debasement of
A race that binds
Its body in chains and calls them Liberty,
And calls each fresh link Progress.
The genesis of this pitiable phantasmagoria of human weak-
ness and folly is not far to seek. Years ago, in one of his admirable
sermons, Newman pointed out with great force and clearness the
essential nature of faith, and the fundamental fact that " it is a state
of mind, a particular mode of thinking and acting, which is exer-
cised, always indeed towards God, but in various ways."5 So re-
garded, the faculty of faith is a spiritual sense, and it apprehends
those truths that lie beyond the physical and intellectual perceptions
of humanity, no matter to what department of human interests they
relate. Primarily this faculty is exercised more especially with
reference to religious truth, but it equally takes cognizance of truth
in any or all of the concerns that affect man's relations and obliga-
tions as a social being and as a moral agent in this world. One of
the distinctive attributes of this sense of the soul is that if it is lost
or impaired in its primary function of apprehending spiritual truth,
it undergoes destruction or loss of sensibility as to all minor and
subordinate interests ; and once lost or seriously diminished, it leaves
man a mutilated and morbid creature, incapable of fulfilling his
highest and holiest destiny in this life, as well as in the next. With-
out faith men are as maimed in soul as they would be in mind by the
loss of memory, or in body by the loss of sight. And another qual-
ity of this supreme faculty is that, if it is subordinated to any lower
faculty of man's nature, if its exercise is made to depend upon the
volition or the mental apprehensions of humanity, it is fatally im-
"' Faith and Private Judgment," Discourses, p. 192
1917-] THE PROPAGANDA OF PAGANISM 163
paired and eventually extinguished. Newman did not follow the
arguments to these lengths, but once the premise is established — and
it cannot be denied — the conclusions are inevitable, and moreover
they are demonstrable by all the facts of history. It was the recog-
nition of these principles that led Washington to admonish his coun-
trymen that religion and morality are the indispensable supports
of political prosperity; that they are essential to true patriotism;
that morality cannot be maintained without religion; and that edu-
cation of the intellectual faculties, to the exclusion of religious train-
ing, cannot beget or sustain morality. Viscount Morley has ex-
pressed the same idea when he wrote : " Those who would treat
politics and morality apart, will never understand the one or the
other."
Transmitted to the Western world, the doctrines of Luther and
his associate reformers have here enjoyed immunity from any re-
straint of the traditions and institutions connected with Christianity
in that elder day when the One, Catholic and Apostolic Church was
the sole ruler of men's consciences in faith and morals. The results
to religion are best described by a Methodist clergyman, who speaks
with the authority of an official statistician : "We scarcely appreciate
our advantages. Our citizens are free to choose a residence in any
one of fifty states and territories, and to move from one to another
as often as they have a mind to. There is a wider range for choice
and change in religion. One may be a pagan, a Jew or a Christian,
or each in turn. If a Christian, he may be six kinds of an Ad-
ventist, twelve kinds of a Mennonite or Presbyterian, thirteen kinds
of a Baptist, sixteen kinds of a Lutheran, or seventeen kinds of a
Methodist. He may be a member of anyone of one hundred and
forty-three denominations, or of all in succession. If none of these
suits him, he still has a choice among one hundred and fifty separate
and independent congregations, which have no denominational
name, creed or connection."6
There could be but one end to such a chaos in the realm of re-
ligious faith — the end of faith itself, and with it the loss of the
sense of the soul that enables men to discern and embrace the funda-
mental truths of morals, politics, social science and every other sub-
ject that admits of belief and requires conviction. Under such in-
fluences it cannot be surprising that those who profess the exposi-
tion of Christian doctrine and are actually engaged in Biblical in-
*The Religious Forces of the United States, by Rev. H. K. Carroll, late Gov-
ernment Expert in charge of the Religious Statistics of the Eleventh Census.
1 64 THE PROPAGANDA OF PAGANISM [Nov.,
struction, should solemnly declare that our conception of God and
our views of His nature and government must be revised to suit the
current of modern thought — that religion, like the natural sciences
and the experimental studies, must change with man's advancement
and the enlargement of human ideals.7 Yet none of these reverend
critics of divine truth would attempt to revise the theorems of Eu-
clid or to modernize the law of gravitation.
Christianity, as represented by the ablest of its Protestant ad-
vocates, is today in this country little more than a sentiment, a sys-
tem of social service, of ethical philosophy, of philanthropic enter-
prise; and in more than one instance its " divine philosophy " has
indeed become " procuress to the lords of hell." Its professions of
humanitarian service and sacrifice are no longer illumined by the
radiance of faith in the mysteries of the Godhead or in the authority
and authenticity of revealed truth. Its sacred symbols have been
transmuted into mere types of earthly virtues. The president of a
great American university, once the citadel of orthodox Presbyter-
ianism, very recently disclosed the barrenness of Protestant concep-
tions of heroic thought and noble deeds when he said : " The cross,
whether worn as a decoration upon the breast, or marking the dust
of the noble dead, is today the sacred symbol of the world. It is
the symbol of honor, because it is the symbol of sacrifice. The way
of honor in this day of darkness and confusion is the way of sacri-
fice.8 That is the conclusion of the whole matter, as Protestantism
views it. The cross — not the Crucifix; sacrifice — not the Sacri-
fice; human honor — not holy humility; faith — not the Faith deliv-
ered to the saints, without which there can be no real faith in any-
thing, sacred or profane.
It is not the finger of pessimism that points out these plain and
unpalatable facts in the history of our times. It is rather the organ-
ized propaganda of a real and potential pessimism that has made
them possible — a pessimism that preaches the gospel of irreverence
and dishonors the noblest monuments of piety and patriotism that
mark the annals of the race; that storms with impious audacity the
bulwarks of the world's ancient trust in truths upon which change
lays not its hand and time leaves no impress ; that sears man's spirit-
i
1 Religion and Bergson, by Lucius H. Miller, Assistant Professor of Biblical
Instruction, Princeton University ; The Stewardship of Faith, by Rev. K. Lake
(Lowell Lectures, 1913-14).
* Baccalaureate Address of President John Grier Hibben, Princeton University,
delivered at Commencement, June 16, 1917.
1917.3 THE PROPAGANDA OF PAGANISM 165
ual vision and mutilates his divinity, and condemns the human soul
to wander in despair, sightless to the beauties of holiness in this life
and of happiness in the life beyond the tomb. But there is an anti-
dote for the disease of this modern iconoclasm — a panacea for the
ills of a paganism that is worse than the mythical monstrosities of
the past. It will be found in the perdurable promise that is the
corner-stone of the age-old and indestructible edifice of Catholic
Christianity. The Church will never change or compromise her
dogmas, and she cannot die. She has " never sold the truth to serve
the hour." She stands for the only democracy that deserves to live
or that is safe for a waiting world — the constitutional democracy
that founds freedom on authority and liberty on discipline, and
scorns the rule of the mob, " fantastic, fickle, fierce and vain." She
clothes with a sacrosanct security the felicities and purposes of do-
mestic life, and guards with flaming sword the Christian home as
the source of social order and the citadel of enduring civilization.
Her Faith is the one immutable thing in a universe of ceaseless
mutations. Her voice is the Voice of her Founder, and her conso-
lations shall yet be the balm for the healing of the nations.
THE RETREAT OF THE AMERICAN NOVEL.
BY GEORGE NAUMAN SHUSTER.
R. CHESTERTON has said that the novel is " a crea-
tion of the mystical idea of charity," which implies
first of all that the novelist is not the devotee of a
sovereign creed or doctrine, but rather the interpreter
of such matters from the common existence. All the-
ories find their truest value in dramatic possibility. Aristotle's
Politics and Kant's Critique taken by themselves are frail and unim-
portant, but acted out or given even a potential reality, they become
startling and stupendous as daylight. A near-sighted professor
writing philosophy in his barred cell often seems fatuous, but the
same principles applied in living, rend the thoroughfares of the
world. Now the novelist is privileged to deal with ideas after they
have been clothed with this virile being; he is concerned with a Jean
Christophe whom Europe has tossed about, and an Oliver Twist who
has been whipped by a brutal charities system. In short he is a
market-place philosopher syllogizing in flesh and blood. But the
definition has also another side. Our novelist himself is the creature
of tolerance, often great and hearty enough to be overwhelming.
His existence is commensurate with a demand. Double-deckers are
children of leisure, and Thackeray might have made shoes, had not
the people been keenly concerned with his response to the question-
points in life. Unspeculative enough to cherish no fondness for
metaphysics, they were yet eager for the same ideas in coat and
trousers. Colonel Newcome and the " magnanimous man " are
quite identical, and Quilp could not be distinguished from sin. We
know that character is always contingent on belief. Men are not
formed by any such broad agency as " life," but frequently they do
become the crystals of an epigram. Thus the novel is veritably the
creation of charity, being found in the hearts of men and gathered
again by the hearts of men. It is an endless game of ball between
the outposts of experience.
The modern interplay has been qualified by many things, but
perhaps most impressively by the seriousness it has assumed. When
Dumas or Fielding told a story, they made it as rollicky, as exciting
1917-] THE RETREAT OF THE AMERICAN NOVEL 167
and even as lewd as possible. The author liked that and so did his
readers. It held for them the wine of life, was a sort of tavern-gos-
sip that could be continued quietly for one's self. Then the ladies
commenced reading and we got an endless tale of love. Because
undying affection was the most fascinating matter in the world,
hero and heroine were led through steeplechase after steeplechase,
till they entered the land where everybody lives happily. Scott car-
ried this high romance into history and it has remained, the Castle
of Utranto transported it to nowhere, and it has resided there ever
since. But for various reasons things changed with the nineteenth
century. Dickens brought the ideals down into the streets and
mingled them with ideas. Victor Hugo discovered humanitarianism,
and actually created a vast and unsteady philosophy. Since then
the novel has been as much a creature of theory as of narrative ; it
has championed social impulses and concerned itself with the insti-
tutions. Could the novelist alone have thus transformed' the
medium of his art? Hardly. But the leisure of the people had
grown uneasy. They wanted visions to soothe the soul as well as
the emotions. At any rate they craved a sedative for the everlast-
ing longing that was in them.
Today this demand is almost hectic. Everything has suddenly
become very vital. Love is no longer a dream but a sex-problem.
The laboring man is not Joe of Great Expectations but a very
passionate prophet whom one meets in such books as the Harbor.
Yesterday Mrs. Deland related that there was a benign old Dr.
Lavendar, but he seems to have been swallowed up completely by the
iconoclastic Hodder of Churchill's Inside of the Cup. The Euro-
pean " Time- Spirit " has been particularly strenuous. There is Mr.
Hardy with every creature a study in pessimistic ebony ; Mr. Suder-
man with every figure a fagot of gleaming passion; Paul Bourget
with a constant analysis of institutions, and Monsignor Benson with
a continuous logic of faith. For a multitude of writers the novel
has become a laboratory wherein the muscles of human desuetude
are made to quiver out their causes. The spirit of belles lettres has
turned scientific. Naturally we in America have caught this seri-
ous fever rather recently, having just arrived in the modern world
from pioneer seclusion. But in the past ten years we have made up
for much lost time. Huckleberry Finn has been dressed up as
The Mysterious Stranger, Mr. Churchill has become an iconoclast,
and even Mr. Tarkington, most old-fashioned American of us all,
has written The Turmoil. We get a dozen new problems every day.
168 THE RETREAT OF THE AMERICAN NOVEL [Nov.,
Here is the novel which is going to end the war, and lo ! there is one
to inspire the most gory patriotic fervor. One woman describes
the process of making the Old Lady new and another informs us
how to keep the New Lady old. We have asked so many questions
of matrimony that we are actually getting bored with the answers.
In a thousand volumes the soul of man is being molded into heroism
so rapidly that it reeks with the strange, white heat of the forging.
The discourse is unremittingly hortatory, and the gentle week-day
preachers of Thackeray have become venomous indeed.
All this indicates how eager we are for truth, or at least pallia-
tives, for matters that distress us. The springs of this passion are,
however, somewhat difficult to trace. Is it that men of today are
radically different from those of yesterday? Not if literature is
honest. Take, for instance, the illuminative example of Cooper, who
is discussed so frequently. His love-passages are heavy with false
sentiment ; his heroines everything that goes to make up the " cling-
ing vine." These gentle females are always fainting, everlastingly
shrieking, consistently quivering. They are hot only in love but
never out of it. For a certain type of modern reformer they furnish
excellent effigies, assuming that the originals ever existed. Yet it is
plain that Cooper in drawing them was not the conscious artist but
merely the respecter of literary tradition. He lived at a time when
the idea of woman was etherealized in a chivalric dream, which
never becoming actual, yet had decided poetic advantages. Cooper's
professed heroes are just as insipid as his heroines, and leave one
full of unmingled gratitude for not having been born on the exalted
plane. But let him get away from the air-castles of fashion and
there is Leather stocking and the Captain of the Red Rover, bearded
gentlemen who could be picked out of a crowd even today. In the
Spy he also discovers a real woman, and Betsy, the camp-follower,
with her humor and curious system of commercial morals, might be
selling apples around the corner. The world of Cooper's time was
probably as poorly stocked with his heroines as is our own, but it
seems to have held a great many real people. One might go on to
say that the women of the Civil War were about the same as those
of our own, and that Mrs. Wilson is apt to be a facsimile of Mrs.
Lincoln. In all the primal moments of existence, particularly in
those ghastly ones now grown so vivid, we undergo the same emo-
tions as our grandfathers did. There are still eager persons with
dreams. On the other hand, Mr. Masters has shown that dead vil-
lagers could sin as efficiently as the city people who fall under Mr.
1917.] THE RETREAT OF THE AMERICAN NOVEL 169
Dreiser's observation. It will be a thrilling day when the twentieth
century discovers that it is human.
If, then, Adam fails to account for the novelist's changed
mood, it may possibly be explained by environment. We do live
in a new age. Ant-hills, crowded, restless, abnormally putrid, have
sprung up in the green grass. There is a great deal of coal-smoke,
structural iron, and Edison. The immemorial haunts of man, the
brooding forests and the talking streams are curios we visit for a
week or two in summer. Harsh, mechanical noises have replaced
the songs of labor, and barefoot boys are scarce. Men have been
partially stunned by the nerve-racking conditions of modern labor,
and women have lost control of the stove. Most vital matter of all,
is the relation of the masses dependent solely on a wage, to the mas-
ters who control that wage. Gentlemen are neither so healthy nor
so jolly as they used to be, and we are continually worried about
their wives. But after all, people have lived in close quarters be-
fore, and health inspection has been worse. History is rich in vast
labor movements, suffragettes and buildings. There have always
been a great many wealthy men and considerably more poor ones.
Travel has been intensified, but no permanent human need is filled
by travel. We have great economic and political problems to face,
unprecedented exploits to carry out, and a thousand novel ways of
making a living. But finally it is the same old problem of making
a living, and of adjusting one's self to environment. The pioneers
did the same thing with much less fuss. Every human being that
has risen from slumber since the first day, has warmed his fingers
at an alien sun.
When everything that can be said for environment has been
emphasized, the causes of modern unrest remain unestablished. Our
trouble is deeper than business or riding on cars. The novelists
agree that the quest of happiness is in danger, that men are being
remade on the anvils of new philosophies and that Quilp does not
quite stand for sin. Human nature is not an answer now, but a
question. Love was a dream so long as fulfillment was expected;
it became a problem when there seemed no destiny. In the form of
a prologue, labor can appear quite comic, but seen as the denoue-
ment, it is sombre, stark and abysmal. The intensity of our new
life is literally its depth. We have fallen and it is not quite cer-
tain where we are. There is a harrowing eagerness for straws. In
the old tragedy like that of Shakespeare, death was an answer to
the riddle of existence. Hamlet died, and it seemed to make all
170 THE RETREAT OF THE AMERICAN NOVEL [Nov.,
things well. There was sanctity in the final sleep of Cordelia, and
grim justice in the downfall of lago. Life was only the first act,
sad or foolish, but ending always in a round full release. More
modern times brought Ibsen for whom death too was the end, but
not the solution. His heroines and villains die, but the question in-
stead of being answered is merely dropped like lead. Some people
have found veracity in this, but scant satisfaction. And so the mod-
ern novel has come to ask that life be both enigma and solution.
We demand that dreams be fulfilled on the very next morning and
that heroes and heroines face no "after " in their happy living. We
either do this or deny any reply, which is very galling and unpopu-
lar. For our star is success. " The incentive to efficiency," says
Walter Lippman, " is not alone love of competent work, but a desire
to get greater social values out of human life the genuine hope
is to substitute for terror and weakness a frank and open worldli-
ness, a love of mortal things in the discipline of science." That is
the modern credo.
Let us see how some of our later novelists make it human. It
is perhaps useful to note that prominent American writers, as a rule,
spring from conservative stock. Their parents were the sort of
people whose associations were very select, and it took all the irre-
sistible pressure of modern throngs to make them realize that the
world is inhabited. When such novelists treat of things as they
were fifty years ago, when everything was calm and secure, their
books are pleasant reading. The Pleasant Ways of St. Medard, for
instance, is a story treating of the extremely tumultuous period of
Southern Reconstruction, but it is utterly impossible to find a
thoughtful novel dealing with the present era, which has anything
like the same serenity of inner life. Mr. Churchill, however, is such
an excellent instance that his metamorphosis should not pass un-
noticed. In Richard Carvel and the Crisis he inhabits a quiet ter-
ritory whose people are bound by ties of honor and patriotism. The
heroes and heroines fall in love without much rendering of anything
except hearts. Richard and Dorothy grew up together and settled
down together. This is all placid, sentimental and a bit wishy-washy
if you insist, but it made nice reading.
Before long, however, Mr. Churchill went sailing and discov-
ered the world. It is a strange place and did not fail to impress him
as such. He could not restrain himself for the weirdness of it. In
A Modern Chronicle he tells the story of Honora Leffingwell, up-
to-date maiden, who meets life in a new way: that is, with a differ-
1917.] THE RETREAT OF THE AMERICAN NOVEL 171
ent attitude towards the institution of marriage. The first man is
all business and pink shirt, the members of his set are vile, and
Honora hungers for the old satisfying emotions of life. But she does
not go back to the established order. Instead she gets farther away
by obtaining a divorce. The next gentleman is even worse than the
first, and his death is quite a relief. So finally, Honora, a much
changed and wiser individual, drifts into the arms of Peter, who
typifies all that is established and secure. The book is full of the
contrast between the outlook of an older generation and the altered
moods of the new. It is dismayed not so much at the defiance of
sacred conventions as at Honora who, in defying them, seems ac-
tually more sinned against than sinning. What shall we make of
this? The answer is vague, and perhaps even Mr. Churchill does
not quite know it.
Having learned that people regarded the old order as instable,
Churchill himself became reformer. The Rev. Mr. Hodder of the
Inside of the Cup learns that his church is merely a shoddy and
pudgy routine. It is still the Episcopal formula, but the infusion of
divine grace seems to have been lost. Accordingly he throws a
cargo of old dogmas overboard, and kicks the rich men off the ves-
sel. He finds that he has a ritual but no religion, and accordingly
makes one that is up to the requirements of the Hibbert Journal in
every respect. The amazing popularity of this rather unexciting
volume was due simply to the fact that many well-meaning people
had come to regard their churches in a similar light. It is likely,
however, that not so many agreed with Mr. Churchill. In A Far
Country the author attacks American political life not in the satiric
manner of Coniston but almost with the tactics of a diatribe. There
is an energetic housecleaning in statesmanship, and the accumulation
of graft is quite startling. But everybody turns socialist in a pru-
dent fashion and the world is renewed. Yet the book is concerned
not so much with objective conditions, but voices a harrowing dis-
satisfaction with the grounds of political faith. Just as the Church
cannot exist unless it has a working principle of salvation, so there is
no reason for the state, if it is merely an excuse for electing people
to office. It is the foundation of institutions that the novelist and
his readers are questioning. Love has grown extremely conscious
of its responsibilities, and life is ruffled by the spectre of " Why?"
But Mr. Churchill does not confront these problems with anything
like his old security. He is perplexed, saddened and disturbed. If
existence is a riddle, there must be an answer, but what is it?
i;2 THE RETREAT OF THE AMERICAN NOVEL [Nov.,
Enter Margaret Deland, amiable raconteur of Old Chester
and its amiable ways. Things are beautiful and exalted in that
bright locality. Dr. Lavendar with his old-fashioned beliefs, his
charity and his humor is as good a person as ever breathed. Old
Chester sinned and was foolish occasionally, but there was always
enough oil left in the lamps to greet the bridegroom. Conflicts
came, but there was peace too. Life was calm, measured out as the
old Cornish ballad says, "By the tick-tick-it-ti-tock of the grandfa-
ther's clock."
In the Iron Woman even, with its modern environment, Mrs.
Deland works out a defence of matrimony in a safe and satisfying
way. But in The Rising Tide, whose heroine does awful things,
and actually uses slang, the aspects of the pet modern theory of
" feminism " are aired thoroughly. For such as realize that ir-
reverent diction is as ancient as Aristophanes and as common as
dust, it seems impossible that such a person as Frederica's mother
could have lived, but she probably did, for the morality of the mid-
dle-Puritan period consisted largely of conventional " don'ts," such
as no music on Sunday. The youthful unrest in the book is however
vivid and easy to understand. The staid and comfortable ways of
meeting existence have been torn up. When the heroine asks : " Did
I ask for life? Was I consulted?" we remember having heard that
before, and that birth control, failure of marriage and woman's
rights have been mentioned several times. The problems of this
book are being lived out, largely in slang, but they are really breath-
ing. Times have changed. The placid old American mother can
only rub her spectacles and say, " Bless us, what are we coming to?"
Her maxims sound foolish now, but the reader and Mrs. Deland are
convinced that they are not so silly after all. The institutions have
stood firm for centuries, and there is no adequate reason for scuttl-
ing them. But why, to use a popular phrase, have they " lost their
sand?"
Mr. William Dean Howells is not only our most venerable lit-
erary figure, but he has not received half the recognition to which
he is entitled. Always an ardent follower of Tolstoy, and never
very enthusiastic except on matters of art, he has come to rely upon
the sound simplicity of American democratic life and to interpret it
in a genial spirit. While he has dealt with problems many times, it
is certain that none of his books present as significant a thesis as the
recently published Leavewworth Case. Externally, the story is
simple, telling of an eccentric religious fanatic who gives himself
1917-] THE RETREAT OF THE AMERICAN NOVEL 173
out as God and turns the religious opinions of the Ohio Valley
topsy-turvy. Of course he is merely a paranoiac and collapses ut-
terly in the end. But underneath all this description of fatuity runs
a very subtle suggestion. If this man with all his fervor and appar-
ent vision is only a fool, can it be possible that all our religious be-
liefs are hectic insubstantialities ? Have we been deluded by a con-
stant mirage of something supernatural, and are we after all only
natural ? The question is put in honest bewilderment, and has been
put several times in the past. But it has never before voiced the
trend of Puritan America. We have read the same thing in a
dozen abysmal biological treatises, but it is recent in the pulpits.
The same uncertainty is put with fearful violence by Mark Twain,
and is implied in a score of varied novels. We have almost caught
up in living with Herbert Spencer's thinking.
Everywhere books seethe with this prying into mystery, this
tapping of the hollow conventional, this incessant concern with
human craving. Naturally the feminine question, having received
the most advertising, is accorded greatest attention. Mary John-
ston, Ellen Glasgow and Mrs. Atherton put it with poignancy and
appeal. But from countless other angles, writers are undermining
the world of our fathers. Dreiser, Sinclair and Paterson have cut
sluices in the dam of reticence. Nothing is so filthy or abhorrent
but that it can come out with its smudgy little interrogation point.
In a great many instances, of course, we can trace this fever for
" truth " to a proffering of sensations for the sake of riches. But
the writers mentioned are all sincere and capable; many of them
have endured comparative neglect for the sake of what they avow.
The bourgeoisie even finds them dismal. Assuredly then we are
witnessing a great philosophic retreat. Yesterday we were calm,
rather pleased with ourselves and we quoted Browning. Today we
are actually taking Bernard Shaw seriously. The beliefs of older
America are simply in rout. One fires on the other, and no one is
conscious of any presence save the enemy's. An idea is merely a
microbe, but it can develop into a disease.
This revolt against the institutions is without precedent, though
many of its doctrines are frayed. One can find in Plato's Republic
a Socialist-feminist scheme almost as thorough as Bax's. None of
our cynicism or derision has half the edge of Aristophanes, and the
highest points of our indignation are candle-lights to the eruptive
hate of Dante. But when in the past an attack was leveled at the
institutions, the slogan read that there was too much in the insti-
174 THE RETREAT OF THE AMERICAN NOVEL [Nov.,
tution, our revolt cries that there is not enough. Socialists denounce
the state not because of its tyranny but because of its dotage. Henry
VIII. abolished matrimony because he wanted connubial liberty;
Mr. Shaw believes that it is much too free. Luther's furore found
an echo in souls for the reason that he aimed at lowering the pres-
tige of the Church, and Julian the Apostate blasphemed because God
is almighty. The modernist is an infidel who conceives of all reli-
gion as futile and unfounded. The theological basis of our agnos-
ticism is the problem of evil : we can truthfully say that it used to be
the question of relative good. Yesterday a man went to the devil
because of a preference, but today he goes because he is hungry.
This trend is evidenced in a hundred ways. Thought is leaving the
home because it finds the home empty, it storms at the state because
the state is lazy, it leaves the churches because the churches are tot-
tering. I do not believe that the unrest of women is so much a de-
mand for employment as actual boredom. There is an actual and
menacing tendency to regard the soul as trivial and to adore the
energy of business. Is that because the soul has been so very much
at ease?
Well, it is the immortal soul which is giving us all this trouble.
There are, indeed, millions to whom the divine ache of the twentieth
century has never penetrated: tiers and tiers of onlookers at the
spectacle for whom it is just so much pomp and sensual food. But
even they have caught some of the tragic flame, some of the heart-
pang and the nausea, some of the paean of desperate thought. For
if modern America had not produced this revolt, as the lands of Eu-
rope have conceived their own, one might have said that the soul
of man is unbelieveably feeble and smudgy, a spark flickering at the
end of an anaemic candle. For what has the spirit thrived on during
the years that have gone? Retrace the steps of Protestantism till
you come to the energy of Puritanism, for it had an energy once that
could place its Jonathan Edwards and Cotton Mather in a burning
desert but still keep them refreshed. It was an ascetic gleam that
folded itself in from the world and went a straight and bitter path
alone. We can say that Puritanism lacked a thousand treasures of
beauty and goodness, but still we never deny that it owned a soul,
begotten of vital parentage.
But watch the Puritan descend the ages. His negations be-
come more artificial and less inspiring. His conventions do not fit
a changed environment. The ancestral motto had been, " Work and
Duty!" and suddenly there was neither, according to the rules laid
1917.] THE RETREAT OF THE AMERICAN NOVEL 175
down. No one oppresses him and nature is forgetful. The seasons
bloom in dazzling fragrance, the winds whisper caressingly over
lighted seas. The air is warm, there is peace and plenty. His inner
life collapses beneath the haunting memories of his youth. Sud-
denly he comes to realize that if he had not forbidden himself music
he might have learned song. Had he not been so busy with the
damned, there might have been a tryst with the blessed. In dismay
he goes back to his inner life for consolation and food. Lo! the
tavern is empty. There was nothing in it except negation, or a per-
manent principle of contraction. His soul has shrivelled up until it
is gone. And so he must go forth and find it again. Today he is
groping, searching, prying everywhere.
No wonder that he is distraught and torn by the winds of shift-
ing belief. Everything that the ancient fires of life and the new
fumes of science could hurl at his abstentions has been flung with a
vengeance. When he is confronted with the flaunting challenge of
his conventions, he must awake to the terrible " Why?" There is
no why. He hurries to the Bible for defence of matrimony, and
finds St. Paul declaring that marriage is a great sacrament in
Christ and the Church. The forefathers abolished sacraments.
Christ Himself was a miracle and miracles are out of date. Science
declares that His cosmogony is mythical, and he discovers that his
creed has thought out no adequate cosmogony. And so, in every
instance in which he takes up the ancient armor of battle, the pieces
crumble and rust in his hands. The ingots have been weighed in
the balance of thought and found wanting. His dismay and re-
treat are, therefore, not startling. But what is he to do? First of
all, he must stop being a Puritan, and the step is taken resolutely.
Where formerly he was modest, he now is shameless. Yesterday
he sat reticent and today he is vile. He used to go to church and
now he talks business. By all the hunger that is in him, he must
get food for his inner life.
There are various avenues he may enter. It is not so likely as
is commonly supposed that he will turn pagan, for the placid Hora-
tian groves were never so far away. However, he may become a
Buddhist or Christian Scientist, which means going from hardtack
to mush. The diet is popular but it will not last long. He has seen
better days and after all the porridge is very thin. He has only to
scrape a little and there is the cracked china again. Then, he may
come, generally does come, to what is called the outlook of modern
life. This regimen consists of various substantial ingredients such
176 THE RETREAT OF THE AMERICAN NOVEL [Nov.,
as the welfare of society, vegetarianism, the new woman and science.
It is characterized by such phrases as a " broad liberalism of
thought," " cooperative efficiency " and " a frank meeting of the
facts of life." Posterity and truth are the two main reasons for its
existence. But in succumbing to it, the Puritan will merely bow to
the absolutism of new standards. His soul will not kneel in worship
to God, but to business. He will be told that the future of mankind
is based on the sources of wealth, and that economic combines will
achieve the destiny of man. It implies absorption but not intro-
spection. The disciples must submit, feverishly, blindly and unabat-
ingly, so that they will forget themselves. If he adopts this course,
the penalty is a disavowal of the cherished inner life.
We do not think that it will content him. When all his con-
ventions have been broken down, and when the last serf-thought
springs up unshackled, there will remain the simple, steadfast
" Why ?" After all, science is but another series of negations —
after seventy- five years, after a century, what then? We who see
the lives of strong men crushed like a field of flowers, and observe
the civilization of centuries submerge itself in a moat of primitive
gloom, may question whether the Tower of Babel is any higher after
all. Can it be likely that the years will discard the memory of mod-
ern industry as they have buried the cities of the East? The spirit
of man searches continually for something firmer than a promise,
something more enduring than a word. We must have faith in
something positive: that which passes away is but another denial.
And so it is probable that Mr. Hodder and Frederica and the whole,
eager serious tribe of them will again become human which is syn-
onomous with believing. They will demand a faith in which all
things are hidden, even the hunger and hopes of man. It must be
a creed with manly strength, with fervor that leads to victory, and
negations consistent with the high purposes of life. It is very likely
that many of them will find a very efficient and humble door which
they passed many times, but which is always open in mystic wel-
come, and which is like the alpha of a language never learned. For
the door was builded on a rock.
More than this dim and hopeful probability no one can foresee.
The success of the quest is based on everything that is noblest and
most virile in the souls of the seekers. They must find it as best
they can, after years of tumult and sorrow, even as the elect entered
the Promised Land. When one considers the massive power of the
opposition — all the authority which modern materialistic thought
i9i 7-] THE RETREAT OF THE AMERICAN NOVEL 177
has abrogated to itself, the schools which it controls, the wealth that
is held in its hands, and the numbers who have come to adore — bat-
tle against it often appears hopeless and laden with sacrifice too great
to bear. Just now one meets an optimistic credence in the War, a
blind faith that the fields of blood will bring forth eternal fruit. Is
it not rather a presumption ? Armed conflict is ineradicably beastly
and vile, and faith that has never been born out of spears is not
likely to blossom out of cannon. True, the war is a grand Shakes-
pearean finale for those who sink in battle, and a desolate chastening
for those who are left to mourn. After all these things, too, are pass-
ing like fiery storms of woe. The vintage that we must seek is the
sustaining draught of peace.
Nevertheless, it is in the spirit of earnest warfare, wherein all
that is most cherished lies at stake and which will define the borders
of our liberty and inner peace, that we wish to approach this conflict.
From more viewpoints than one this development of nineteenth cen-
tury ideals in American life is as much the concern of the Catholic
as of his neighbor. We too have inherited a great deal of the rou-
tine materialistic attitude, have in a large measure come to forget
the birthright of our Grail. Is it not evident that many of our sym-
bols have lost their poetic significance for even the educated, and
that the high thinking of the ages of Faith slumbers in a coma of
misunderstanding? These things are proved fully by the novels of-
fered to the people as Catholic. When one has glanced over the list,
the books appear almost invariably trite, juvenile and uninspired.
Our authors have begotten a limited vision. For them the world is
not yet alive nor seething with the terrible fires that have been kin-
dled. It is all very well to write books for the young but when the
thinking Catholic seeks a book which voices the aspirations of his
belief in tones cadenced to the life of the times, he is obliged to go
to England, France and Germany. Not that all of this is chargeable
to the authors. The American Catholic has come to his own through
long struggles up the valley of economic serfdom and civil prejudice.
The insatiable battle for bread, for social recognition, to a decent
position among men, has demonstrated miraculously well the
strength of our Faith as applied to common life, but has rendered an
artistic appreciation of these victories negligible.
This book, however, is sealed. The war on smudgy prejudice
has not ceased, but is waning. We have come to a new field where
men challenge not so much our credence in holy water as our belief
in Christian institutions and in God. It is no longer so urgent that
VOL. CVI. — 12
178 THE RETREAT OF THE AMERICAN NOVEL [Nov.,
we fight Protestantism, for that has turned suicide. Our position is
now in the midst of chaos, face to face with the dragon of modern
thought. For these reasons there must and will be a restatement of
Catholicism in terms of flesh and blood. Europe has already done
much for us. The inspired reply of Pius X. when he opened the
Tabernacle wider than it has been unbarred since the days of the
martyrs, seems to have nipped that cankerous growth of pride in the
bud. Great principles on the rights of labor laid down by Leo XIII.
have outlined a programme of industrial adjustment whose thor-
oughness becomes more striking every day. Monumental thinkers,
poets and novelists have talked so forcibly for the Church in foreign
lands that it becomes simple for us to repeat what they have said.
Too simple in fact. But American Catholicism is waking to its mis-
sion. There will be a new and better spokesmanship, sturdier and
deeper thought. Moreover, if we can rely on the promise of what
has already been done in myriad ways, resuscitation of Christian art
is not far distant. Since the novel is the creation of charity, the lips
which have brought consolation to the hunger of the world for two
thousand years will not fail us now.
There will be no peace until these things are settled. There is
so much discontent, so much running amuck with the fever of
thought, that some form of spiritual revolution is well-nigh born.
As the armies of Sobieski and Charles Martel fought back the Turks,
and as the shield of Charlemange rang with the onslaught of a horde
of foes, so the defences we have built round the things we hold more
sacred than life, will be besieged. And we believe that our ultimate
victory will be no less certain than was theirs.
THE SAINT OF THE CITY BEAUTIFUL.
BY JOSEPH H. MCMAHON, PH.D.
HE pages of the Acta Apostolica Sedis are scarcely
the place where one would look for entertainment.
The table of contents seems to promise dreary reading
save for the canonist or ecclesiastical administrator.
Yet, to the thoughtful mind, the various Acta of
Pontiff, Congregations and Tribunals teem with interest because
reflecting the many-sided activities of the Universal Church. Vaster
is the field included than even the confines of the greatest secular
empire: more intimate, and even more human, than the official
record of any mere worldly government, are the enactments that
fill the pages of this Commentarium Officiate that will always re-
main as a monument to the revolutionary activity of Pius X.
Events grave and gay, tragic and sordid, inspiring and consoling,
food for the sinister reflections of the cynic as well as comfort for
the saintly and God-fearing heart, jostle one another in these pages,
whereon the commonplaces of life are dignified by the sonorous
Latin of the Roman Curia. These reflections came to mind as I
glanced through the issue of July 2, 1917, and doubtless were sug-
gested by the sight of the abbreviation Arequipen, under the Acta
of the Sacred Congregation of Rites. At once my mind called up
the vision of La Villa Hermosa, the City Beautiful of Pizarro, en-
throned on its high Andean valley in Southern Peru. Long before
the conquistadores had scaled the Andes the victorious soldiers of
the Incas had come upon this valley, long and fertile and of won-
drous beauty, and had exclaimed to their leader Maita Capac, Child
of the Sun, "Let us remain here," to which he replied in the Quichua
tongue, " Ari, quepai " — Yes, remain. There had they built the city
they called Arequipa. Their choice and taste were both ratified
centuries afterward when in 1539 the sturdy followers of Pizarro
built the modern city of that name, and called it the City Beautiful,
La Villa Hermosa.1 Stretching across the narrow valley and up
the slopes of the mountain on either side, its white houses with
gleaming red tiled roofs are lovely in contrast with the luxuriant
'Its altitude above the sea is about the same as that of the city of Mexico
(8,000 feet). If not the most beautiful place in South America, as its admirers
claim, it is certainly the most restful. Zahm, Along the Alps, p. 143.
i8o THE SAINT OF THE CITY BEAUTIFUL [Nov.,
vegetation of the tropics. Overhanging it rises in tremendous lonely
majesty the great volcano Misti, eighteen thousand five hundred feet
above sea level, feared by the aboriginal Peruvians and placated by
annual sacrifices of young maidens. Four times in the centuries
elapsing since the Spanish foundation has Misti shaken and damaged
the City Beautiful. But so strong is the fascination of its loveliness
that its population still grows and clings to it, until now more than
thirty-five thousand souls are accounted fortunate as its inhabitants.
It is ninety miles from Mollendo, the nearest Pacific port, with which
it is now connected by a railway. It became the seat of a bishopric in
1609. It has always possessed a reputation for intellectual culture.
Its university, still extant, goes back to the days of the conquista-
dores. Its poets occupy an enviable place in the rich literature of
Peru. The most striking building of the city is the Cathedral, a
structure built to replace the ancient church of the Conquest burned
in 1849. Its four venerable and stately monasteries have been sec-
ularized as a result of revolutionary progress. But their glory re-
vives as we read the story of a soul who dwelt in one of them as set
forth now in the Acta Apostolicce Sedis in Ar equip en, a Decree of
the Sacred Congregation of Rites given on June 13, 1917, for the
introduction of the cause of the beatification and canonization of
the servant of God, Anna of the Angels, nee Monteagudo, a pro-
fessed nun of the Order of St. Dominic.
Note the confident judgment of the Mother of all the Churches :
" The symbol of Christian faith which the renowned Christopher
Columbus planted and erected in the remote regions of America,
has in the course of time borne and does not cease to bear there the
choicest fruits of virtues and holiness." This surely will come as
a surprise even to many Catholics of the United States who in the
smug satisfaction caused by their own material prosperity are blind
to the glorious history of the South American Church, and easily
swallow the ignorant calumnies that have cheapened and blackened
the reputation of that Mother of Saints and Martyrs. The Decree
goes on to say that the immediate object of consideration is the city
of Arequipa in Peru where Anna of the Angels, a professed nun of
the Order of St. Dominic, following St. Rose, a maiden of Lima,
of the same order, the first fragrant flower of South America, gave
a like odor of virtue and splendor. This servant of God was born
at Arequipa in 1602 of honorable and wealthy parents. As a child
she was sent to the flourishing convent of St. Catherine of Siena in
her native city, where she was educated in what we now would call
1917-] THE SAINT OF THE CITY BEAUTIFUL 181
domestic science and belles lettres as well as in religion and piety.
Her academic training finished, the girl returned to her home. Her
parents wished her to marry. She, however, aspired to the higher
life of religion, and diligently cultivated by pious practices what she
felt was a divine calling to the nuptials of the King. Then came
the old, old story. By every means in their power these devoted
Catholic parents sought to thwart their daughter's desire. She
persuaded one of her former mistresses to shelter her in the con-
vent and to give her an old habit with which she proudly garbed
herself as a child of St. Dominic. When the cause is debated the
devil's advocate will no doubt have much to say as to the conduct
of this nun in breaking seemingly several of the rules of well-
regulated convents. But at any rate the girl seems to have come
under the protection of the cloister. Her parents coaxed and
pleaded, in their effort to attract their favorite daughter from the
austerity of the convent to the luxury of the home. Failing by
gentle means they resorted to threats but with the same ill-success.
Their child of grace remained constant in her determination to
follow the will of God. Her persistence at length reduced them to
passive resistance, much to the relief of the perplexed prioress who
apparently did not wish to offend these powerful citizens of the City
Beautiful, and who, nevertheless, did not wish wrongfully to place
any obstacles in the way of what seemed a true vocation. As so fre-
quently happens, Anna found in her two brothers allies who adroitly,
by degrees, calmed the opposition of their parents and finally caused
it to disappear altogether, so that at the end of the novitiate they
gladly gave the girl a suitable dowry and their full, free and joyous
consent to become an inmate of St. Catherine of Siena. It speaks
well for the religion and virtue of these young men who evidently
were of the gilded youth of La Villa Hcrmosa. It would be inter-
esting to trace their subsequent history, but, alas! Roman official
documents do not trail off into inviting side paths. In one pregnant
sentence Anna's life after her religious profession is summed up:
" Obedient and subject to the prioress of the monastery, sedulously
intent upon the splendor of divine worship and constant prayer, ab-
sorbed in her varied works of charity, she gave to the other nuns
an example of life and conduct, of activity and contemplation,
worthy of praise and imitation."
In the course of time Anna was made Mistress of Novices, a
post she no doubt filled with great satisfaction, for in 1648 she was
elected prioress. The Decree tells us that she accepted both these
i5a THE SAINT OF THE CITY BEAUTIFUL [Nov.,
offices under obedience, filled them wisely, and that she ruled and
governed her religious family with meekness and fortitude. Trou-
bles, difficulties, serious dangers were encountered during her ad-
ministration of the affairs of St. Catherine's in the City Beautiful,
but by God's help she was able to overcome them all. Despite the
cares of her high but onerous office she constantly sought the paths
of spiritual perfection, living chastely and austerely, sustained by the
frequent reception of the sacraments, distinguished for her love of
God and her neighbor, most exact in the observance of her vows,
afflicted for a long time with a most painful disease borne with the
greatest patience and resignation. Finally, peacefully and suddenly
she went forth to meet her heavenly Spouse on January 10, 1686.
For eighty-four years she had lived in the City Beautiful. Here,
the ages lost in the mists of obscurity, vestals had ministered at the
altars of the Sun throughout the region that stretches up to wonder-
ful Titicaca whence came "Manca Capac of virgin birth to be the re-
deemer of mankind." Strange is it not that the place of the van-
ished vestals should be filled by vestals such as she who worshipped
the Lamb, the Sun of the City Celestial.
Ponder on the facts suggested by this life so summarily
sketched in this Decree, you boastful citizen of the Great Republic
of the North. Before Virginia had received its first settlement this
woman was born in a city whose beauty is, even now in the twen-
tieth century, unexcelled by any city of our great country. When
the Mayflower anchored at Plymouth Rock she was peacefully
pursuing the higher studies in the academic halls of the beautiful
and well-ordered convent that was to be her future home. When
the Roman Catholic colony of Maryland was founded in 1632 by
Lord Baltimore to give the world a specimen of real, not pretended
toleration, she was a professed nun at St. Catherine's with all the
marvels of orderly civilization therein implied. Pennsylvania was
founded five years before her death, but even then La Villa Hermosa
possessed a university, select schools of which we might be proud,
a literature rich in every department and a civilization that pre-
served the Indian inhabitants instead of exterminating them. While
the Catholic missionaries were exploring and traversing the wilder-
ness from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes preaching the Gospel
to the filthy savages in the umbrageous depths of the forest pri-
meval, she was ruling a convent of nuns, many of whom were doubt-
less of Indian blood, aiming at the higher flights of spiritual per-
fection. While Jogues and Brebceuf were suffering tortures at the
THE SAINT OF THE CITY BEAUTIFUL 183
stake, she was treading the wine-press of voluntary mortification
within the walls of the cloister in that City Beautiful which Spanish
civilization had so quickly erected in the wonderful Andean valley
over which broods majestic Misti.
What a light we gain on the completeness of that civiliza-
tion when we are informed in this Decree that shortly after her
death, so great was the fame of her sanctity, the ecclesiastical curia
of Arequipa instituted a commission to prepare the " Informative
Process," first step in the long process of canonization. How our
curiosity is aroused by the next sentence or rather phrase : " Cujus
tamen acta nonnisi anno 1887 in Urbem transmissa fuere." Why
we wonder? What caused a delay of two hundred years before the
record of this life of heroic sanctity found its way from the City
Beautiful of the Andes to the Imperial City of the Seven Hills?
Again the calm confidence of the Church which " securus fudi-
cat orbis terrarum." With the assurance of one who speaks with au-
thority she receives the records that ought to have come to her two
hundred years before, assents to the petition of the representative
of the great order to which Anna of the Angels belonged, whose
seven hundred years of history is but little more than a third of that
of the Church of which it is an ornament, hearkens to the voice of
the hierarchy of South America gathered in plenary council in the
very shadow of the Vatican, listens to the plea of the present Bishop
of the City Beautiful, legitimate successor in unbroken line of him
who first pronounced official judgment upon the sanctity of Anna of
the Angels, joined to that of the Bishops of the Republic of Peru,
of the chapters of cathedral churches, the heads of religious orders,
congregations and sodalities, of men distinguished in ecclesiastical
and secular life, together with the Master General of the Order of
Preachers and the Prioress of the venerable monastery of St. Cath-
erine in the City Beautiful who rules now in due succession to her
whose canonization she pleads — how wonderful it all is as' a testi-
mony of the unity of the Church; how significant it is in contrast
to the lack of organization in the Church of North America where
there are no cathedrals in the liturgical sense, no chapters, where,
until quite recently, there were none of those monasteries devoted to
the seraphic life, and where even now the contemplative orders are
looked upon askance.
And now more than two hundred years after her death, the
terse question is put in a session of the Roman Congregation : should
a Commission issue for the introduction of the cause of Anna of the
184 HIS WAY [Nov.,
Angels? And Immortal Rome gives the answer in the affirmative.
The holy woman, whose case is in question, has been dead for up-
wards of two centuries; the City Beautiful of which she is the most
precious jewel has undergone many changes; her family name is
perpetuated only by her sanctity : but the same Rome by whose au-
thority she ruled then over the convent of St. Catherine in the City
Beautiful, speaks with the same authoritative voice today. Doubt-
less another saint shall grace the altars of South America to shame
us sluggards of the most materially prosperous Church on earth.
HIS WAY.
BY HUGH F. BLUNT.
AT the dawning came my Chief;
Oh, life seemed so good,
Till I heard His sigh of grief ;
He commanding stood.
" This our battle day," He said ;
" Arm thee for the fight."
In that moment youth was dead;
Dawning turned to night.
" Callest me, my Chief ? " said I ;
" I am weak and young ;
Battle means mayhap to die,
All life's joy unsung."
" Yea, so weak, but God is strong ;
And He crossed my brow;
" War is short but peace is long ;
God calls once — and now."
Lo, the warm blood in my heart,
As He signed my head ;
" Now to war let us depart;
Lead on, Christ," I said.
Still He leadeth through the fray,
Still He cheereth me;
Christ, I care not what the way,
If it ends with Thee.
FRANCIS LEDWIDGE.
BY KATHARINE TYNAN.
HEY are wrong who call Francis Ledwidge a peasant
poet. For the matter of that there is no such thing
as a peasant poet in Ireland. There was one, Keegan,
who came nearest to it. Francis Ledwidge was by
accident born in a peasant's cottage in Meath. There
was nothing of him peasant — not his beautiful handwriting, his
lovely and distinguished choice of words, his delicate color-sense, his
music, his mind, himself : they are all gentle.
Lord Dunsany, his discoverer, has not been able to avoid the
name of Burns when he talks of Francis Ledwidge as a peasant poet.
For one so remote from the obvious it is unexpected. Burns was an
inspired peasant : when he was most inspired he was least a peasant.
He could build a gallant song on a gallant fragment, gloriously.
But, side by side with the inspired poet, there was the peasant
coarseness. One cannot imagine Francis Ledwidge writing a poem
To a Louse on a Lady's Bonnet in Church. He was all gentlehood.
There was nothing to refine out of him. He was born refined.
Lord Dunsany found him road-mending in Meath. To be a
road-mender is a very good school for a poet. He has the skies
over him arid the fields around him: in Meath he has miles and
miles of pastoral country full of the lowing of herds; he has im-
mense whitehorn hedges ; the birds sing to him and the little streams,
and the world jogs by in gigs or carts or afoot or driving its cattle.
It is very placid there. There is but one fly in the amber of its
peace — the motor-car. In Meath no one is strenuous: the climate
forbids it and the cattle fatten of themselves. The peace of Led-
widge's poetry is almost untroubled.
He sent a copybook full of his poems to Lord Dunsany, in a
fortunate hour, a year or so before the War. Lord Dunsany found
errors, immaturities, cliches of a bad kind. He shook himself free
of these things very soon. He had to learn so little. I think it was
in 1913 I met him with Lord Dunsany at the private view of A. E.'s
pictures in Dublin which used to take place in the autumns of the
incredible period, ante bellum. He was then contributing to the
Saturday Review. He or someone else sent me a copy containing
186 FRANCIS LEDWIDGE [Nov.,
a poem of his within the week. He must then have been quite a new
discovery.
He had a high-colored, eager, winning face. Perhaps it was
the excitement made the 'high color. I remember that he was
wrapped in a big frieze coat as though someone had carried him off,
unawares, to what used to be something of a fashionable function,
and he, protesting that he was not dressed for the like, had wrapped
him up in the big coat. I can see the eager 'gentle face, under the
dark, soft hair, with the desire to please obvious in it. He was very
humble and deferential to an older writer. There was nothing self-
conscious about him. He was entirely simple and sincere.
A couple of years passed before his first book came to me for
review. Perhaps indeed it was 1912 when I first met him, for Lord
Dunsany, in his preface to Songs of the Fields, over the date, June,
1914, mentions that two years earlier, when he was "wasting June "
in London, he received the copy-book of Francis Ledwidge's
poems. He adds to the preface a year later, when Francis Ledwidge
had been nine months in the army and had attained to the rank of
corporal. He served in Gallipoli, in Serbia, on the Western Front;
was wounded once, not badly; went back again when the wound
healed, and was killed by a fragment of a shell on July 3ist of this
year, the first day of the new offensive.
I do not know when he could have found the time to write poems
in the grocer's shop in Dublin, about which Lord Dunsany writes,
telling us how he broke away and tramped thirty miles to his mo-
ther's cottage. That grocer's shop in Dublin must indeed have been
a trial to the poet, though it is quite possible that he may have found
some there to appreciate his gift. But he must have missed the
seat by the roadside and the procession of the seasons, the stars and
the secret things of the fields and groves and " the wind on the
heath."
Reviewing his first book I found an essential beauty — a Greek
sense of beauty, to use a cliche and a rather worn-out one — perfect
in phrases and moments, within a setting as yet unsure. He had not
quite mastered the art, which came so easily that it had only just to
be discovered, in its wholeness, but his phrases were magical :
And wondrous, impudently sweet,
Half of him passion, half conceit,
The black bird pipes adown the street.
And this of April :
I9I7-] FRANCIS LEDW1DGE 187
And she will be in white, I thought, and she
Will have a cuckoo upon either shoulder.
And again there is a lovely line :
Sweet as rain-water is the blackbird's flute.
All these lovely things gave assurance of the full beauty that
came a few months later in Songs of Peace. I do not propose to quote
from an already published book, which those who love poetry may
acquire for themselves. By this time he had become a traveler.
He had been at pretty well all the fronts of war. He had seen the
dreadful things which all soldiers must see in these days. The
Chariot of War had driven over him and left him untouched. He
was still the boy who sat by the roadside in Meath and loved the
fields and the thorn-hedges and the long roads fringed with cow-
parsley, and the blackbird's note, and the color of blue with which
all his poems are colored, and his mother and all simple and quiet
loves. Reviewing Songs of Peace, I had the thought to write to
him. Apparently the letter traveled for some time before it reached
him, but it did reach him and his answer is dated January 6, 1917.
It is eagerly, enthusiastically friendly and grateful for the advance
on my part. He was the most friendly thing alive, while he was
yet alive.
" If I survive the war," he wrote, " I have great hopes of writ-
ing something that will live. If not, I trust to be remembered in
my own land for one or two things which its long sorrow inspired.
" My books have had a greater reception in England, Ireland
and America than I had ever dreamt of, but I never feel that my name
should be mentioned in the same breath with my contemporaries.
" You ask me what I am doing. I am a unit in the Great War,
doing and suffering, admiring great endeavor and condemning great
dishonor. I may be dead before this reaches you, but I will have
done my part. Death is as interesting to me as life. I have seen so
much of it, from Suvla to Strumnitza and now in France. I am
always homesick. I hear the roads calling and the hills, and the
rivers wondering where I am. It is terrible to be always homesick.
"I don't- like to send you a poem in pencil. If I can borrow a
fountain pen I will transcribe one for you. If I go home again
I should certainly like to come and see you. I know Claremorris,
Ballinrobe and all the little towns in Mayo."
In his next letter there are two poems enclosed :
1 88 FRANCIS LEDWIDGE [Nov.,
IN FRANCE.
The silence of maternal hills
Is round me in my evening dreams
And round me music-making bells
And mingling waves of pastoral streams.
Whatever way I turn, I find
The paths are old unto me still
The hills of home are in my mind
And there I wander as I will.
HAD I A GOLDEN POUND TO SPEND.
Had I a golden pound to spend
My love should mend and sew no more,
And I would buy her a little quern,
Easy to turn on the kitchen floor.
And for her windows, curtains white
With birds in flight and flowers in bloom,
To face with pride the road to town
And mellow down the sunlit room.
And with the silver change we'd prove
The truth of Love to life's own end,
With hearts the years could but embolden,
Had I a golden pound to spend.
The letter in which these were sent talks with a happy confi-
dence. I am not to think he is lonely. There are a few about him
who care for the only things that matter, as he does. And he has
letters from home, from brothers and sisters and cousins and his
loving mother. They are all artists in a way : one collects flowers,
one examines into causes, and thinks he has discovered the cause of
gravity. " When I am at home we are all happy together."
" I was with the first British troops who landed at Saloniki.
We spent all last winter fighting the Bulgars in the hills of the
Varda and Uskiib I dare say you know the horrors of the
retreat. I love Serbia. It is a delightful country even seen as I
have seen it under the worst conditions of weather, etc. I spent a
year in the East, going first to the Dardanelles. I was in Egypt,
Cyprus, Mitylene and had a pleasant fortnight in Naples."
His next letter gives some indication of his odd ways of writ-
ing. " When I read the proofs of Songs of Peace there were sev-
1917.] FRANCIS LEDWIDGE 189
eral poems I hardly recognized as my own, for I scribble them off
in odd moments, and if I do not give them to someone they become
part of the dust of the earth and little things stuck on the end of
hedges when the wind has done with them. My manuscripts are
scattered about two hemispheres, some lost forever, others wander-
ing in the corners of newspapers, like so many little Abrahams,
changing their names as if they had given over an old faith and
were set on new endeavors. I lament in sober moments and forget
them again when some new tune breaks out in my mind.
" I wish you would come to Louth. There are charming places
about Dundalk and Drogheda, and the people are so beautiful.
When I am in Louth I always imagine voices are calling me from
one distance to another, and at every turn I half expect to see Cu-
chullin stride over the hills to meet some new champion of Maeve.
You could only be happy in Louth or Meath
" What a pity the birds must suffer as we do ! I had a special
way of feeding them when I was at home in winter. I used to put
potatoes on the garden wall for the crows and under a covering of
sacks spread bread and meal for the smaller birds. It was taboo to
open the kitchen door for that would disturb them.
" So A. E. has been telling you of my doings," he says in an-
other letter, " but he did not know that the poems which I destroyed
were very amateurish; and how sick I was of them, for I had re-
peated them until they became vapid. I try to keep my poems now
by sending them to Lord Dunsany, or home, but out here one has
not always the time or the convenience, and, after all, when the
pleasure of writing them has passed, what does it matter? I still
have hundreds. My next book will be the best of mine.
" I may be in Ireland for May Day yet."
But May Day found him still in France, and the longest letter
he has written me is dated May 3ist. I fear I was slow in an-
swering his letters. He always wrote at once with a great under-
standing and forgiveness.
" Your letter came yesterday evening like melody from the
woods at home, as welcome as rain to the shriveled lips of June. It
was like laughter heard over a low hill. I would have written to
thank you for the sweets, only that lately we were unsettled, wander-
ing to and fro between the firing line and resting billets immediately
behind. This letter is antedated by two hours, but before midnight
we may be wandering in singile and slow file with the reserve line
two or three hundred yards behind the fire trench. We are under
190 FRANCIS LEDWIDGE [Nov..
an hour's notice. Entering and leaving the line is most exciting as
we are usually but thirty yards from the enemy, and you can scarcely
understand how bright the nights are made by his rockets. These
are in continual ascent and descent from dusk to dawn, making a
beautiful crescent from Switzerland to the sea. There are white
lights, green and red, and whiter bursting into red and changing
again, the blue bursting into purple drops and reds fading into green.
It is all like the end of a beautiful world. It is only horrible when
you remember that every color is a signal to waiting reinforcements
or artillery, and God help us if we are caught in the open, for then
up go a thousand reds and hundreds of rifles and machine guns are
emptied against us, and all amongst us shells of every calibre are
thrown, shouting destruction and death. We can do nothing but
fling ourselves into the first shell hole and wonder, as we wait, where
we will be hit. But why all this ?
" I am indeed glad to think you are preparing another book of
verse. Will you really allow me to review it?. I don't want money
for doing it. The honor would be more worth than money. I re-
viewed Seumas O'Sullivan's poems a few years ago, and hope I
helped him to a wider public, though he has not yet the fame he de-
serves. His very name is a picture to me of lakes and green places,
rivers and willows and wild wings. You give me a picture of a
long lane, with many surprises of flowers, a house hidden in trees
where there is rest, and beyond that, mountains where the days are
purple, and then the sea. A. E. sets me thinking of things long for-
gotten and Lord Dunsany of gorgeous Eastern tapestry carpets. Do
you get such impressions from the books you love ? I met a traveler
in Naples who told me that he never read Andrew Marvell but he
remembered a dunce's cap and a fishing rod he had when a boy,
and never could trace the train of thought far enough back to dis-
cover where the connection lay.
" I am writing odd things in a little book whenever I can.
Just now I am engaged in a poem about the Lanawn Shee who, you
remember, is really the Irish Muse. One who sees her is doomed to
sing. She is very close to you. I am writing it in the traditional
style of the Silk of the Kine. Here are the opening verses :
Powdered and perfumed the full bee
Winged heavily across the clover,
And where the hills were dim with dew
Purple and blue the West looked over.
1917.] FRANCIS LEDWWGE 191
A willow spray dipped in the stream
Moved many a gleam of silver ringing,
And by a finny creek a maid
Filled all the shade with softest singing.
She told me of Tir n'an Oge
And there, she told me, honey drops
Out of the tops of ash and willow,
And, in the mellow shadows, Sleep,
Doth sweetly keep her poppied pillow.
And when the dance is done, the trees
Are left to Peace and the brown wood-pecker,
And on the Western slopes of sky,
The day's blue eye begins to flicker.
" She tries many devices to woo a lover, and to secure his pity,
laments one who loved her for long but one day left her for earth,
' fairer than Usua's youngest son.'
You rode with Kings o'er hills of green,
And lovely Queens have served your banquet ;
Sweet wine from berries bruised, they brought
And shyly sought the lips that drank it.
If I do not tire of it you will read it all some day (D.V.). I en-
close a little thing written on Ascension Thursday. It is time I
remembered you would be weary of this letter and will close with
regret. I am sad when I think on the boy from Roscommon. He
will remember you in his kingdom. Mention my name to him, say-
ing how sorry I am not to have known him, and that I hope he has
not any pain.
" I may be home in June yet."
The boy from Roscommon referred to in this letter was John
Higgins, a young writer of brilliant promise, who died of consump-
tion eighteen days before Francis Ledwidge was killed. May not
Francis Ledwidge have overtaken him?
Here is the poem he enclosed :
ASCENSION THURSDAY, 1917.
Lord, Thou has left Thy footprints in the rocks
That we may know the way to follow Thee;
But there are wide lands opened out between
Thy Olivet and my Gethsemane.
i92 FRANCIS LEDWIDGE [Nov.,
And oftentimes I make the night afraid
Crying for lost hands when the dark is deep,
And strive to reach the sheltering of Thy love,
Where Thou art herd among Thy folded sheep.
Thou wilt not ever thus, O Lord, allow
My feet to wander when the sun is set
But through the darkness, let me still behold
The stony by-ways up to Olivet.
On June 19, 1917, he wrote:
" This is my birthday. I am spending it in a little red town in
an orchard. There is a lovely valley just below me, and a river
that goes gobbling down the fields like turkeys coming home in
Ireland. It is an idle little vagrant that does no work for miles and
miles except to turn one mill-wheel for a dusty old man who has five
sons fighting for France. I was down here earlier in the spring
when all the valley wore its confirmation dress and was glad to re-
turn again in the sober moments of June. Although I have a con-
ventional residence I sleep out in the orchard, and every morning a
cuckoo comes to a tree quite close and calls out his name with a
clear voice above the rest of the morning's song like a tender stop
heard above the lower keys in a beautiful organ.
" I am glad to hear the experience of your boy in Macedonia.
I had a rather narrow escape above Lake Doiran in the winter of
1915. Ten of us went out to rescue a few sheep which we had dis-
covered on a mountain top, and we were attacked by a Bulgar force.
We sought the cover of rocks in a deep ravine and we were able
to keep the attackers off, although we could not return until help ar-
rived. We secured three sheep after which we named the battle.
I wrote the song of it for the Sunday Chronicle in Manchester last
year.
" I hope will be duly rewarded for his coolness and
bravery, for after all is not every honor won by Irishmen on the
battlefields of the world Ireland's honor, and does it not tend to
the glory and delight of her posterity ?
" You are in Meath now, P suppose. If you go to Tara go to
Rath-na-Ri and look all around you from the hills of Drumcondrath
in the North to the plains of Enfield in the South where Allan Bog
begins, and remember me to every hill and wood and ruin for my
heart is there. If it is a clear day you will see Slane Hill blue and
FRANCIS LEDWIDGE 193
distant. Say I will come back again surely, and maybe you will
hear pipes in the grass or a fairy horn and the hounds of Finn — I
heard them often from Tara.
" Be sure to remember me to Lord Fingall if he is at home.
" I am greatly afraid Lord Edward will never reach me
" My next book is due in October. Did you ever know I wrote
a play. It is a one-act thing called A Crock of Gold, and is about
a man who went to dig for gold which another man dreamt about.
I showed it to many in London and Dublin and they liked it
I will show you the play when I come to see you.
" About the mine — it made a greater explosion in the news-
papers than on Hill 60, but was beautiful all the same.
" It is growing dusk now : it is ' the owl's light,' and I must
draw to a close."
With this letter came three poems.
THE FIND.
I took a reed and blew a tune
And sweet it was and very clear
To be about a little thing
That only few held dear.
Three times the Cuckoo named himself
And nothing heard him on the hill
Where I was piping like an elf,
The green was very still.
Twas all about a little thing,
I made a mystery of sound,
I found it is a fairy ring
Upon a fairy mound.
STANLEY HILL.
In Stanley Hill the bees are loud,
And loud a river wild,
And there, as wayward as a cloud,
I was a little child.
I knew not how mistrustful heart
Could lure with hidden wile
And wound us in a fateful part
With dark and sudden guile.
VOL. cvi. — 13
194 FRANCIS LEDWIDGE [Nov.,
And yet for all I've known and seen
Of Youth and Truth reviled,
On Stanley Hill the grass is green
And I am still a child.
THE OLD GODS.
I thought the old goods still in Greece,
Making the little fates of man,
So in a secret place of Peace
I prayed as but a poet can ;
And all my prayer went crying faint
Around Parnassus' cloudy height,
And found no ear for my complaint
And back unanswered came at night.
Ah, foolish that I was to heed
The voice of folly, or presume
To find the old gods in my need
So far from A. E's little room.
f
The last of these letters is dated July 2Oth. It is poignant, as Francis
Ledwidge's name is now a poignancy, and rouses a fierce indignation
that such as he should be killed — and after nearly three years of
service. Presently out of his memory will come nothing but sweet-
ness, a bruised sweetness if you will, because he has gone to join
the great company, taking with him so much of his lovely message
for the world and especially for his own country.
" We have just returned from the line after an unusually long
time. It was very exciting this time as we had to contend with gas,
lachrymatory shells, and other devices, new and horrible. It will
be worse soon. The camp we are in at present might be in Tir n'an
Og, it is pitched amid such splendors. There is barley and rye
just entering harvest days of gold, and meadow-sweet rippling, and
where a little inn, named In den Neerloop, holds its gable up to
the swallows, blue-bells ,and goldilocks swing their splendid censers.
There is a wood hard by where hips glisten like little sparks and
just at the edge of it mealey (?) leaves sway like green fire. I will
hunt for a secret place in that wood to read Lord Edward. I antic-
ipate beautiful moments.
" I dare say you have left Meath and are back again in the
1917.1 FRANCIS LEDWIDGE 195
brown wides of Connaught. I would give one hundred pounds for
two days in Ireland with nothing to do but ramble on from one
delight to another. I am entitled to a leave now, but I'm afraid
there are many before my name in the list Special leaves are
granted and I have to finish a book for the autumn. But more par-
ticularly I want to see again my wonderful mother, and to walk by
the Boyne to Crewbawn and up through the brown and gray rocks
of Crocknaharna. You have no idea of how I suffer with this
longing for a swish of the reeds at Slane and the voices I used to
hear coming over the low hills of Currabwee. Say a prayer that
I may get this leave and give as a condition my punctual return and
sojourn till the war is over. It is midnight now and the glow-worms
are out. It is quiet in camp, but the far night is loud with our own
guns bombarding the positions we must soon fight for.
" I hope your boy in Macedonia is doing well and that your
other boy is still in Ireland."
One is quite sure that the blameless soul of Francis Ledwidge,
before it sped on its way to its ultimate Source and Goal flew over
the fields of Meath and hovered a while -near those scenes and
friends for whom he had so tender and faithful an attachment.
The completed manuscript of the Lenawn Shee he sent me
under date of July 27th. It reached me, as a similar manuscript
reached his constant friend, Lord Dunsany, on the morning of July
3 ist, the day he was killed.
THE GLORIES OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH.
BY F. AURELIO PALMIERI, O.S.A., PH.D.
I.
THE TRUTH.
HE traveler starting from the valley to climb to the
top, while still confined to the horizon of the valley,
has but the most limited grasp of the landscape. His
eyes cannot survey its rural beauties, because of the
walls of rock around him. Even the sky is partly
shut off from him. But as he advances up the ascent, the horizon
broadens: his eyes discover new lands, new verdant forests, new
and enchanting valleys; all creation seems to lie before him, and
above stretches the sky in serene resplendence. And when, at last,
the highest peak of the mountain is reached, he swims in an ocean
of light : his lips are silent as he gazes upon nature's marvels :
What a landscape lies below !
No clouds, no vapors intervene,
But the gay, the open scene,
Does the face of nature show,
In all the hues of heaven's bow;
And, swelling to embrace the light,
Spreads around beneath the sight.
. Old castles on the cliffs arise,
Proudly towering in the skies!
Rushing from the woods, the spires
Seem from hence ascending fires!
Half his beams Apollo sheds
On the yellow mountain heads!
Gilds the fleeces of the flocks,
And glitters on the broken rocks!
But, though his lips be silent, his heart repeats melodiously the
lyric accents of the Psalmist : " The heavens shew forth the glory of
God, and the firmament declareth the work of His hands" (Ps.
xviii.).
In like manner, a Catholic soul needs to ascend the heights to
enjoy a broader view of the Church of Christ on earth. At times,
the cares of our daily life shut us in and make us lose sight of that
I9I7-] THE GLORIES OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 197
harmonious whole which is the Catholic Church. We pay atten-
tion only to a particular corner of it; we fix our eyes upon a single
stone of its majestic building, and it seems to us so perfect, so
worthy of our admiration, that we cannot detach ourselves from its
contemplation. We linger on it in ecstasy, and fail to raise our eyes
to the summit, where the genius of the Divine Builder shines in the
fullness of his infinite wisdom. We are gratified by the features of
that small portion of the majestic building nearest our own vision,
and, so to speak, closest to our own interests, immediate needs and
limited range of action, and we easily forget that it is only on the
heights, the " top of Thabor," that we are able to embrace at one
glance the gigantic lines of the Church whose foundations Jesus
Christ laid and cemented with His Blood ; whose structure God and
man — divine grace and human will — have embellished for centuries.
We forget that the greatest, the most touching events of the life of
our Saviour took place on the summits, nearest heaven, and sim-
ilarly the greatness, the glory of the Church of Christ shines in a
more vivid light when we look at it from a higher point of view and
with broader horizons; when we regard it as not closed within the
narrow walls of a church or of a village, or limited by national fron-
tiers, but as overpowering the whole world, as setting up the uni-
versal brotherhood, as struggling for an ideal which has no land-
marks either of space or of time. Then, we see her as a gigantic
tree, whose branches cover the whole world, as a universal kingdom
which rules all the peoples and nations; as an intergrowth of
heaven and earth ; as the allied army of the invisible and the visible
world.
That the Catholic Church is the most perfect, we may say the
only one institution which may rightly claim the epithet of divine,
can readily be seen from these attributes. Even her adversaries are
forced to avow that her structure reveals the skill of a divine artist.
She is not denominational. She is simply the Church of Christ.
She realizes the ideal of a perfect society gathering into its bosom all
the true members of the mystical body of the Saviour. The princi-
ple of her unity was not implanted in her heart by man, for men are
used to divide, whereas the Church is the great unifying force of
mankind. If we study her life, if we peruse the records of hei
struggles, we shall see that her glory is as the glory of God. As
man was created to the image and likeness of God, so the Cath-
olic Church was built to the image and likeness of her divine Foun-
der. Ail the glories of Christ shine in her diadem, and illuminate her
198 THE GLORIES OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH [Nov.,
countenance, distinguishing her from the institutions built by the
hands of men, imprinting upon her the marks of the true Church of
Christ.
Among those glories, is the glory of truth. The Catholic
Church claims to possess it, and to have inherited the fullness of the
word of Christ. She claims to have preserved her doctrinal inheri-
tance among the discordant voices of false prophets and teachers.
She asserts, in her own behalf, a full authority over the patrimony
of truth which she has received. She claims the right to explain
the revealed word of God, to declare it, and clothe it with unchange-
able formulae. In fact, she has always exercised the noble mission
of the recipient and guardian of the truth, and we are Catholics pre-
cisely because we feel and are most sincerely convinced that her
claims to the exclusive possession of Christian truth are based on the
firmest grounds. It is not because of human interest, or petty am-
bition that we boast of our membership in the Catholic Church, for,
very often, we must sacrifice, for her, substantial advantages and
material welfare. Still less is it the outward beauty and splendor
of the Catholic Church which links our life to her life, and rivets
our heart to her heart. We love her, and we belong to her, soul
and body, because, as thinking beings, we adore the truth which we
receive from God through her: because, as Christians, we know
that Jesus Christ is the embodiment of truth, the Word of God made
man, and that the declaration and defence of Him as the Living
Truth, God and Man, are the work of the Catholic Church.
Whatever may be said of Our Lord Jesus Christ we are bound
to assert or to deny his Divinity. If we say that He is no more than
man, then as man He did not speak the language of truth, for He
claimed divine Sonship. Consequently, he would deserve to be
placed in a lower rank than the greatest founders of false reli-
gions, who attributed to themselves a divine mission, without deny-
ing their purely human nature or claiming divinity for themselves.
But if we kneel before Christ as God, and His Divinity is lumin-
ously proven by His work, the incomparable purity of His doctrine,
the sweet fruits of His teaching, the centuries of Christian civiliza-
tion, and the full regeneration of the human race, we must affirm
that He brought to us the truth of God, the Father. That truth
He heralded for all times and generations, and His claims to the
abiding character of His teachings would be groundless were His
doctrinal inheritance not assigned to a legitimate authority invested
with the charge to teach in His name.
I9I7-] THE GLORIES OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 199
That the Catholic Church embodies this legitimate authority
is certain because of the character of the truth which she announces
to the world. Truth is at once immutable and active. Her immo-
bility, however, is not that of a dead body. It is rather a mark of
her perfection, as immutability is one of the essential perfections
of God. As the living word of God, the Christian truth in the
Catholic Church does not alter its original features. The waves of
the ages do not efface them. Truth springs forth the perfect word
from its eternal source. It does not undergo the phases of growth
and decadence which characterize human life. It is not as the
leaves on the trees :
Now green in youth, now withering on the ground.
It is perpetually identical with itself, although men, in gazing at it,
discover new shades of beauty in its face, or see it in a brighter
light, or strive to add the ornaments of human skill to its native
simplicity.
Although immutable, the Christian truth in the Catholic Church
is not a dead formula. It is a living source of intellectual and moral
perfection, for Christ Himself, God and Man, lives in the heart of
the Catholic Church, in the hearts of her healthful members, and
this word, the word of truth, lives with Him. The true Church
of Christ is that which harmoniously blends the unchangeable-
ness of truth with the pulsations of an intense life: which under
the guidance of the Holy Ghost continues the work of Christ, the
enlightenment of every man " that cometh into this world," which
dispels the mists and darkness spread, from time to time, by deceit-
ful men over the undefiled teachings of the Saviour.
Christian truth partakes of the characteristic traits of the prin-
ciple of life. That principle is the source of the most varied move-
ments, a spring of activity and fecundity. So it is with the truth.
Outside the Catholic Church we do not find the admirable blending
of the above-quoted characteristic traits. On the one hand, as in
the Orthodox Church, we discover a lifeless immutability : entire
absence of any life-giving principle; on the other hand, in Protestant
denominations, the immutability of truth is sacrificed for ephemeral
outbursts of life, doomed to early death. On the one side we have
the truth as a soul without body ; on the other, we have a body with-
out soul, stirred by apparent vital movements. Therefore, in neither
direction may we find the harmony and perfection of truth, any
more than we could find the harmony and perfection of man, in a
200 THE GLORIES OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH [Nov.,
soul divorced from the body, or in a dead body animated by an
electric current. The perfect and substantial union of soul and
body, the perfect blending of an immortal principle of life with a
mortal frame constitutes the living man; and, similarly, in perfect
truth immutability and activity are necessary to each other.
In the Catholic Church alone truth lives a full life, avoiding
both stagnation and feverish delirium. The Catholic Church fol-
lows the middle course. She does not fall into the excesses of either
extreme. She does not lay away in a golden coffin the truths of
Christian revelation, nor squander them to suit the capricious tastes
of superficial hordes. By her conduct, the Catholic Church proves
that the truth of Christ is living in her bosom.
A French physiologist defined life as a power which relent-
lessly withstands the destructive energies of death. There is some
truth in the definition, although it does not express exactly that
mysterious essence which makes life. We may also say that, to
some extent, the life of Christian truth is associated with the power
of resistance to the forces of error assailing it. Christian truth
lives in men and among men, and consequently it cannot escape the
hostility and hatred of its foes. As the struggle with evil is a daily
manifestation of the life of the Church which is called the City
of God, built up against the strongholds of Satan, so the struggle
with error is the daily task of Christian truth. Hence it follows
that those branches of Christianity severed from the Catholic
Church which pretend that the struggle has ceased, which state that
the Church should no longer repel the assaults of the falsifiers of
the teaching of Jesus Christ, plainly misunderstand the role of the
Church in her earthly life. And this is the case with the Orthodox
Churches of the East.
They practically reduce to powerlessness the intellectual activ-
ity of the Church, as heir of the teaching mission of Christ. They
do not deny that Christian faith rests on the ground of Holy Writ,
of the apostolic traditions, and the dogmatic definitions of Ecumeni-
cal Councils. But they regard the period of doctrinal development
of Christian truth as closed with the eighth century. Hence
they accuse the Catholic Church of having corrupted the de-
posit of Christian revelation committed to her charge. The Cath-
olic Church is scorned for introducing innovations in the realms
of dogmatic truths, of discipline and of liturgy ; for having surrep-
titiously introduced into the Christian revelation some doctrines
which were unknown to the Fathers of the earlier Church ; and for
1917.] THE GLORIES OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 201
having obstinately convoked Ecumenical Councils after the fatal
date of the eighth century. And in accordance with its principles,
Eastern Orthodoxy rejects the possibility of further dogmatic defi-
nitions, and holds that the Church of Christ which once spoke
through the lips of the Bishops of Rome, or in the solemn assem-
blies of the Ecumenical Councils, is doomed to perpetual silence for
all time to come. The magisterial task of the Church has lost its
meaning in the Orthodox beliefs and practices. " The dogmas of our
Church," writes the most famous historian of the Greek Church,
Diornedes Kyriakos, " are the dogmas of Christian antiquity. East-
ern Orthodoxy did not commit the sin of adding new dogmatic defi-
nitions to the teaching of the Holy Fathers. The history of its the-
ology does not mention any change in its doctrine. It reproduces
the ancient Christian faith, which developed in the earliest cen-
turies under the influence and the genius of the Greek Fathers. We
cling firmly to the true and authentic faith, which the Apostles
preached in Greek to the Hellenic World."1
Why after the eighth century the Church, the guardian of
Christian truth, was obliged to renounce her ceaseless struggle with
error, is a point which Orthodox theology has never been able to
explain. Neither revelation, nor the apostolic tradition, nor the
Ecumenical Councils themselves ever defined or suggested that the
intellectual activity of the Church in the domain of Christian dog-
matics was exhausted at the close of the eighth century. Down to
that epoch, as would appear from all the ecclesiastical records, the
Church heroically grappled with all kinds of heresies which at-
tempted to substitute the tinsel of human opinion for the pure gold
of revealed truth. In all their writings, the Fathers claim for the
Church the right of driving from her pastures the sowers of tares
and the preachers of novelties; of placing in a fuller light those
teachings of the Saviour which were wrapped in a veil of mystery ;
of stating in a more appropriate and precise form by dogmatic defini-
tions the meanings of the evangelical truths. The work of defining
and formulating the dogmatic truths of Christian faith never ceased
in any age of the life of the Church. Heresies against the Divinity
and Personality of Jesus Christ, against the blessed Motherhood of
Mary, against the divine constitutions of the Church, were exploded,
pulverized, buried by the force of the Ecumencial Councils, in full
exercise of their teaching functions, or by the decisions of the
Roman See. Truths which are scarcely outlined in the earliest doc-
lAntipopiku, Athens, 1893, p. 40.
202 THE GLORIES OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH [Nov.,
uments of the primitive Church, after the debates of the Councils,
appeared in all the brilliancy of their divine origin : the craftiness
of heresies was detected ; ambiguous expressions in the formularies
of faith were proscribed; and the sophistry of heresiarchs gagged
forever. Thus, truths which lay unperceived within the deposit of
Christian revelation, and which were implicitly believed by the
conscience of Christianity, came forth to challenge the wiles and
subtleties of the novelty-loving reformers.
The Church did not hesitate to coin new words, and to clothe
with them the unchanging doctrines of the teaching of Christ.
From the very outset, the history of the development of the Chris-
tian thought is filled with carefully coined words, which by their
mathematical exactness close all access to the creeping in of dog-
matic alterations. And the Eastern Church accepted as divinely in-
spired the philological work of the Ecumencial Councils. Even in
a later age, the Church dared to introduce in her symbolical docu-
ments a term which scholastic theology had forged and adopted to
express with admirable precision the Eucharistic mystery, the term
" transubstantiation." By her conduct and her utterances she ac-
knowledged the elaboration of dogmatic formulae by the infallible
authority of the Church to be wholesome and beneficial to Chris-
tian faith.
Why, then, through the mouths of their theologians, do the
Eastern Churches affirm that the teaching office of the Church as
concerns a clearer and more precise explanation of dogmatic truths,
came to an end at the close of the eighth century? Did later cen-
turies produce no lovers of novelties, who spread the darkness of
human beliefs over the eternal truth of Christ? Could we affirm
that the dogmatic tenets of the so-called Reformation, or the bold
denials of modern rationalism, are less dangerous to the purity of
Christian faith than the attacks of the ancient Christological here-
siarchs against the Divinity of Christ ? Or has the Church lost her
vitality to the point of being utterly unable to discover the cockle
among the wheat and to extirpate it ? Were it so, the Church would
sink to the level of human institutions which are swept away by
the rising tides of time. After a period of youthful life, and all
the fruitful labors of her maturity, she would suffer the dread-
ful symptoms of a decrepitude hurrying on to death. May one say
that it is useless to raise a battering ram against the citadels of
error? No man of good sense would yield assent to that proposi-
tion. Christian truth has not only the right, but the duty of holding
1917-] THE GLORIES OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 203
its ground, of warding off the invaders, and if the Church is the
guardian of that truth, she cannot claim exemption from her office
of enlightening the ignorance of her children, of preventing them
from tasting poisonous food, of answering the objections of her
foes.
It is absolutely false to say that the sophistry of error in the
realm of dogmatic truth no longer exists, no longer fights aggres-
sively. We learn from history that error rises up from its contin-
uous defeats, and puts on new garbs, according to the latest fashion.
Error numbers among its following many mediocrities, who are
amazed at its high-sounding, sonorous periods, and at the glittering
pomp of its language. It spreads its influence by using the plumage
of truth, and because of the speciousness of its fallacies. This
being so, why do the Eastern Churches refuse to do the work they
once did with wonderful success when the Church was undivided,
and when they recognized " a first see in the world, and a supreme
court of Christianity" (Theodoret of Cyrus). Alas! through
their inertia, the Eastern Churches show that they have lost the
possession of living truth ! They have condemned themselves to a
self-isolation. Alexander Rangabe, a Greek historian of mod-
ern Greek literature, frankly avows that they have cut short the
theological development of Christian faith. They are impotently
idle, a fatal languor has seized them, their blood has ceased to
flow. Schism has crippled their energies. Without a centre of
unity they cannot realize what St. Vincent of Lerins called a
" vehement progress in understanding, in knowledge, and wisdom
with regard to faith." They have left to the Catholic Church alone
the glorious mission of preserving the teaching of Christ in its na-
tive purity, of avoiding both a lifeless inactivity and the disintegra-
tion of the doctrinal body of true Christian revelation. They have
exhausted the literary fecundity of the Hellenic genius in the realm
of speculative theology.
By the uninterrupted exercise of her supreme magisterium the
Catholic Church has built up a theological system which, as an im-
pregnable rock, withstands all the attacks of heresies, schisms and
human aberrations. By repudiating her guidance and authority,
with regard to the truth, Protestantism went to the extreme dia-
metrically opposite to Orthodoxy — to doctrinal anarchy; and has
now succeeded in blurring the original features of Christianity. In
the maze of warring creeds, and conflicting statements, and chang-
ing dogmas, which in Protestantism sap the foundations of Chris-
204 THE GLORIES OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH [Nov.,
tian faith, one cannot recognize the characteristic traits of the truth
preached by Jesus Christ to men.
Teachers who dogmatize in their own name, and take to them-
selves the mission of correcting, rehandling and renewing the doc-
trine of Christ, substitute their own image for His, or so con-
found both as to make identification impossible. As the image of
Christ, as Christ still living in the world, the Church is " the pillar
and ground of the truth." They who work not with her, destroy the
ground and shatter the pillar. Under their hands the doctrinal body
of Christian truth has been broken into a thousand pieces.
The history of Christian thought shows that the great crime
of the disruption of Christian unity has produced, outside of the
Catholic Church, either an intellectual stagnation or the loss of
Christian beliefs. Here the dullness of a corpse-like catalepsy;
there the Babel-like confusion of tongues. The East ceased to draw
fresh water from the wells of Christian speculation : the Reformed
West nearly submerged Christian truth under a flood of bold nega-
tions. The former by sluggishness, the latter by tumult, have
impeded the victory of divine truth over human error.
From what we have said it follows that it is refreshing, con-
soling and invigorating for a Catholic soul to dwell in contempla-
tion upon the everlasting titles to glory of the Catholic Church.
Those titles .constitute her outward beauty. The beauty of the
Catholic Church does not shine chiefly in the monuments of marble,
or bronze, or stone erected to her by the artistic genius of her
children. It consists, above all, in her mystical life: in her soul,
the perennial source of life, of holiness and of high moral
perfection, in her mind, the truest mirror of the divine truth.
It is the vision of that glory and beauty of the Catholic Church
which strengthens our faith, and guides our steps. We see
in her utterances the distinguishing marks of truth, and conse-
quently we claim for her, and for her alone, the glory of truth.
Truth lives; truth revives; truth pursues its victorious ways; error
falls before it. Such truth, living and reviving, combating and
overcoming error, is found only in the Catholic Church, which
teaches and defines, and proclaims and explains the true meaning of
Christian revelation by the infallible agency of the supreme Pontiff.
Truth also is one. Unity, so to speak, is the silk of its wedding-
dress; the gem of its wedding-ring. The partisans of error war
against each other; each speaks his own language. Truth, on the con-
trary, speaks to all the same language ; it silences hatreds, and still
I9I7-] A SONG 205
contests; it is a force of cohesion which gathers around the same
altar all its followers from the remotest corners of the world. In
its sanctuary divided hearts fuse into one heart; conflicting minds
acquiesce in one mind; rebellious wills yield to its supreme, con-
vincing and authoritative word. Such is the character of Christian
truth in the Catholic Church. The possession of the living and
unifying truth is a title of glory. The Catholic Church holds that
title. The glory of truth illumines her habitation, and dwelling in
her we experience the fulfillment of that promise of Our Lord and
Saviour Jesus Christ, " I will not leave you orphans."
A SONG.
BY CHARLES J. QUIRK, S.J.
" Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu."
THE SEEKER.
OH, Joy ! I prithee wait until I come ;
Go not from me. O see ! the soil is wet
With bloody footprints and the sun is set.
Oh, Joy ! I prithee wait until I come !
CHRIST.
i
Sad heart ! sad heart ! I prithee come with Me ;
I, too, am weary and My soul is sad ;
But Night shall end and I shall make thee glad
Sad heart ! sad heart ! I prithee come with Me !
THE PORTRAIT.
BY ANNA T. SADLIER.
[HE portrait hung over the piano, in a quaint house,
which had stood since the pre-Revolutionary times,
on the southwestern portion of Long Island, not so
very far from where the battle of Long Island was
fought. The portrait, like the house, had survived the
Revolutionary storm. It was that of a young girl, who had been
fair to look upon. The blue eyes, long-lashed and prettily shad-
owed, seemed to look into futurity. There were deep, deep
thoughts, indeed, in that half wistful, half eager countenance. The
lips were red and slightly smiling. The costume, in that half length
presentment, was a ball gown of white displaying the slender youth-
fulness of the figure, the drapery of tulle around the shoulders,
caught by a single rose. The room in which the portrait hung, was
square and old-fashioned, with high-silled windows and lozenged
panes. From a broad hall outside a winding staircase, with small,
low lamps, led up to the top of the house. There in a neglected
corner stood a square box of oak, with a finely carved lid containing
the story of the portrait, or rather of its original, which I, as a
friend of the family, was permitted to read. The leaves of those
written pages were yellow and the ink pale ; but I managed to make
it out and this is, in some sort, how those disjointed fragments of a
life history appeared to one, who sat by the window on the stairway
and read, with an interest that never flagged, during the course of
a long, summer afternoon. Some of those entries in the diary,
which had not become obliterated by time, may be here reproduced.
The original of the portrait, Marion Lawrence, had been born
and bred in that house, which was already old when the Revolution-
ary storm swept over the country. She had spent all her youth there,
where the surges from the coast sounded in her ears and lent
something of melancholy to the dreams of her girlhood. She was
about nineteen when the portrait was painted. But the diary dates
back some three years before and goes onwards to record, with
more or less regularity, the chief events of her life. It gives glimp-
ses of a nature born to suffer and feel profoundly the incidents that
cluster around even the most ordinary life.
I9I7-J THE PORTRAIT 207
" Today," begins the diary, " I am sixteen. Mamma and
grandmamma have told me the same thing, that I am no longer a
child and must conduct myself like a grown-up person. That makes
me feel sad, as I do when I hear the waves dashing on the shore at
night. It was so pleasant to be a child and play there on the beach,
and run with the dogs and weave flower chains. Even in this
bright noonday I seem to be afraid, as if I were being pushed
on towards something. I have not told this to anyone, except the
new woolly puppy. He only shook his long ears as though he did
not desire the confidence.
" It is All Saints' Day and that makes one's spirits rise. Grand-
mamma says such charming things about heaven and about the
saints, I can almost see them up there upon those ' hills of Sion, all
clothed in living green.' She says their faces are radiant with joy
as they move at will through vast spaces, so beautiful that all the
beauties of earth do but faintly mirror them ; or they walk in snow
white garments, washed in the Blood of the Lamb, beside the River
of Life, over pavements of molten gold, or within walls of precious
stones. She made me read from her leathern prayer book, with its
heavy clasps of silver, that hymn, Justus ut palmis, which sounded
so splendid from the choir of the church. Mamma, who is not a
Catholic, laughed when she heard me reading from the book, but I
fancied she was a little vexed, too. And she said that grandmamma
was trying to make me into a precocious, little saint before my time.
Grandmamma looked up at her, over the gold-rimmed spectacles,
with that look of hers all kindness and gentleness, and she said : ' Do
not be afraid, Sophia. Saints are far more rare than diamonds, and
mostly they are gems cut and polished by suffering. We are fortu-
nate if we can but bring some pale ray of their sanctity into our
lives, and let it shine like morning sunlight on the young.'
" Mamma only shook her head and made such a pretty, little
grimace. She is very pretty and young to have a grown-up daugh-
ter. ' Youth is short,' she said, ' and must not be burdened with
the wisdom of age. I want Marion, for the present, to interest her-
self in pretty frocks and gay, young cavaliers.'
" ' All well in their way,' responded grandmamma, ' and our
Marion will take to both kindly enough, as they come along.' I was
quite confused because of the look, half smiling and half sad, which
grandmamma gave me. Then when my mother had left the room,
she took hold of my hand and squeezed it hard.
" ' My child,' she said, ' these other things will come easier,
208 THE PORTRAIT [Nov.,
perhaps, to your temperament, but keep a place warm in your heart
for God ami His saints, and remember always that your destination
is that beautiful city where there is no mourning nor weeping.' "
" It is a day of early November; all my flowers are dead and
there is rain in the air. The clouds are hanging low, and last night
the waves beat so loud on the shore and the wind was blowing a
hurricane. All sorts of thoughts crowded into my mind that fly
like ghosts when the light comes. I buried my head in the clothes,
for I seemed to see drowned mariners going down to awful depths
full of terrible monsters, and people with agonized faces drifting
about on rafts or clinging to wrecked ships. I prayed for them all
on All Souls."
" November loth. This morning I woke very early and there
was a pale gold over everything. The earth outside, in the new
light of day, seemed as if it, too, were young. All my fears fled
away and my heart beat with joy. Mamma is taking me to New
York, to get a lot of pretty frocks and a bonnet of white chip,
wreathed with flowers. I am so excited I can scarcely think of any-
thing else, and very nearly forgot my morning prayers. But then,
as mamma says, I cannot have an old head upon young shoulders.
I hear her calling now, and we shall go across the river on the old
scow. Oh, how I love the bright, sparkling water; the sail will be
charming, and New York is so big, so big — like a new world after
this quiet place."
In the next few pages she is swept along in a new current, full
of other thoughts and emotions, until in her eighteenth year Marion
is introduced into society ; not only that which the immediate neigh-
borhood afforded, but such balls and routs, dinners, picnics and
supper parties as the life of colonial New York offered. She visited
at one house or another ; she drove in fine coaches, and promenaded,
with young girls of her age, on the Parade or passed the Bowling
Green where officers of the garrison were assembled. She entered,
with her whole heart into that life of gayety so, that very often,
she forgot to inscribe the various happenings in her diary, just as
she occasionally forgot both morning and evening prayers. As
was evident from the scattered entries, her mother delighted in
her daughter's success and her grandmother was far too wise to
cast a shadow over the brilliant sunlight of that young existence.
She listened, with an indulgent smile, to the girl's rhapsodies over
1917.] THE PORTRAIT 209
some new admirer, or some particularly gay assembly. Only, she
put in a word now and then when she could, about the end of the
way whither the gayest feet are tending, and kept the girl faithful
to many small practices of devotion as well as to the fundamentals
of her Faith.
" I love the world so," wrote the girl, in the journal of her
eighteenth birthday, " and I love pleasure and gayety and the beau-
tiful dresses with which mamma loads me. How good and kind
she is, and how proud of my success. When she sees me surrounded
with the most eligible young men, one would say that she is as
happy as I am. How can anyone be unhappy in such a glorious
world? And yet, at times, when I wake early in the morning or
in the middle of the night, my old fears come back and I seem to
be dreading something. Mamma says it is silly to attend too much
to our own sensations, but grandmamma seemed to know when I
told her. She says it takes many years to understand oneself."
The first entry concerning the portrait was made in December.
" It is an exquisite day, though wintry. The hoar frost is over ev-
erything; the bare trees gleam in the morning sunshine, and the
ground and the leafless bushes in the garden are glittering, too.
I love things that are bright and glittering. I am having my por-
trait painted ; the painter is an old man with mournful eyes. I hope
he won't make me mournful, too. I am wearing that same gown
in which I was presented to society. Between the times that I
wear it, it is kept away in silk paper and lavender; one^has to be
careful of a gown like that. It will have to be worn so many times.
It is strange to think that that portrait of me will, perhaps, be here
when I am old, with white hair and wrinkles like grandmother. It
frightens me to think of that time. So many things frighten me :
fears that fall upon my heart and soul like cold lead. I wonder
where they come from — shadows, perhaps, from death so gray
and weird."
*******
" The portrait will soon be finished ; both mamma and grand-
mamma like it very much. The old painter — he is as much as
forty-five, they say — fcas not made me look so very mournful after
all ; only, he seems to have put into my eyes some of those thoughts
that often make me turn pale in my lightest moments, or cause the
tears to gather under my lids. Grandmamma says that while learn-
ing to know ourselves, we must guard against being egotistical.
Perhaps young people always are; I don't know. In a diary it
VOL. CVI. — 14
2io THE PORTRAIT [Nov.,
doesn't matter, no one will ever read it. When I am most afraid,
and shadows pass over my soul, I like to creep near to grand-
mamma; she is so still and tranquil, as though she had passed
through all the storms."
Quite soon after the painting of the portrait occurs the first
reference to a notable event in that hitherto uneventful girlhood : a
courtship which led to marriage. " I met Monsieur de Chambrun
at dinner. He has a very graceful manner and his eyes are very
gay, as if he saw only the sunshine. They are not so dark as those
of most of his nation. Rather a gray or hazel. This young man
interests me more than any I have met, and he seems to have a
preference for my society. I should like to ask him if he found
life all gayety : perhaps those of his sex do not feel fear and sadness
as we do. But, of course, I cannot ask him such intimate questions
yet. When I know him better I shall do so ...... Nothing is
talked of now but war, war, war ; it seems already such a very long
time since war was declared. This gay, young man, whom they
say is wonderfully brave, has left his own country to be a soldier
with General Washington. He followed Monsieur de Lafayette
from France. They are cousins."
" This evening mamma invited Monsieur de Chambrun to din-
ner with some other officers from General Putnam's camp. I put
on my prettiest dress and looked a good while in the mirror. It
seems odd that I should be so anxious to please him. I saw him
look at me when I came into the room. I wonder what he thought.
After supper he stood and looked for sometime at my portrait;
then he came and sat down beside me. ' Yes, mademoiselle,' he
said, ' the portrait is a true resemblance in so far as it may be. It
is hard to do justice to such an original. It speaks, that portrait,
and tells many things.'
" I wondered what those things were, but, naturally, I could
not ask him. Perhaps they are the thoughts that the painter has
put there. He stayed for sometime beside me; we seemed to find
a good deal to say to each other. He made me laugh a good xleal,
but I think I liked him best when he did not laugh but said in a low
voice some things which it pleased me very much to hear. It is so
still tonight, except when the wind stirs the dry leaves or whispers in
the trees outside my window. It is like a voice calling and it makes
me afraid as though it were telling me things which I don't want to
I9I7-] THE PORTRAIT 211
hear. The waves on the shore are murmuring, too, in a great calm-
ness. They remind me of sunny mornings when I played on the
beach. This continual talk of war is depressing, and it makes me
shudder to think of Monsieur de Chambrun — of all those gallant
men — going into battle. It brings before my mind scenes of suffer-
ing and death. Sometimes when our own brave Continental troops
are defeated I could cry my eyes out. It makes us all despondent.
When I tell grandmamma of all the mournful things that come,
sometimes, to chase away my cheerfulness she bids me pray. But I
can't pray like her, I become distracted. Since mamma is a Prot-
estant and I have been much with her of late, I find it harder to
pray.
" Monsieur de Chambrun is a good Catholic. Perhaps that
is why grandmamma likes him so much. I think she would wish
me to listen to his suit, if he should speak. As yet he has said
nothing, at least in words, of such a serious matter as marriage, and
I may be only vain and presumptuous to imagine that he will some-
time do so. In any case I shall be very unhappy when he goes away.
Since the camp is not very far away he comes often now. He took up
grandmamma's rosary this evening and kissed the cross so pret-
tily when he returned it to her. She had dropped it from her
reticule, and she blushed like a girl at being caught praying in the
drawing-room. After he had gone she said to me: ' I pray God
that my little lady-bird may love and marry so good a man.' I was
so confused that I did not answer, but she only smiled and kissed
me."
A page or two farther forward, after the various incidents in
that delightful, young romance are duly recorded, there comes an
entry which is like a clarion note of joy : " My heart tonight is
overflowing with happiness. Henri de Chambrun has spoken. He
went first to mamma and grandmamma, who were both delighted,
the former because he is such a good match; then he came to me.
I was in the drawing-room, beside the piano over which my portrait
hangs. The moonlight was streaming in so as to pale the tapers.
I cannot write down here all he said, though in truth it was not
much. But there is the one thing of which I am certain : he loves
me, and he prays that because of the uncertainty of military service,
our marriage may take place soon. He looked up at my portrait and
said : ' To think that I have won the far more beautiful original!' '
Very shortly after, an item which occupies but a few lines of
the journal, chronicles a wedding at St. Joseph's Church, Philadel-
212 THE PORTRAIT [Nov.,
phia, with Father Farmer, S.J., officiating. There is, too, the
echo of distant cannonading, and the rumor of a great victory mak-
ing the very air jubilant. In some of those pages, which the hand
of time has obliterated, there were, no doubt, hints of the gloom
and despondency of Valley Forge, when the patriot army, barefoot
and half clothed, slept upon the frozen ground; and of the joy and
exultation of Princeton, Saratoga or Trenton. During the absence
of the young husband, who had been placed on the staff of General
Schuyler, the hope and courage of the bride are sustained by the
faith and piety of her grandmother. " Grandmamma and I are in-
tensely patriotic, and sometimes mamma laughs at me a little and
says it is as well I had not a Tory lover, instead of a French one.
But that is merely her way of jesting." There are pretty, little side
lights thrown upon the great struggle, the patriotism of the women
in depriving themselves of fine clothing and other luxuries; and
glimpses given here and there of the Americans, who fast were mak-
ing history, and their gallant allies, Lafayette, Pulaski and Kosci-
usko. All of these made flying visits to her home in company
with Monsieur de Chambrun. At last there is the despairing entry :
" Oh, boundless, measureless grief ! All the shadows, all the
clouds that used to obscure the sunshine are as nothing. Dear God,
shall I ever feel happy again? Will this black veil that obscures
everything be ever lifted? Will this pain ever lessen? Death has
come so close. Terrifying, awful ! It has swept away grandmother,
whom I loved and him, him. I saw my portrait yesterday, still
hanging in the old place, and I fled from it. Its smile mocked me.
Enough has befallen to chase that smile forever from my lips. Only
I can pray now. I can take grandmamma's rosary and pour out
my soul. Oh, what strength she has given me by her beautiful faith.
To pray for the dead. Ah! that makes sorrow less. I could not
endure this pain were it not for that.
" The old fears oppress me at night ; they close heavy and
dark around me, till, like a dream of brighness, comes the remem-
brance of grandmamma's smiling, old face. I dreamed of her last
night, as she used to sit there with her rosary. She turned her
head and looked at that exquisite Madonna which always hung in
her room. I awoke, cheered and comforted, though the sound of
the waves on the shore sounded loud and omnious, and the moon-
light streaming across my floor was cold and pale. All the next
day I was able to tell myself, that though the worst has happened
to me, for those I love, it is the best. Grandmamma is with the saints
1917.] THE PORTRAIT 213
of whom she used to talk, and he, my beloved, has died a noble
death, receiving the last Sacraments, as the chaplain wrote me, with
true faith and resignation and sending me his love with his last
breath. Perhaps that is why the sunshine was always with him;
that he was never to know the shadows of life."
After a pause of several years, during which it seems prob-
able that Marion was absent frequently, if not all the time, from
home, the chronicle is resumed abruptly:
" And so I have acceded at last to mamma's pressing entreaties,
and have agreed to marry Horace Winslow. He is very wealthy
and we have been poor since the war. This marriage will be such
a help to my poor mother; but as to me, it tears open all those
wounds which I thought were closed. Like mamma, my husband
that is to be is a Protestant. If grandmamma had lived should I
have done so? Who can say? I am to be married in sober gray,
and very quietly. This is my wish though mamma is disappointed.
But I want it to be as different as possible from that other wedding,
where all was youth and hope. I have prevailed in so far that the
priest will marry us. He is to come here to perform the ceremony.
It seems to me heart-breaking that I cannot be married before
God's altar. How weak I have been, and I scarce dare ask for help
and guidance. On that other day, which memory keeps recalling
to torture me, we received Communion together — Henri and I. The
poor, little widow, who must remain a widow at heart, will try to
do her best. Perhaps I may win this other to the Catholic Faith, if
I am strong enough to give him good example. But I fear my own
weakness."
That she had need of strength became all too soon apparent.
One entry after another told briefly and bitterly of dire unhappiness,
even of harsh ill-treatment on the part of her second husband, due
to her own efforts to remain faithful to the religion which her
grandmother had striven to plant deep in her heart. Then came
cries of anguish in the birth and death of two children, whom se-
cretly and without the knowledge of her husband she had contrived
to have baptized. Through all those pages runs, like a silver thread,
the memory of her grandmother sustaining her hope and courage.
Finally there is the still sadder record of her own weakness and in-
stability when exhausted by many griefs, and through the combined
influence of her husband and her mother she virtually loses her
Faith and plunges into a very vortex of worldly pleasure, living
abroad in the various capitals of Europe. The entries during that
214 THE PORTRAIT [Nov.,
period are few and very perfunctory as though she had not the mind
to put down in black and white the true sentiments of her heart.
She describes on one page a ball dress, designed for her presenta-
tion to the French court, that of Napoleon, of cloth of silver in the
fashion of the empire and upon her neck a circlet of diamonds, and
she adds :
" My pearls, my dear precious pearls ! which Madame de Cham-
brun might well wear, belonged to that other self which is dead and
buried. All is brilliant and glittering now, like the 'diamonds, and
certainly it is a gay, splendid world here. Only I am glad that I
never hear the surges on the beach, which used to terrify me as a
girl. A girl whose childhood lasted past her teens. Mamma is al-
ways near and enjoys it so much." Only once there is a cry of
despair :
" Why should I conceal from you, my diary, that I have mar-
ried a brute. Even mamma has no idea of my sufferings. He
taunts me with the Faith I have given up for him. He is an unbe-
liever, a reprobate. His conduct is scandalous, though he tries to
keep up appearances before the world, which always condones the
wickedness of a man who spends his wealth lavishly. Could I but
call on God for help, but no, that is impossible."
Harsh treatment, as is briefly recorded somewhat later, is
followed by desertion, abandonment. It is only after several years
that she again writes in the long neglected journal, which has ac-
companied her in all her wanderings. She has returned home alone,
for her mother is dead and her husband, when last heard from,
living in Russia. She describes herself thus, with a touch of
cynical frankness:
" Here I am at last, visible to mortal eyes, an old, wizened
woman. The wrinkles in my face are hidden under a coating of
paint and powder; the touch of red in either cheek is unnatural;
my curled hair is false, false as my life has been for years. I
tremble no more at the sound of the waves on the shore, the wind
in the trees. The worst has happened. Fear is as dead as hope.
Sorrow is felt no more."
The next entry is unconsciously but splendidly dramatic:
" Today, today I entered, for the first time since my return,
the drawing-room and stood before my portrait. It was youth and
age confronting one another. Oh, how I shrink and tremble before
that young, brave, hopeful figure, those eyes that smile. In those
eyes is the shadow of the future which the painter, which Henri
I9i7-] THE PORTRAIT 215
saw. Oh, my God, my God! beside the portrait on the piano,
as if placed there by an invisible hand, was grandmother's prayer
book. Oh, how infinitely right she was when she spoke of the
strength I should need and strove to lay foundations upon the
shifting sands of my unstable nature. I threw myself upon my
knees, sobbing before that picture of my other self, seeming to see
once more the gentle figure of grandmother, and crying to her from
the very depth of my spirit to guide and teach me once more."
There is a final entry in her own hand, when once more she
has settled down to her life in the old home : " The waves
beating on the shore last night had to me, in my old age,
a sound of joy and triumph. Perhaps it is an echo of that
shoreless ocean whither my course is tending. Sometimes I could
cry aloud for very gladness of spirit. In repentance I have found
peace. In heart I am young again, playing a happy child upon the
shore, though the frost of many winters silvers my head. Grand-
mother, and my heart's best beloved, Henri, are waiting for me over
there and calling. When I leave the dear, old home again, it will
be to go to them in those happy mansions of which grandmother
talked so much, and when I shall have won complete forgiveness of
all those wasted years.
" The poor are my constant visitors now, the orphans, and the
good sisters who have come from France to care for them. The
war added much to their number. They come across the water from
New York to spend the day with me ; or sometimes to sing at Mass
or vespers in the chapel which was once grandmother's room.
They pray there for her and Henri, for mamma, too, though alas !
that she was not of the Faith. And so rejoicing I wait for the end."
There is a brief inscription after that in another hand. It
briefly records the death of Marion Winslow at an advanced age,
and after some years of benefactions to the poor and numberless
deeds of kindness to all. Her phantom, continues the worn and
faded manuscript, is said to haunt that house. Now it is the old
woman, withered and frail, the spirit of a spirit. But more often it
is the embodied spirit of youth, the true spirit of the house, as shown
in the portrait.
THE PLAY OF JULIUS CAESAR.
BY EMILY HICKEY.
PART from some external evidences, there is in the
play of Julius Casar a good deal of the evidence we
call internal, as to its belonging to the middle period
of Shakespeare's work. The characterization is fine,
and we feel the reserve and sense of proportion which
do not usually belong to early work, and which certainly did not
belong to Shakespeare's first plays. This play is not disfigured by
those worrying puns and conceits which we strive to think reason-
able in the mouths of certain conditions of men, with an uneasy
feeling of desire for their absence. The only things of this nature
in Julius Casar which really grate upon us are Antony's :
A world, thou wast the forest to this hart ;
And this indeed, O world, the heart of thee.
And the conceit of Caesar's blood, " rushing out of doors to be re-
solved if Brutus so unkindly knocked or no." Rosalind in Arden
may make the pun on the word hart ; but fie upon Antony !
The versification is free and harmonious with few of the early
work rhymes, and without the strongly marked tendencies observ-
able in Shakespeare's latest work to run one line into another by
ending it with a word on which the voice. does not, or cannot rest.
Neither have we the difficulties and obscurities of expression which
we find in the last period of our poet's work ; nor yet the compres-
sion of thought which seems to have grown with the growth of the
thought itself. We have not, in the play before us, those closely
packed lines that seem, at first, as if they could hardly bear the
weight laid upon them ; and yet bear it and bear it right nobly.
As to the origin of this play, although Shakespeare may, to a
slight extent, have been indebted to Appian's Chronicle in its de-
scription of Antony's oratorical art, there is no doubt that to Sir
Thomas North's englishing of Plutarch he was more than deeply
indebted. In this, as in the other Roman plays, Coriolanus and
Antony and Cleopatra, the poet stands in a special relation to his
original. In using his materials, he knew what to alter, what to leave
unchanged. What he borrows is usually borrowed in the rough;
1917.] THE PLAY OF JULIUS C1ESAR 217
he has to free his gold from its ore: he has to cut his jewel until it
catches the light on its many facets and becomes a wonder and a
glory ; but in the three Roman plays it is not so. The very wording
of North is frequently used, and it has been noticed that many
touches which seem to be essentially Shakespearean are to be found
in the pages of this noble translation, and yet we have Shakespeare,
not North. Shakespeare takes from North's Plutarch the gift he is
to give to us : it is a good gift, and as such he will give it ; but it must
pass through him, and behold in some wonderful fashion it is the
same and yet not the same. We may go to the " pasture of great
souls," as Plutarch's work has been called, and find delight and
nutrition, but we come to Shakespeare and receive more and greater
most abundantly.
We note the influence of the Renaissance upon Shakespeare in
the deep imbuing of his mind with the sense of " the grandeur that
was Rome." He could recognize how great was her greatness : he
felt the true Roman to have been an image of strength, a man simple,
resolute and brave. Of Antonio, the merchant of Venice, it is said
that he is " one in whom the ancient Roman honor more appears
than any that draws breath in Italy." " I am more an antique
Roman than a Dane," says that ideal friend, Horatio.
In all Shakespeare's Roman women there is not a moral flaw :
Volumnia, Valeria, Portia, Octavia, all are worthy to share the life
of a Roman citizen, and to bear him sons and daughters worthy of
" the breed of noble blood." Apart from the distinctively Roman
plays, we can trace the same admiration and sympathy for Rome
and the Romans. In one of his poems Shakespeare has treated the
story of Lucrece, the chaste and noble; the scene of Cymbeline is
partly laid at Rome, and there are many allusions to Rome and her
children scattered throughout the plays.
Shakespeare's imagination appears to have been more than
strongly impressed by him whom he makes Brutus call " the fore-
most man of all this world ;" and in the first scene of the third act of
Richard III. there occurs one of the most remarkable mentions of
the great Roman leader:
That Julius Caesar was a famous man;
With what his valor did enrich his wit,
His wit set down to make his valor live.
Death makes no conquest of this conqueror,
For now he lives in fame, though not in life.
Other striking mentions of Caesar could be recalled.
218 THE PLAY OF JULIUS CJESAR [Nov.,
All this should be borne in mind when we come to consider
the statement which has been made that the play named after Csesar
has Brutus for its true hero; that Caesar is represented in a light
that is actually unheroic: that we see but little of him, and that
little disfigured by what Rosalind calls " thrasonical brag," and by
irresolution, the offspring of superstition, in the scene where Cal-
purnia urges that in the face of such evil omens as there have been,
he shall not go forth, and he says:
Caesar shall forth : the things that threatened me
Ne'er looked but on my back. When they shall see
The face of Csesar, they are vanished.
Again :
Danger knows full well,
That Caesar is more dangerous than he.
We are two lions littered in one day,
And I the elder and more terrible.
Again, at the senate-house, Caesar insists on his own firm-
ness : it is not possible, he says, to move him ; with him there is no
revocation of the decree once made that Cimber's brother be sent
into banishment. The couchings and the lowly courtesies of Cimber
might fire the blood of ordinary men, but not indeed the true quality
of the blood of Caesar.
It is urged that certain bodily defects of Csesar are brought into
prominence, such as his deafness, his dependence on Cassius for de-
liverance from the angry flood, which his physical courage had
made him dare, but before which his failure in physical strength had
made him quail. Cassius speaks of him with contempt as fever-
stricken, and describes his weakness with a certain curious and
illogical gusto that might make one wonder whether Cassius would
have supposed a man of real greatness immune from the visitation
of sickness common to humanity.
It seems to me at least that a good deal of this impression of
Shakespeare's having intentionally drawn Caesar's character in this
particular play as unheroic, arises from two things : lack of careful
study and the habit of, consciously or unconsciously, using a later
world standard when judging of an earlier mode of characterization.
It can hardly be doubted that Shakespeare's was, compared with
ours, an age of unreserve, and that words were uttered and deeds
done involving none of that loss of dignity which, in our day, would
assuredly follow hard upon their utterance and their doing. I do
not mean that we can suppose our forefathers to have had no sense
1917.] THE PLAY OF JULIUS CJESAR 219
of the absurdity of high-falutin and tall talk; otherwise we should
never have come into possession of our joy forever, in those things
of beauty, Ancient Pistol and Captain Bobadil. But these men are
unheroic : they are not doers of high and gallant deeds ; the men who
have done great things feel they have a right to tell of them, and they
exercise that right. They are conscious of their own strength and
proclaim it with a bold simplicity unplagued by the thought of a
something yet beyond what they have attained to, or ever can attain
to, which means hope, or ill-ease, or despair, according to the manner
wherein it is taken. Allowing for the difference of ideal in these
later times, Caesar need not appear a braggart.
Is Caesar really represented as influenced by superstitious fears ?
Possibly, to a certain extent, he is wrought upon by the fears of Cal-
purnia, but surely had it not been for his love for her, he would not
have allowed her cries in dreaming of his murder, or her account of
the strange and terribly ominous sights and sounds reigning in the
streets of Rome to alter his plans. It is unnecessary to dwell on the
fact, that, in Shakespeare's day, belief was much in sympathy with
the belief of the pagan world in omens and auguries. All through
Shakespeare's work we find that the brave, if accepting fate, do not
reject premonitions, hintings and presentiments, any more than
they disbelieve in the influence of the planets on their lives and
fortunes. Does not much of this linger in our twentieth century?
Where, in Shakespeare, we find absolute disbelief in these things,
it is in the bad men, not in the good. It is the true-hearted Kent (in
King Lear) who exclaims:
It is the stars, the stars above us govern our conditions,
Else one and self -same mate could not beget such different issues.
while the false-hearted Edmund says :
This is the excellent foppery of the world that when we are
sick in fortune (often the surfeit of our own behavior) we
make guilty of our disasters, the sun, the moon, and the stars.
In the words of Coleridge, who pointed out this : " Both individuals
and nations may be free from such prejudices by being below them,
as well as above them."
As has been said above, the want of careful study of the con-
text is one of the factors in the production of the impression that
Caesar is here set in unheroic light. When we apply this to the
stress said to be laid on the great dictator's physical defects, we see
that it is chiefly Cassius who lays special stress on Caesar's weakness.
220 THE PLAY OF JULIUS CAESAR [Nov.,
I have always felt it as a defect in Cassius' mentality that he is in-
capable of recognizing the true greatness of Caesar. I have always
felt that here his mind's eye is short-sighted; and I cannot hear of
this account of his having had to save Caesar from the roaring tor-
rent, and his contemptuous comments on Caesar's illness in Spain
without feeling irritation at his thick wit and his thin heart.
The play is rightly named after Caesar, not after Brutus, how-
ever the preference of beholders and readers may lean to the latter,
who comes before us, in life and in death, only in relation to Julius
Caesar and in subordination to him.
Caesar is the dramatic centre of the play and all converges to
him, in his living, in his dying, and in the life of his spirit after the
death of his body. It is on Caesar that the interest of the play de-
pends : it is his relation to him that first sets Brutus apart as it has
set Cassius apart before him. It has been shown by that fine Shakes-
pearean scholar, Dowden of Dublin, working out a suggestion of
Doctor Albert Lindner's that as it was against the spirit of Caesar
that Brutus fought, so that spirit never ceases to be the protagonist
of the play. Brutus strikes down the body of Caesar, and hence-
forth the spirit rises with a force that is resistless, for his revenge
is more the revenge of nature herself, the revenge of that power
which God has ordained to bring forth to our sight, the fruit of
the plant whose seed our hands have sown, " It is Caesarism that
is victorious, whether represented by Julius or Octavius."
It is Antony who prophesies of this revenge when he stands
alone by the " bleeding piece of earth " wherein the great spirit of
Caesar had sometime dwelt :
A curse shall light upon the limbs of men ;
Domestic fury and fierce civil strife
Shall cumber all the parts of Italy ;
Blood and destruction shall be so in use,
And dreadful objects so familiar,
That mothers shall but smile when they behold
Their infants quartered with the hands of war,
All pity choked with custom of fell deeds,
And Caesar's spirit ranging for revenge,
With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice
Cry " Havoc " and let slip the dogs of war;
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial.
1917-] THE PLAY OF JULIUS CAESAR 221
The man who grapples most prominently with the spirit of
Caesar seems to stand forth as the noblest of those Romans for
whom Shakespeare had so sympathetic an admiration. Pure, faith-
ful, brave and gentle, he enters the lists. Is he defeated because his
antagonist is greater than he? Or is it that circumstances are too
strong for him ? Or is it that the causes of defeat lie deep in his own
nature? To the life of Brutus a terrible struggle has come. He
sees, as he believes, the attempted sapping of the very foundations
of Rome's high liberty ; and the hand of the sapper, that guilty hand,
is the hand of his friend, of his " best lover." For a time the strug-
gle has gone on unknown as it seems, to any ; the struggle between
the love that is none the less for Caesar and the love that is all the
more for Rome ; but evidence of the combat appears in there being
no room left for the thought of the graciousnesses of life, and
" poor Brutus, with himself at war," his nature shrinking under
the burden of a thought terrible though not yet clearly shapen,
" forgets the show of love to other men." His rest is broken; in
the little sleep that comes to him he tosses restlessly about: he is
absolutely unhinged ; he cannot eat, nor talk, nor have any quiet.
Cassius has formed a purpose, and, having determined that
Brutus shall assist in its execution, sounds him and finds that he is
ready, at any price, to save Rome. Having given himself to his
country, Marcus Brutus can unhesitatingly give everything else ; for
all else is included in the sacrifice of himself. But he will decide
nothing hastily ; he will have time to consider what Cassius has said,
will hear with patience what he has to say, and " find a time both
meet to hear and answer such high things." A little later and
Brutus' mind is made up. It must be "by the death of Caesar that
Rome shall be set free. It has been a hard time for him, and a hard
time for her who loves him and who, as yet, does not know the cause
of the evident disturbance of his nature. He has risen suddenly
from his meal, walked about musing and sighing, with his arms
crossed. When Portia has questioned him he has stared upon her
with ungentle looks, and when she has further urged him, has
stamped with his foot and, at last, with an angry wave of his hand,
given sign for her to leave him. This from him so courteous and
tender to her, so beloved and revered.
In the soliloquy of Brutus at the beginning of the Second Act,
we have strong evidence of that flaw in his judgment which we
shall meet with again and again, learning, as we must, how his lack
of wholeness and soundness of judgment helps to ruin the cause
222 THE PLAY OF JULIUS CAESAR [Nov.,
which is to him a pure and holy struggle for freedom. He knows
" no personal cause to spurn at " Caesar : indeed, personally, Brutus
has received from him high favors and tokens of warm friendship ;
a friendship which had silenced the note of obligation which might
have sounded through it.
Antony in his great funeral oration, touched only on the love
of Caesar for Brutus : this made his speech more effective, and his
object was not truth but effect; but we know how Brutus loved
Caesar with a great love, only exceeded by his love for Rome. It is
" for the general " only, for the people, for the republic that Brutus
must spurn at Caesar. In the argument that he brings forward we
see how he is under the sway of false reasoning, and therefore inev-
itably comes to a false conclusion. Caesar is to be destroyed be-
cause he might do mischief ! Brutus has not known the time when
Caesar's affections have swayed more than his reason; but Caesar
may, when he has attained the top-most round of the ladder, scorn
the lower steps, the base degrees. " Then, lest he may, prevent."
What would become of the world if we all acted on this princi-
ple, and, in destroying that wherein there is potential evil, destroyed
also that wherein there is potential good, and obtained mere negatives
where we should seek and find affirmatives? We see also how
Brutus does not recognize that for the republic there is now no sal-
vation : Caesar Imperator is virtually king. Nor can the republic be
restored. See how the people crave for a ruler: Pompey, Caesar.
When Caesar lies low they would fain crown his better parts in
Brutus ; let Brutus be Caesar. A new spirit has arisen, necessitating
a new form. The new form comes, and under Augustus Rome will
win for herself fresh glory and renown; but the old republic shall
not live again. When men are great enough to serve without force
and pressure, except that force and pressure which duty exerts upon
them, they will not need a commander, for they will know what is
right and will to do it.
The mind of Brutus recoils from conspiracy; nothing that is
dark or even suspicious in its nature finds a kindly soil in his breast.
It has been said that Brutus is used by the conspirators to cover
their own moral nakedness: we may carry on the metaphor by
adding that the garment they have donned impedes and stays them
in their course. Cassius, the most prominent among them, a man
much lower in moral stature than Brutus, is possessed of judgment
sound and practical, but he, as well as others, is under the control
of a power in Brutus which, consciously or unconsciously, he exer-
1917-] THE PLAY OF JULIUS CAESAR 223
cises all through. Thus, when Cassius urges the importance of
Antony's death, as, if he be spared, he may well find means to in-
jure them all, Brutus instantly objects:
Let us be sacrificers, but not butchers.
The limbs must not be hacked, though the head must be cut off.
He does not understand the power that is veiled under Antony's love
of sport, his wildness and addiction to company. So Brutus has his
way.
Out of Brutus' singleness of heart there springs that assertive
self-belief which is not vanity, but is an identification of himself
with his cause, the cause which he believes must prosper for its
absolute Tightness' sake. His is, as it were, the personification of a
great principle, though he is also a man framed to love and be
loved, and counting the love that is given him as a good thing.
Thus he says of Caius Ligarius :
He loves me well and I have given him reasons :
Send him but hither and I'll fashion him.
It is this also, as it seems to me, that makes him so confident of the
power of his simple summing-up of the reasons for the death of
Caesar to satisfy the populace, who must, he thinks, recognize its
truth ; and his inability to see what mischief may come of the per-
mission to Antony to address the crowd. All through, we find that
Brutus deals with his fellow-workers and with those around him, as
if they were like himself, simple and pure: he takes no account
of secondary motives, because he has none of them himself.
Once the die is cast, once Brutus has made up his mind what
is right, and formed the resolution to do it, he is at peace, a peace
no doubt can trouble, no remorse assail. He will never repent of his
deed, though the day must come when he shall atone for it.
It is worse than nonsense to talk of the result of a deed justify-
ing or condemning it. A deed has to be judged, as to its Tightness
or wrongness in itself. If the assassination of Caesar was right,
none of its results could make it wrong : bad results do not always
even prove a deed to be wrong. If it was wrong, it was wrong,
even though the republic had straightway been established and the
crown of her old glory circled the brows of Rome. Brutus hates
the means, but believes the end to be so purely right that these means
must be used. Henceforth he sees only the end. The responsibility
is his, for he says of Caesar, " I slew him."
224 THE PLAY OF JULIUS CJESAR [Nov.,
Within a few hours of the execution of the plot, a woman
becomes possessed of the knowledge of it. Portia enters into her
lord's confidence as one able and worthy to enter into it. This
woman is shown to us in one relation only, as the wife of one en-
tirely worthy of her. Her life is blent with that of Brutus, though
that blending has not involved the loss of her individuality. The
fine scene in which she claims the confidence of her husband has
been compared and contrasted with that (I., Henry IV.) in which
Lady Percy seeks to win partnership in Hotspur's trouble : there is
a striking antithesis in the two men, the two women and the relation
of the two wedded pair to each other.
Shakespeare has not used Plutarch's beautiful account of the
emotion of Portia later on when Brutus must go forth, at the sight
of the picture of the parting between Hector and Andromache: it
was not necessary dramatically, but I think the incident may have in-
fluenced him in his drawing of the character, and his showing her
as so over-strained by the burden of the great secret as almost to
betray herself at the time of the fateful meeting at the senate-
house. A bodily wound she could give herself to test her powers of
endurance, but the stroke of that dagger she had used, was nothing
in comparison to the mental torture she had willed to endure.
Portia's life is Brutus, and when he is taken from her, what
remains? Volumnia and Valeria stay in Rome after Coriolanus has
gone, as it seems, never to return : but Portia will not live without
Brutus. These other women live on for Rome ; Portia has lived for
the noblest Roman.
After the assassination of Caesar, Brutus, who had insisted on
sparing Antony, commits another practical blunder in allowing
him to make the funeral oration. What man could have listened to
Antony's words without feeling on fire with pity and indignation?
What kindly uneducated man but would feel his whole being deeply
shaken? What crowd, with its quick electric thrills, its rush of
sympathetic emotion, but would be half maddened by such an
appeal? The scene which we know " took nobly " in Shakespeare's
own time, is one that must always be one of the specially telling parts
of the play.
It is curious how unconscious Brutus appears of having given
any occasion of annoyance to Cassius, when he quietly comments to
Lucilius on the enforced ceremony shown by Cassius, marking the
beginning of the sickness and decay of love. Cassius has refused,
so Brutus believes, to send gold to him, and Brutus has, without any
I9I7-] THE PLAY OF JULIUS CAESAR 225
deference to Cassius' intercession, condemned and noted (dis-
graced) Lucius Pella for taking bribes. Brutus' sturdy honesty
cannot bend to expediency, nor can he take the view of the worldly-
wiser general that " in such a time as this it is not meet that every
nice offence should bear his comment." He cannot see that the
greatest tact is required for the cherishing of an unpopular cause.
With scorn he says he had rather be a dog and bay the moon than
a Roman who could contaminate his fingers with base bribes; and
yet, though he " had rather coin his heart and drop his blood for
drachmas than wring from the hard hand of peasants their vile
trash, by any indirectness," with curious inconsistency he blames
Cassius for not sending him gold — the gold of whose source the un-
practical man does not think! What irony of facts is here. The
quarrel is made and the friends bury their unkindness. Cassius
learns of the " insupportable and touching loss under which Brutus
is laboring." The death of Portia was, as it were, the seal set upon
the gods' acceptance of Brutus' sacrifice of himself for his country.
We know what this woman has been to Brutus : she is none the
less to him for the quiet " speak no more of her." The loss is
too great, the grief too deep, for words.
Now again Brutus blunders. In his anger, Cassius has spoken
truly, " I am a soldier, I, older in practice, older than yourself to
make conditions." Cassius is the better general, but Brutus cannot
see it, and the cause he loves is shaken, ready to fall before the
resistless spirit of Caesar. Brutus can always have his way against
the opinion of Cassius, and now, against that opinion, the march
to Philippi is determined upon, and the generals part, brothers in
arms as in heart. We note the gentle courtesy and consideration
shown by Brutus to his servants : they are to " sleep on cushions in
(his) tent." They must not " stand and watch (his) pleasure." To
the boy Lucius he apologizes for having asked for a book which he
had forgotten having put into his pocket and supposed he had given
to Lucius, " Bear with me, good boy, I am much forgetful." And
when the lad, willing but weary, sings to his instrument in response
to his master's wish, and, yet singing, falls asleep, that master takes
the lute from his hand and lays it down, lest it should drop from the
sleeping boy's hand and be broken.
Evil omens gather round Brutus ; the spirit of Caesar appears to
him, his " evil spirit " now, to meet him, as he tells Brutus at Phil-
ippi. The two eagles that had perched on the standard of Brutus
and Cassius fly forth, and in their stead come ravens, crows and
VOL. cvi.— 15
226 THE PLAY OF JULIUS CJESAR [Nov.,
kites that fly over their heads " as they were sickly prey," the carrion
birds' shadows making a fatal canopy over the doomed army. It is
against Cassius' will, as he calls Massala to witness, that the liber-
ties of all have been set on one battle.
The spirit of Caesar indeed walks abroad and turns the swords
of his enemies into their proper entrails. " Why, I will see thee at
Philippi, then," Brutus had said when, at Sardis, the great spirit had
appeared to him. At Philippi he meets him and falls conquered.
It is Antony who says, and Antony who says truly of him:
This was the noblest Roman of them all :
All the conspirators, save only he,
Did what they did in envy of great Caesar;
He only, in a general honest thought,
And common good to all, made one of them.
His life was gentle, and the elements
So mix'd in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world " this was a man !"
The life of Brutus had known great good : he had loved and
possessed Portia; he " had found no man but he was true to (him)."
Best of all, he had been to his own self true, and so had never been
false to any man. He kept his ideal throughout all conflict, all
change, and in apparent defeat, dying to live for us, as " the noblest
Roman of them all." A great poet has sung of :
that dim bust of Brutus, jagged and grand
Where Buonorotti passionately tried
From out the close-clenched marble to demand
The head of Rome's sublimest homicide.
Perhaps the best expression of the difference between Brutus and
Cassius is in North's saying that Cassius was not so simple and pure
as Brutus.
To do Cassius justice we must look at him as a thinker, one
who can plan and carry out a plan if he is allowed; but who is
swayed by a great love for Brutus which leads him to sacrifice his
own judgment and sacrifice it knowingly. The tribute that Brutus
pays him shows what he was in his friend's esteem, and Brutus'
words are not mere oratory :
The last of all the Romans, fare thee well !
It is impossible that even Rome
Should breed thy fellow.
"OUR MAURICE FRANCIS."
BY CHARLES PHILLIPS.
E is a prince, our Maurice Francis ; a prince and a con-
sorter with kings. As he is also a grandfather, it
may seem a bit familiar to speak of him thus in such
lightsome vein; but he has a touch of eternal
youth in him ; he is still one of us, still " our " Maurice
Francis, with all his brilliant achievements, his honors and his titles
— poet, critic, novelist, doctor of a half a dozen laws, philosophies
and what not; and finally, Minister Plenipotentiary of the United
States of America to the kingdom of Denmark. I speak, of course,
of Egan, the one and only Egan — Maurice Francis.
Doctor Egan is not only one of the warmest-hearted of men,
but the warmest-hearted clever man I have ever met. In fact, he is
all heart, all kindly human impulses and Irish " give." And yet he is
clever — one of the cleverest men in public life today. It is an un-
usual combination. One does not generally take to the clever man —
the man who, by nimble wit and the sharp eye of the opportunist, is
able to advance himself in the world until he shines far out above all
his fellows. Egan has the wit; and his eye is far from dull to the
main chance; but he has more — something bigger, better and finer
than all this combined — a heart of pure gold and the pure soul of a
poet; an unselfish spirit and an open, generous hand.
Maurice Francis Egan has perhaps gone further in the world
than any other Catholic layman of the time. His story is one of
steady progress from one position of trust to another until today he
is easily in the front rank of American Catholics in public life. By
the time that a man has achieved some twenty or more volumes of
literary output, his work takes on an air of permanence that de-
mands consideration; and when to these achievements he adds a
memorable record in the service of his country, his story is, accord-
ing to the custom of the world, more or less public property.
People naturally wish to know about him. And yet, when
one comes to look things over, it is surprising to see how little is
known or has been written about Maurice Francis Egan — a man
who is, nevertheless, almost constantly in the public prints. There is,
in fact, no one in the literary world today who has advertised himself
228 "OUR MAURICE FRANCIS" [Nov.,
more by the actual merits of his work, and less by puffs and " write
ups," than Egan. He has kept himself in the forefront through his
own legitimate efforts.
His personality is somewhat puzzling. Despite the impression
he gives of being very easy to know, one does not really know him
till after long acquaintance. That is the " diplomat " of it, I sup-
pose : he does not give himself away, though he may seem to. He
is really, to use perfectly plain English, a very clever man, with an
unusually strong tincture of common sense in his make-up. This
common sense it is that has kept him ever on the safe side of life.
Gifted with all the fine temperament and aspiration of a poet, he has
not, however, made the mistake of letting himself develop one-sidely.
He saw the folly long ago, no doubt, of giving away too freely to
his emotional inclinations. He has struck a happy medium, and
has made his gifts serve him, instead of becoming a slave to his
gifts. Does this lessen his rank among the stars ? On the contrary,
I think it denotes an innate strength of character that is remarkable :
he has chosen wisely to let his light shine surely and steadily rather
than blaze meteorically and be extinguished. It would have been
easy enough for him perhaps, even with the fairly prosperous start
he had in life, to have become a hungry savant poring over his tomes
— or a hungrier poet in a garret. Very picturesque ! But I imagine
that Maurice Francis had the foresight to see that, if he loved books,
learning, culture, position, and all that these things signify, he must
put himself in the way of earning them and possessing them beyond
recall — even though at times he must relinquish some of his mo-
mentary dreams and shape his wares according to the market that
he served.
And this is what he has done. He has won more than the usual
number of the rich prizes of life : comfortable means, if not actual
wealth (which I do not believe he ever craved) ; and he has done it
by keeping a clear eye on the market. Yet, do not for a minute
think that Egan, clever, far-sighted, man of the world and equal to
the world at its wiliest, has ever sold one iota of his birthright for
the pottage of success, or sacrificed one grain of manhood for ad-
vancement. Not by a long shot ! That is the beauty of his story ;
he has succeeded, gone ahead, got on top; but never at the cost of
a single farthing of the pure gold of his character. In a world that
has too many nominal Catholics in the high walks of life; in a
world that puts a premium on paganism in the arts, Egan, on the top,
and in the front rank of the doers and devotees of art, is unique.
I9I7-3 "OUR MAURICE FRANCIS" 229
He stands always for the sheer, pure, unadulterated Christian spirit
in literature. He is a Christian poet, a Christian critic, a Christian
teacher without equivocation or quibbling. His books are challenges
to the Time-Spirit. It really gives one a little more faith in this
old world to see a man of Egan's type succeeding.
So today Egan has his books, his culture, his position — every-
thing, perhaps, that his heart could desire; and what proud, joy-
ous possessions they must be, earned as they have been ; worked for
manfully, and won on merit ! In Copenhagen he has an even more
delightful and charming home than the one in Washington which
was for years the rendezvous of the country's best, in every walk
of life, from Presidents to poor poets. For the latter, the Egan
house was a sheltered haunt, and his study a holy of holies. In the
Danish capital his study is just at the head of the stairs; and once
that room is entered, you feel that you are really " behind the
scenes." It is a typical literary workshop. The rest of the house,
under the ordered eye of its quiet, well-poised mistress, may be in-
deed the home of the American Minister Plenipotentiary to Den-
mark; but in this room the man's native spirit breaks out in happy
disorder. The four walls, from floor to ceiling, are solid with
books. You wade knee-deep in books from door to desk. There
are books heaped on the floor, books piled on chairs, books strewn
on the table — books, books, books ! — everything from the tragedies
of Sophocles to the latest treatise on Scandinavian dairy farming.
In the midst of the books is the man himself, rising to greet
you, bright eyed, cordial, suave, his gray hair and gray beard giving
a little distingue touch to his appearance that would strike you as a
trifle foreign in air were it not a familiar memory of the old days
in Washington. From time immemorial, Egan has worn a beard;
and though it is a bit gray now (why not at sixty-five?) the blue
eyes are as blue and boyish as ever. For with all his distinction and
dignity, there remains always something of the imperishable boy in
Dr. Egan. Perhaps that explains his great success in writing for the
young, a something that he has never lost the trick of, no matter
what the years have brought him. He has always been a boy. In
the old days he loved to gather his university students about him ;
and the young still gravitate toward him. His youthful Danish
secretary at the legation is as much his worshipper — he thinks him
a second Keats — as was ever any lad back in his professional days at
the 'varsity.
In the midst of the books, the man ; a man who has never lost
230 "OUR MAURICE FRANCIS" [Nov.,
himself in books. He is thoroughly of the world, alive, alert: his
books are but windows through which, when he retires at hours of
ease or study, he may glimpse the universe through others' eyes and
so challenge it and measure it by the standard of Truth and Faith
that happily are his. For the lover of books, Egan has a story to
tell: "Read, read, read — the best of everything; acquaint yourself
with the thoughts of the great thinkers of the ages; but never read
supinely, subserviently. Measure their thought by your own; chal-
lenge their belief with your own!" That is what books mean to
him. I suppose half, at least, of the volumes in his immense col-
lection are autographed; and in those autographs half the world
of learning and genius of the time is represented, subscribing itself
to him, not formally, but in terms of affectionate regard. A glance
at some of the pages of Egan's autographed books is like reviewing
the ranks of the celebrities of a century; for the dates go back
amazingly far ! It makes one feel old for a minute ; but it is touch-
ing, too, to note how this man, so thoroughly of the present, was
esteemed by the giants of yesterday as he is loved by the great of
today. For Egan is a lover of books only because he is so heartily a
lover of " men and things." Only a man with an understanding and
practical eye open to the human equation, could do what he has
done since going to Denmark : master the fine points of Danish agri-
culture to such a degree that the United States Department of the
Interior, on his last visit home to America, " borrowed " him from
the State Department and sent him on a tour through the country
lecturing on the advanced methods of intensive Scandinavian farm-
ing! Not one man in a thousand, with the training that Egan has
had, the training of a poet and a bookman, could achieve such a
thing as that. It assuredly shows a remarkably open and adaptable
mind. No wonder he is a favorite with our home government ; and
no wonder the Danish government, and the King himself, have done
everything in their power to have him retained in Copenhagen year
after year. He is, in fact, the ideal diplomat for this country : the
genuinely democratic American who represents our country at a
European court without offending by an ostentatiously " demo-
cratic " spirit, or making a mockery of democracy by subserviently
aping the manners of the older world.
There is a lovely vein of generosity and unselfishness in our
Maurice Francis; the very essence of hospitality. In the old days
in Washington it was his delight to give young literary aspirants
or social postulants a happy surprise by carrying them off to a
I9I7-] " OUR MAURICE FRANCIS " , 231
brilliant encounter with an aristocrat of letters, or the titled scion
of some ancient house serving on the diplomatic corps, and thus
initiate the youngsters into the mysteries of a world of which they
fondly dreamed but hardly hoped to enter. Egan had the open ses-
ame there to an exclusive world. But he did not keep his good
things to himself. That was not his nature. So now, in Copen-
hagen, ushered into his sanctum, to be regaled, we know, with a
feast of wit and enough wisdom to make a happy balance, we are
quite likely to be surprised by an- invitation to a royal garden party,
or an embassy ball, or a salon of the gods before the hour is past.
It is the good old fashion of hospitality. There is really a flavor of
the South in it, or of the old world — what is mine host's is mine.
We are reminded that Maurice Francis is a descendant of the gallant
Chevalier MacEgan and of the courtly de Florens; and that his
grandmother in her day entertained Lafayette at the old Egan home
in Philadelphia.
Like his autographs, Maurice Francis' recollections go back,
back, back in the most startling manner. To us Booth and Augustin
Daly seem of a bygone day ; but he chats of them as of friends who
might have been with him yesterday. In his early journalistic days
in New York he came into contact with most of the personages of
the time. For six years he was associate editor of The Freeman's
Journal under the great McMasters. He has a fund of stories to
tell. He is one of the best raconteurs in Europe. Who having read
Sexton Maginnis needs to be told of his keen sense of humor? And
what a saving sense it has been to him in his adventures as an
American diplomat! It has enabled him, for one thing, to see
things with a clear eye. The comedies that are enacted, for instance,
by some of our fellow-countrymen abroad in their pursuit of crowns
and garters would be hopeless tragedies to one less gifted with the
quick and twinkling eye. Another man might be tempted, in short
order, to throw up the job and come home and let Uncle Sam find
someone else to look after his interests across the sea. But the man
who can see the humorous side of things as well as the serious,
generally sees all around a situation ; and such a man's observation
and judgment is worth listening to. Today, Dr. Egan's word, I
have been told in Washington, " goes " in our State Department on
many points touching the diplomatic service. He talked earnestly
on this subject. " It is absurd," he said, " to imagine that the United
States must try to dazzle the courts of Europe by sending them am-
bassadors of great wealth. In every capital there are plenty of rich
232 "OUR MAURICE FRANCIS" [Nov.,
parvenus who can furnish all the flash that's needed !" And again :
" Another common mistake is the belief that it is well to send to any
foreign country a representative who was once of its nationality,
but who has become an American. About the best thing that a man
who has severed connections with his fatherland can do is not to
flaunt his Americanism by returning there in an official capacity."
But it is not alone of books and writers, nor of diplomacy and
knee-breeches that Dr. Egan chats over our tea and cigarettes. It is
astonishing how simply and naturally the names of the world's re-
nowned are interwoven in our family gossip. Gerald, his only
son' is married and living in Washington ; and there are happy anec-
dotes of the days when Mr. Roosevelt was President, and would
enjoy a wrestling bout with Gerald every time he came with his
father to the White House. Then the father and the President
would talk about Irish mythology until everything else was forgot-
ten. In the end, T. R. was himself writing essays on Cuchullain and
Queen Maeve for the reviews. It was Roosevelt who originally sent
Egan to Copenhagen ten years ago; and there he has remained
through all the succeeding administrations, proof sufficient, assur-
edly, that Maurice Francis is a diplomat and not a politician.
Yes, Gerald is married ; he is on one of the big dailies at Wash-
ington. And Patrice, the elder daughter, she too is in Washington,
the wife of Elmer Murphy, another successful journalist, formerly
editor of the Los Angeles Tidings. And Carmel, the baby, is mar-
ried!— living away off in the Philippines, her husband, Gabriel
O'Reilly, a prominent lawyer of Manila. So today the Egans,
in their stately home in Copenhagen, are alone. " Back to where
we began," the Doctor says, with a smile for his gracious wife, who
has just come home from her round of afternoon calls. They are
alone — but there are children and children's children keeping the
old land new for them against the day when they will return.
In the meantime, Doctor Egan, engrossed as he is with his dip-
lomatic duties, and they have increased a hundred-fold since the War
began, continues to write. One wonders how he manages to turn
out so much and such finished work; it is almost as much of a
puzzle as to figure how his secretary can decipher his perfectly abom-
inable penmanship. I remember when Patrice used to help him get
his manuscripts out to the editors : she knew his writing better than
the chick of the story knew Horace Greeley's ; but when Patrice left
— well, there was confusion in the legation for awhile, and also in
the offices of Scribner's and The Century!
I9I7-] "OUR MAURICE FRANCIS" 233
It was in this dreadful writing, for he does all his composing
by long hand, that Dr. Egan wrote his famous Maginnis tales. In
them he achieved that highest of all achievements of an artist — he
created. He put the parish sexton permanently into literature ; and
how he put him there, laughing and adding forever to the gayety of
the nations, all who have read him know. Who could forget the
wily Kerry man with his " Brother Gamborious, a Passionate
monk, who died of dropsy of the heart;" or his ecstasies over the
sermon on hell, which was " the most elegant thing?" Happy Ma-
ginnis— happy except when the redoubtable Herself was on his
trail. He never tells a lie, unless in the interest of truth! And
does he not vow never to do it again — unless he has to ?
This was the latest of Egan's books. Back of it stands a
whole shelf full of volumes, great and small — poems, novels, crit-
ical essays, short stories, juveniles, a remarkable output of a high
order of excellence. Our Maurice Francis excels in everything he
touches. In poetry he is a master of the sonnet ; his verses are fine-
chiseled to perfection ; and always breathe the purest spirit of Chris-
tian philosophy, challenging the paganism of the time in no uncer-
tain voice. In his critical essays he takes some views that his friends
may dispute ; but never can they question the grace or clarity of his
expression, whatever his opinions. He is not an admirer of Tenny-
son. He may tolerate the Idylls, but he has no time for In
Memoriam. " I doubt whether any heart in affliction," he says, " has
received genuine consolation from this decorous and superbly meas-
ured flow of grief." He loves the ancient classics ; and perhaps more
than any other writer in English, excepting Keats, he has woven the
old gods of Moschus and Theocritus into his songs; but always to
celebrate, transcendantly over them, the Living God of Eternal
Truth. With him, indeed, literature is a symbol of God. " Life
has always turned to God," he says, " and literature echoing life,
has always written the symbol of God !" And again : " God, Who is
the centre of life, is the centre of the written expression of life,
which is literature." This is Maurice Francis Egan's literary creed.
It reveals a man of the noblest ideals — a man fitted in the fullest
degree to teach the young, to lead his fellows, and to serve them in
the arena of world activities. Certainly he has used his talents
wisely and well. He is one of whom Americans, and very espe-
cially we Catholic Americans, claiming him as " ours," may be
justly proud.
WAR IN THE VILLAGES.
BY THOMAS ALEXANDER BAGGS.
N the busy hives of men, war and its spectre death
stalk by grimly, unchallenged. On the same city
pavement the pomp and parade of arms jostles with
careless unconcern the sable pageant of mourners.
No one questions the incongruity: familiarity has
bred its contempt. Autres temps, autres mceurs, and silently the
change is accepted.
It is different in the little villages where life flows deeply,
serenely. Outward signs of the great calamity are few — a scarcity
of men folk, a public roster in the village church, a collection of
rude wooden crosses huddled together in the God's acre. No more,
but in the hearts of the villagers a mute inexpressible sorrow that
peers softly forth in their faces.
Scattered over the breast of Europe are thousands of such little
villages, each typical of the rest. In the Polish wastes, in the smil-
ing French vinelands, in the snug retreats of the Tyrol, in the fresh,
green English countryside, everywhere they abound. Each proudly
bears its burden ; each secretly suffers.
One such I recall in Normandy, far from the beaten track. It
was just a row of straggling cottages, a church, a manor, and less
than a hundred inhabitants. No railroad came nearer than twenty
kilometers. Its name — the map does not record it, and yet its
name is legion.
It was late one July afternoon. I had walked from Bayeux
a score of miles, and rounding a hill I first glimpsed it, tucked away
in the hollow, steeped in mellow sunlight. Tall trees whispered
about it, and ripening orchards, herd-dotted pastures and wheat-
fields, seas of tossing gold, flung broadcast their bounty. Thoughts
of the World War were jarring. " Man's inhumanity to man "
seemed unreal, unthinkable. Here, said I, war has passed lightly
by or, like time and that crazy thing civilization, has forgotten the
hamlet's existence.
On the tall iron Calvary near the church a wreath of fresh-cut
laurels had been hung. I was later to learn its import. In the shade
of the little stone church, with its stunted bell-tower and roof
I9I7-] WAR IN THE VILLAGES 235
of once red tiles, the mould had been turned in five heaps. At the
head of each was a simple cross with crudely charactered inscription.
I read : Charles Bertaut, tombe a Fleury; Henri Chatelain, tue a St.
Eloi; Hippolyte Puy, mort le 24 cwril, 1915; Auguste Frenard, tue
a Thiaumont; Jacques Nodain, peri en mer pour sa patrie. Five
empty graves a-bloom with summer flowers! A green chaplet on
the Calvary ! Thus war greets one in the village.
In the street, flanked on both sides by crazy cottages, not a
soul was stirring. The blacksmith's shop was shut; the cobbler's
barred and shuttered — on the door a scribbled legend : Etienne Ar-
naud, mobilise le 15 aout, 1914. Save for the creaking of shutters
in the wind, everywhere was brooding silence. My footsteps rang
disturbingly as footsteps in a vault. I thought it a deserted village.
The door of the inn was open as I passed, and within were two
old cronies, mumbling incoherently. They did not even look up as
I entered. But the good lady of the inn, a buxom, cheerful woman
of forty, quickly saw to my needs. I sat long over the cider and
meanwhile mine host gossiped.
Ah, it was quiet, she said, these days in the village! They
had all gone — fine young fellows, thirty of them, and at least a
dozen fathers. It was sad — and hard, too. They needed men for
the harvesting. But the women would do it. She herself was kept
at home with an infant. The others, yes, they were working and
with them the old men and children. The harvest this year was
good. Was it not terrible, this war ? The village had lost its half.
Monsieur must see the roster in the church. Six were dead — one
the day before yesterday, three were prisoners, and the good God
alone knew how many wounded and missing. Yes, the wreath on
the calvary was fresh. It was for young Eugene Pollet, such a fine
fellow! Soon the cemetery would own another grave, and another
cross of honor.
An old man, bent and stooped with age, entered with a black
tin letter-box. He swallowed a petit verre, and then shuffled on.
' " The postman," said madame. " Each day he tramps twenty
kilometers from Bayeux. And, mon Dieu, what news he brings!
These two letters, here — who knows their tidings? We welcome
Henri, monsieur, but nowadays always fearfully. Only the day
before yesterday he brought ill news to the widow Pollett — Eugene
was shot by a sniper. One of his comrades wrote."
Madame busied herself, with the lamp. Dusk was now falling.
The chapel bell tolled drowsily. Along the street came the clatter
236 W AR IN THE VILLAGES [Nov..,
of clogs and voices. A dozen women, three old men and some boys
rustled into the inn. Their voices were shrill, though subdued.
" Is there anything, Marie ?" demanded the spokeswoman.
Marie delivered the letters and then and there they were read
aloud, the whole assembly eagerly listening and quaffing great
glasses of cider in the hearty Norman fashion.
One came from a kinswoman in Paris and was quickly passed
over. The other from the communication trenches. The wife read
slowly, repeating the phrases, ever and again interrupted by some
buzz of interested comment. I could see the letter from where I sat.
It was scrawled indistinctly in pencil on the gray squared paper in-
dispensable to the French bourgeoisie. It was a letter of love from
husband to wife — not a love letter. I would give much to reproduce
its golden glow of devotion, its simple pious trust in the ordering of
all things. One phrase I remember : " When you think to send me a
little present again, my darling, will you send me the flowers of our
Norman fields, flowers gathered by you that shall speak to me of
you and our village ? " Then the letter spoke of the rough and ready
life of the trenches. It was simple, graceful, poignantly human.
An hour later, lights twinkled from the cottage windows. At
the doors the women and children were sitting, knitting and chatter-
ing in groups. Their talk is seldom of the War itself — always of
their men folk and memories. The whole village is a family. The
loss or hurt of one is a loss or hurt to the whole little community.
They will accept it quietly, as the will of God, with that air of weary,
pathetic humility, not without a touch of the sublime, that shines
in Millet's Angelas. The cardinal virtues, faith, hope and love, are
not deadened but quickened by war in the hearts of the villagers.
Night comes on and her sober livery sits well on the little vil-
lage. White dust sleeps along the lanes, moonlight floods the or-
chards, lending their tumble-down walls an eerie, mysterious gray-
ness. One by one the lights are extinguished. The village is quietly
sleeping, but its soul is dreaming away in the distant war zene with
father, brother, husband and friend.
The little villages of Europe may differ in nature's externals,
but all are one in spirit, in their modest, heroic endurance of the
burdens of the nations at war. Away from the fever and fret of the
cities' antagonisms, they see the havoc of war more clearly and per-
fectly, for being but small, they see it whole. Theirs are the true,
simple pleasures of life, love of home, love of country; theirs the
faith that removes mountains. Closer to earth, they are closer to God.
A NEW THEORY OF POLITICAL SOVEREIGNTY.
BY JOHN A. RYAN, D.D.
HE doctrines and performances of the ruling class in
Germany, as manifested to the world since July, 1914,
have enabled intelligent persons to become pretty
generally acquainted with the Prussian theory of the
Omnipotent State. Philosophers, such as Hegel;
political scientists, such as Ruemelin ; historians, such as Treitschke ;
military theorists, such as Bernhardi ; rulers, such as Bismarck ; and
war directors, such as Von Tirpitz, have in substantially uniform
terms proclaimed that the State is the supreme reality, that for it
the individual exists, and that for its extension and preservation
the use of every means is legitimate. According to their theory,
the State is above the moral law, and its will and welfare constitute
the supreme law for individuals and social groups.
We are properly shocked at the enormous immorality of these
doctrines, and we see in them a powerful reason for desiring the
success of the Allied arms in the present world conflict. How many
of us are aware that substantially the same theories are at least im-
plicity contained in the current view of sovereignty expounded in
the standard text-books of political science which are printed in
the English language? That these implicit doctrines have not re-
ceived explicit expression in text-books and class-room is probably
due to the fact that our writers and teachers do not feel constrained
to carry to the logical conclusion theories which run counter to their
intuitions of morality and common sense. That the doctrines have
not been formally adopted nor put into practise by legislators and
executives is to a large extent explained by the relatively slight in-
fluence exerted among English-speaking peoples by political theory
or any other form of merely academic opinion.
The conception of sovereignty accepted in our treatises on
political science derives mainly from the English writer, John
Austin. In essence it declares that the sovereign power of the State
is incapable of legal limitation. Understood in one way this prin-
ciple is quite harmless, is, in fact, almost an identical proposition.
From its very nature a sovereign State is not limited by nor subject
to the laws of any other State. If it were so restricted it would be
238 NEW THEORY OF POLITICAL SOVEREIGNTY [Nov.,
a section or province of some other State, not a sovereign among
equal sovereigns. So long as a State retains its independence, its
sovereignty, legal supremacy, supreme governmental power, it is
limited neither by the laws of other States, nor by the political or-
dinances of its subordinate parts. In other words, sovereignty is
politically unlimited both from without and from within. We re-
peat that this is a harmless and a self-evident proposition.
The mischief begins as soon as the word legal, in Austin's defi-
nition, is taken to include all kinds of law, moral as well as political
or civil. In this sense the unlimited sovereignty of the State be-
comes freedom from the restraints of all forms of authority. It
means that the State is not subject to the moral law, nor bound by
the laws of God. Thus we have the Omnipotent State. The fact that
it arrives by the route of analytical jurisprudence does not make it
any more attractive than when it emerges out of the mazes of
Hegelian metaphysics.
Now this is the conception of State power and authority that is
logically deducible from the theories of sovereignty set forth and
defended in our American text-books and class-rooms. Let us
glance at the statements of a few typical authorities. Professor W.
W. Willoughby, of John Hopkins, tells us that the political philos-
ophy of England and America is in advance of that of the Continent,
because in the latter region the idea of natural law " still persists to
a very considerable degree." Only when the concepts of natural and
divine law have disappeared do we get the " completely secular,
scientific conception of the State." With the passing of these ideas
vanishes " the alleged subjection of the political power to any will
but its own." The modern conception, he informs us, holds the
State to be " secular, positive, independent and absolute ;" and he
does not hesitate to call this the " true conception of the State."1
Evidently this conclusion, that sovereignty is absolutely unlimited,
must be adopted by anyone who denies the existence of the natural
moral law, as well as the authority of the Church. If neither nature
nor revelation imposes obligatory ordinances, there is no lawgiver
morally competent to limit the power of the State. While admitting
in theory that the authority of the State is limited by the laws of
God and of reason, Burgess denies the proposition in effect ; for he
declares that the State itself is the best interpreter of these other
laws, that it is the human organ least likely to be wrong, and there-
fore that we must hold to the principle that the State can do no
1Tht Nature of the State, pp. 380, 388, 393-
1917.] NEW THEORY OF POLITICAL SOVEREIGNTY 239
wrong.2 Professor Garner maintains that the sovereignty of the
State is unlimited, but asserts that this does not mean that the
State has a moral right to exercise its power in any way that it
chooses. This is a restriction, indeed, but it is one for which
Garner provides no theoretical or rational basis. If we cannot point
to a definite moral law that limits political power, how can we logi-
cally defend the proposition that the State has not a right to do as it
pleases ?
It is unnecessary to observe that neither the political authorities
nor the people of America accept the logical and practical implica-
tions of the foregoing theories. Neither our public nor our popular
thinking is influenced by academic thought to anything like the de-
gree that obtains in Germany. Nevertheless the teaching of our
universities has some effect upon our everyday life and opinion, and
it is an increasing influence. Some importance, therefore, attaches
to the appearance of a book from the pen of a university man, and
the press of a university publishing house which opposes flatly the
theory of sovereignty indicated above.
Professor Laski's work is in the main critical. It is mostly
devoted to the task of showing that the current theory of sovereignty
in unacceptable. The State's power, he declares, is not unlimited,
nor is the State the only corporate body to which men owe and give
allegiance. Instead of being the supreme society in which the life
and purposes of all lesser societies are merged and, if necessary, ab-
sorbed, the State is but one of many corporate organizations which
possess their own life, and exercise their own sway over the hearts
and lives of men. In addition to the State, there exist other " mon-
istic entities, club, trade union, church, society, town, county, uni-
versity, each with a group life, a group will. ..." (pp. 4, 5).
With the exception of the first chapter and two appendices, the
book is taken up with the task of demonstrating the foregoing prop-
ositions by certain historical events. These are the disruption of
the Scottish Church in 1843, tne Oxford Movement, the Catholic
Revival in England, the Catholic Reaction to the French Revolution,
and the Kulturkampf in Germany. Each of these chapters is han-
dled in able and entertaining fashion, and each is of great historical
interest, independently of its bearing upon his thesis. He contends
that each of these great historical facts shows the sovereignty of
the State to be not unlimited, since each exhibits an important group
of persons successfully resisting the power of the State in order to
'Politics and Comparative Constitutional Law, i., pp. 54-57-
24o NEW THEORY OF POLITICAL SOVEREIGNTY [Nov.,
safeguard their freedom of allegiance to another society, namely,
a church.
The author's viewpoint is frankly pragmatist. In effect he con-
tends that the sovereignty of the State is not supreme if important
groups of men sometimes prefer other and narrower kinds of sov-
ereignty. If men decide to obey their church, their trade union, or
their private political association inftead of the State, and if they
consistently act upon that belief, how can it be seriously maintained
that the sovereignty of the State has no limits? Is it not more in
accord with reality to say that the power of the State is measured
by the extent to which it is able to command allegiance and obedi-
ence? To the contention that such a view makes sovereignty no-
thing more than " the ability to secure consent," the author re-
sponds : " I can only reply to the objection by admitting it " (p. 14).
He likewise admits that his theory " dissolves — what the facts
themselves dissolve — the inherent claim of the State to obedience.
It insists that the State, like every other association, shall prove
itself by what it achieves .... It does not try to work out with
tedious elaboration the respective spheres of State, or group, or in-
dividual. It leaves that to the test of the event " (p. 23).
Were Professor Laski to follow the lines of strict logic the pas-
sage just quoted would compel him to concede, or even to maintain,
that the State which succeeded in enforcing its will ruthlessly
upon the members of other societies would have justified its claim
of unlimited sovereignty. It would have " proved itself by what it
achieved," and thus complied with the pragmatic test of truth. In
this instance, at least, the theory of absolute sovereignty would
have been demonstrated to be right.
On the other hand, the author appeals occasionally to some for-
mally ethical standards of State authority. The State, he says, is
entitled to ask of its members not all that it can exact by force, but
only that "which conduces to the achievement of its purpose;" it
could not, for instance, demand that one of its citizens assassinate
another who is blameless; " for so to demand is to violate for both
men the whole purpose for which the State exists" (pp. 17, 18).
Evidently the purpose in question is the welfare of individuals; but
this is a moral consideration. It is a principle assumed to be true
just beforehand, not a pragmatic induction from a conflict between
the State and particular wills. Again, he declares that the State
is entitled to preeminence over the other associations to which a
man may happen to belong, only when it possesses a " superior
1917-] NEW THEORY OF POLITICAL SOVEREIGNTY 241
moral claim " (p. 19). He points out and deplores the danger that
in modern times " people will believe the legal sovereignty of a
State to be identical with its moral sovereignty " (p. 20). He pro-
tests against a theory of sovereignty which would " exalt the State
above the moral law " (p. 23), and maintains that in a conflict of
wills " men should give their allegiance to that which is possessed
of superior moral purpose " (p. 24).
Possibly there exists some " higher synthesis " in which these
statements can be reconciled with those quoted in the third last
paragraph. In the absence of such a device it is not easy to see
how the power of the State is limited by moral considerations if
the determination of these moral values is to be left " to the test of
the event." If the proper sphere of the rights of the individual or
group, as against the State, cannot be marked out beforehand, how
can we rationally condemn the State that should show itself power-
ful enough in fact to reduce all individual and group wills to com-
plete submission, and disregard all their commonly recognized
rights? In the face of this determination of the State's competence
by " the test of the event," how could Professor Laski reasonably or
logically stigmatize such action as an attempt to lift the State above
the moral law?
These difficulties and the excesses of the prevailing theory of
sovereignty are both avoided by the Catholic theory. While admit-
ting and insisting that the supremacy of the State is complete within
its own sphere, the Catholic conception holds that this sphere is not
unlimited either outwardly or inwardly. The authority of the State
does not extend beyond temporal affairs, and even within that field
its exercise is always limited by the law of morals. Both the in-
dividual and the private association have natural rights which may
not be violated by the State, be it ever so powerful. Professor
Laski declares that his own theory " does not try to work out with
tedious elaboration the respective spheres of State or group or indi-
vidual." That very thing is attempted by Catholic political philoso-
phy. Since State and group and individual all have their proper
place and function in society and in life, their respective spheres
must be capable of at least approximate determination and delimi-
tation. The basis of this distinction of provinces must be reason
and experience. A reasoned theory of the freedom and opportunity
that properly belong to the private association gives men beforehand
a justification for their claims as members of such groups, tends
to prevent them from pushing their claims too far at the expense of
VOL. cvi. — 16
242 NEW THEORY OF POLITICAL SOVEREIGNTY [Nov.,
the State, and places their allegiance both to the State and the
private society upon strictly moral grounds. Surely this proceeding
is more rational than that which would leave all these matters " to
the test of the event," which is only another phrase for the arbitra-
ment of force and conflict, physical and intellectual. If clashes be-
tween the State and the group are to be reduced to a minimum the
limits of their respective spheres must, so far as possible, be ascer-
tained and set forth. In this process men may and do make mis-
takes, but these are fewer and less costly than those which result
from failure to adopt any reasoned theory defining the limits of
State and group and individual.
Two features of Professor Laski's theory call for special criti-
cism. He seems to look upon the State as merely one among many
forms of association. In other words, he seems to reduce the State
to the same plane of moral importance as the lesser and smaller so-
cieties. According to the Catholic position, the State is superior
to all of these. It is a perfect society because it is self-sufficient,
and because it is necessary for human welfare. None of the lesser
societies is self-sufficient, and only one of them, the family, is
strictly necessary for the well-being of mankind. Hence the State
is morally superior to all the others, even though they all have rights
which it may not transgress. In the second place, the author seems
to base the rights of the smaller associations on the ground that they
possess unified and corporate wills, and command the allegiance of
their members. Surely this is an inadequate foundation. A treas-
onable conspiracy against a legitimate government fulfills these con-
ditions; yet it has no right to exist or to function. Private asso-
ciations have rights against the State only when and because they
promote the welfare of their members without interfering with the
legitimate province of the State. Their validity and sacredness are
derived from their end and functions, not from their corporate char-
acter and the allegiance which they are able to command.
Had we space we should like to notice some of the statements
which the author makes in the chapter on the Catholic revival. We
should like to show, for example, that the claim made by the Church
to fix the limits of its jurisdiction in case of a conflict with the
State is not a claim of supremacy over the State. Such a claim
leaves the bulk of the State's province immune from ecclesiastical
control or authority. It is only the borderland, the twilight zone,
that is in question, and in the absence of amicable agreement the
line through this must obviously be drawn by the spiritual and
1917-] NEW THEORY OF POLITICAL SOVEREIGNTY 243
higher, not by the temporal and lower, society. Many other points
in this chapter, and in some of the other chapters, will be found of
particular historical interest to Catholics. In this article we are
mainly concerned with the theory of sovereignty that is expounded
in the book.
The work contains an immense amount of erudition, and is ex-
ceptionally well written. As a sample of the thought and the style,
we subjoin the following passage : " To distrust the old theory of
sovereignty is to strive towards a greater freedom. We have been,
perhaps, too frankly worshippers of the State. Before it we have
prostrated ourselves in speechless admiration, deeming its nature
matter, for the most part, beyond our concern. The result has been
the acceptance of a certain grim Hegelianism which has swept us all
unprotestingly on into the vortex of a great All which is more than
ourselves. Its goodness we might not deny. We live, so we are
told, but for its sake and in its life, and are otherwise non-existent.
So the State has become a kind of modern Baal to which the citizen
must bow a heedless knee. It has not been seen, or perhaps has
been too truly seen, that the death of argument lies in genuflection "
(p. 208).
Bew Boohs*
THE NEW ARCHEOLOGICAL DISCOVERIES AND THEIR
BEARING UPON THE NEW TESTAMENT AND UPON
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE PRIMITIVE CHURCH.
By Camdem M. Cobern, D.D., Litt.D. Introduction by
E. Naville. New York : Funk & Wagnalls Co. $3.00 net
The purpose of the present work is thus stated by the author
in his preface : " Specialists have written many ponderous volumes
touching limited areas of the general subject, but no one has previ-
ously attempted to give a summary of all the discoveries, in all lands,
so far as these in any important way have cast light upon the New
Testament writings or the life of the primitive Church. The aim
has been to make this work a corpus of all the more fascinating
facts and all the most beautiful and worthy sayings that have floated
down to us from those opulent centuries in which the earliest
Church was trained." Certainly the author has spared no pains to
realize his aim, analyzing hundreds of publications, checking and
sifting their contents, selecting what would be useful to his con-
templated readers and finally arranging the material in a logical
and pleasing manner.
The work is divided into two parts. Part I. (pp. 1-350) deals
with the literary remains, such as Greek papyri, ancient New Tes-
taments and other documents recently discovered. Part II. (pp. 350-
669) considers the monuments, inscriptions and other ancient re-
mains with references to the life and times of the primitive Church.
The fact that Dr. Naville has written the introduction is sufficient
guarantee of the scholarly character of Dr. Cobern's work. The
present volume will prove of the greatest utility to the large number
of readers who look for just such a ready reference to the scientific
discoveries of modern times, and scholars, too, with large libraries
at their disposal, will welcome the main facts presented in this con-
densed form. Dr. Cobern, it is true, does not intend to substitute
his " summary " for more extensive works and more special mono-
graphs, yet he says enough to present clearly the various facts and
their bearing on the New Testament and the primitive Church.
The style is always pleasing and the reading never grows
tiresome. We can recommend Dr. Cobern's pioneer work to our
1917-] HEW BOOKS 245
readers as a very instructive and interesting one, calculated to render
great service to all those interested in the study of the Nevr Testa-
ment or of the primitive Christian Church.
i
A MANUAL OF THE HISTORY OF DOGMAS. Volume I. By
Rev. Bernard J. Otten, S J. St. Louis : B. Herder. $2.00 net.
The history of dogmas is a record of the development of the
teachings of the Catholic Church, special attention being paid to both
the internal and external causes of that development. As Professor
Tixeront of Toulouse declares in his well-known History of Dog-
mas: " It calls for an accurate and truthful determination of the
course followed by Christian thought in that evolution which thus
brought it from the primitive elements of its doctrine to the devel-
opment of its theology. What were the stages in that progress?
What impulses, what suspensions, what hesitations did it undergo?
What circumstances threatened to bring about its deviation from
that path, and, as a matter of fact, what deviations did occur in cer-
tain parts of the Christian community. By what men and how was
this progress accomplished, and what were the ruling ideas, the
dominant principles which determined its course? These questions
the history of dogmas must answer."
Three volumes of Tixeront's scholarly work have been pub-
lished by Herder in an English translation, but his work is too ex-
tensive to be of much use to the average reader. Father Otten,
Professor of Dogmatic Theology in St. Louis University, has done
well, therefore to publish a compendious manual for ecclesiastical
students and college-bred men and women desirous of making a
thorough study of the teachings of the Church.
His first volume covers the period from A.D. 100 to A.D. 869.
The work is carefully and accurately done, the arrangement or-
derly, and the salient facts of dogmatic development clearly set
forth.
TERTULLIAN'S APOLOGY. Annotated, with an Introduction,
by John E. B. Mayor, M.A. With a Translation by Alexander
Souter, B.A. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. $3.25.
The late Professor Mayor of the University of Cambridge left
among his papers copious notes of his lectures upon the Apologeti-
cum of Tertullian. These notes Professor Souter of the University
of Aberdeen has edited and published with a scholarly and excellent
translation of Tertullian's well-known work.
246 NEW BOOKS [Nov.,
Oehler's text has been used throughout, although Gerald
Rauschen's edition of 1906 has superseded it as more accurate and
complete. The chief value of the book lies in Mayor's notes which
cover three hundred and fifty pages out of a total four hundred
and six. They contain parallel passages from profane and sacred
authors, references to the Sacred Scriptures and hundreds of illus-
trations of peculiar grammatical forms and words. The Latinist
and the student of the Fathers will find this critical work invalu*
able.
THE POETICAL WORKS OF THOMAS MacDONAGH.
THE POEMS OF JOSEPH MARY PLUNKETT. New York:
Frederick A. Stokes Co. $1.75 each, net.
There is a singular and pathetic suitability in this simultaneous
publication of the works of these two devoted, young Gaels,
leaders alike and victims of the ill-timed " poets' revolution " of
1916. And the personal differences, so manifest in their writings,
are quite as interesting as the similarity of their aims.
Joseph Mary Plunkett, whose poems carry an interesting bio-
graphical foreword by his sister, Geraldine Plunkett, was by nature
a scholar and by intention an artist. He was, moreover, a Stony-
hurst man, who lived close to the mystics, and there was something
apocalyptic about his muse. He wrote, it is said, with difficulty and
with a self-criticism that seldom called for revision : yet his genius
was extremely pictorial, and at moments — as in Heaven in Hell —
it achieved a breathless literary abandon close akin to Swinburne.
The present collection contains the best of Plunkett's earlier work,
a highly suggestive essay on Obscurity in Poetry, and the poems
which under the title of Occulta he had himself designed as his next
volume.
Of the work of Thomas MacDonagh, his friend James
Stephens says truly : " Here are the poems of a good man, and if
outside of rebellion and violence you wish to know what his
thoughts were like, you will find all his thoughts here." They are
the thoughts of a brave and very loving dreamer, a pure, human,
whimsical boy-soul who sang naively of himself and the things
about him, of eternal beauty, and of the imaginary Chaucers and
Calvins he met on the Dublin tramway. MacDonagh would seem
to have possessed a charming and prodigal gift of imagination,
without great sense of order or design. Into the Wishes for his
I9I7-] NEW BOOKS 247
little son it is impossible not to read a curious and tragically signifi-
cant commentary upon the mingled achievement and defeat of his
own brief life-story :
For I wish you more than I
Ever knew of glorious deed,
Though no rapture passed me by
That an eager heart could heed,
Though I followed heights, and sought
Things the sequel never brought.
Wild and perilous holy things
Flaming with a martyr's blood,
And the joy that laughs and sings
Where a foe must be withstood.
Joy of headlong happy chance
Leading on the battle dance !
THE CYCLE OF SPRING. By Sir Rabindranath Tagore. New
York: The Macmillan Co. $1.25.
This newest of Tagore's dramatic poems is rather a masque
than a play, and has been performed outdoors in Calcutta by the
masters and boys of the Bolpar School. In our own country it is
likely to delight the habitues of those exotic " little theatres " spring-
ing up on all sides. The Cycle of Spring is a poetic glorification of
the spirit of youth — a wistful glorification of childhood, such as only
mature hearts dream of, since the child himself plays always at
being "grown up!"
Like Tagore's other plays, the volume contains many charming
lyrics. It is pungent, too, with a growing spirit of irony ; and one
notes the passionate praise of activity, which is as essentially the
Bengali poet's message to the East, as contemplation and repose
may be said to sum up his message to the West.
LUTHER. By Hartmann Grisar, S.J. Translated by E. M. La-
mond. Edited by Luigi Cappadelta. Volume VI. St. Louis:
B. Herder. $3.25 net.
The opening chapter of Father Grisar's last volume deals with
Luther's attitude toward social life and education. He proves con-
clusively the truth of the famous saying of Erasmus : " Wherever
Lutheranism prevails, there we see the downfall of learning." His
revolt contributed to the decline of learning by its confiscation of
so many livings and foundations established for educational pur-
poses. The strongly utilitarian temper of the age emptied the uni-
248 NEW BOOKS [Nov.,
versities and caused a general contempt for learned studies. Prot-
estants, like F. M. Schiele, admit that the immediate effect of the
Wittenberg preaching was the collapse of the educational system
which had flourished throughout Germany.
The spread of Lutheranism had also a bad effect upon the
municipal movement for the relief of the poor. Luther's schemes
for helping the needy came to naught because of lack of organiza-
tion, and the avarice and hardheartedness of those who had en-
riched themselves by the robbery of church property. He himself
admits the utter lack of charity among his early followers, saying :
" No one will give, and unless we had the land we stole from the
Pope, the preachers would have but scant fare." " Woe to
you peasants, burghers and nobles, who grab everything, and pre-
tend all the time to be good Evangelicals."
Chapters XXXVI. and XXXVII. treat in detail of the darker
side of Luther's inner life: his early suffering, bodily and mental;
his many temptations ; his pseudo-mysticism ; his pretended dealings
with the devil; his impudent and dishonest insistence upon private
revelations; his morbid imaginings that the Pope was anti-Christ;
the Catholic religion utterly depraved, and himself a man blessed
with personal experiences and gifts beyond all other men. Some
physicians and historians have considered Luther absolutely insane,
others, the victim of hallucinations, while others again have traced
his morbid states to gout, heart disease, over-work or melancholia.
Father Grisar rejects utterly the insanity theory. He writes : " The
theory of Luther's not being a free agent is excluded not only by
his doubts and remorse of conscience, but also by the bitter deter-
mination with which at the very beginning he persuades himself of
his ideas, insists upon them later when doubts arise, and finally sur-
renders himself to their spell by a systematic self-deception. Such
behavior does not accord with that of a man who is not free."
In Chapter XXXVII. Father Grisar shows, from Luther's own
words, the utter falsity of his later account of his life in the convent
and the reasons for his apostasy. Chapter XXXVIII. pictures
Luther as the enemy of freedom of conscience. He was intolerant
toward Catholics, urging his followers to slay priests, monks and
cardinals " like mad dogs." He advocated the death penalty for the
Anabaptists and the Sacramentarians, and his theory and advice
were carried out to the extreme in the Saxon Electorate.
Father Grisar refutes in full the legend of Luther's suicide, and
shows how such stories were very current in the controversies of
1917.] NEW BOOKS 249
the sixteenth century. In a final chapter he gives extracts from the
writings of Luther's early biographers, sermons preached immedi-
ately after his death, and estimates of his character by Orthodox
Lutherans, pietists and liberal theologians. The author concludes:
" To get as close as possible to the real Luther and not to present a
painted or fictitious one has been our constant endeavor in the pres-
ent work. We venture to hope that the claims of objective history
may be recognized even in a field which trenches so closely on reli-
gious convictions."
The readers of these six volumes of Father Grisar must indeed
recognize that he has written the most objective, the most thorough
and. most unprejudiced life of Luther.
THE SISTERS OF CHARITY OF NAZARETH, KENTUCKY.
By Anna Blanche McGill. New York: The Encyclopedia
Press. $2.00.
This goodly volume of nearly four hundred and fifty pages
chronicles the story of the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth, and
fittingly celebrates their centenary.
Truly this pioneer band of founders, six in number, were val-
iant women, worthy daughters of the early colonists of Kentucky,
and greatly they needed the hardy virtues they so well cultivated.
In the year 1812, in a quaint little log cabin, was laid the foundation
of a great work for humanity. The dawn of 1912 found a society
numbering forty branch houses, almost a thousand Sisters laboring
for twenty thousand children and ten thousand sick in hospitals.
Their Motherhouse is at Nazareth where a Mother General and her
Council preside over a work stretching from New England to
Oregon. The story is a long record of superhuman fortitude, heroic
self-sacrifice and noble perseverance, which have caused the wilder-
ness to blossom as the rose.
DREAMS AND REALITIES. By Rosa Mulholland. St. Louis:
B. Herder. $1.50 net.
Happily there are still those to whom the love of God — and
even the love of Ireland — bring not a sword but peace. And of
these is Lady Gilbert, regnant always in the calm, silver beauty of
her work. It needs no introduction : each new volume is sure of
its old welcome, and the present poems will bring no disappointment.
They are rich with the pre-Raphaelite glamor which long ago be-
came a part of Rosa Mulholland's thought; the sacred verses have
250 NEW BOOKS [Nov.,
the old, naive sweetness; and there is a very modern note, too, in
such poems as The Factory Girl. The poems of dread and fore-
boding are interesting, and undoubtedly Celtic : but less truly " Gil-
bertian " perhaps than those in which the love of bird and blossom
and earth and sky runs riot. For here is a poet whose singing is
always — and half -unconsciously — running up the celestial stairway,
and to whom the dream is always a little more real than the reality.
THE LIFE OF MOTHER PAULINE VON MALLINCKRODT.
FOUNDRESS OF THE SISTERS OF CHRISTIAN CHAR-
ITY. By a Member of Her Community. New York: Ben-
ziger Brothers. $1.50.
That marvelous growth of religious congregations, character-
izing the first half of the last century, manifested the undying youth
and vigor of the age-old Catholic Church. Among them was the
congregation of the Sisters of Christian Charity — a name well ex-
emplified by their works, which embrace the active exercise of char-
ity in every department. Their foundress, Pauline von Mallinckrodt,
belonged to a race of soldiers, and on the maternal side to a family
of earnest, devoted Catholics. Her brother, Herman von Mallinck-
rodt, was the distinguished colleague of Windthorst, in the Centre
Party's courageous battle for right and justice.
Born in Westphalia in 1817, Pauline received her education
in Aix-la-Chapelle, having as her most venerated teacher the con-
vert-poetess, Louise Hensel. Curiously enough, two of her school
companions likewise became foundresses of religious congregations
— Clara Fey of the Sisters of the Poor Child Jesus and Frances
Schervier of the Sisters of the Poor of St. Francis.
Sweetly and gently, Divine Providence prepared the way for
Pauline's life work, and in 1847 sne l^d the foundation of her con-
gregation in the city of Paderborn. A glance at the appendix of
her life shows how widely the congregation has spread. Over
a hundred foundations, comprising day and boarding schools,
orphanages, homes for the blind, hospitals, etc., exist today;
some in Europe — Germany, Denmark and Bohemia — but by
far the greater number in North and South America. The
rise and progress of the work was attended by even more than the
usual trials; for Pauline and her Sisters lived through the days of
the Kulturkampf, sharing the exile of the older religious orders.
She did not bow before the storm, until every effort dictated by pru-
dence and wisdom had been exhausted. She even called on Herr
1917-] NEW BOOKS 251
Falk, the author of the iniquitous May Laws, but his suggestion
that her community lay aside their religious habit was promptly re-
jected, and she set herself to provide asylums for her Sisters and to
open new centres for their religious activities. So it was that the
New World benefited by the mistakes of the Old. Eighty-eight
convents, each radiating Christian charity, were the result. But
Pauline herself did not go far from her beloved Paderborn. She re-
tired to Brussels and there established her Motherhouse, wishing
to be at hand should the storm abate. And in 1880, after a visit to
the foundations of America, she quietly resumed her life where she
had begun her labors. On the 3<Dth of April, 1881, she went to her
reward.
This valiant woman possessed a great mind, a tender heart and
in large measure that charity of Christ which was the inspiration
and the aim of her life and work.
CHRISTINE. By Alice Cholmondeley. New York: The Mac-
millan Co. $1.25.
Except for a preface that explains and supplements the main
substance, this short but very interesting book is — ostensibly, at all
events — made up of an English girl's letters written from Germany
during 1914, the first date being May 28th and last, August 6th.
There is a great deal of speculation among readers and re-
viewers as to the genuineness of the letters. Whether fact or fiction,
they have the ring of truth and spontaneity. They are all written
to the author's mother; thus we get the girl's unstudied record
of everyday experiences and impressions of people and things in the
pension, in the homes she visits, in the city streets and in the coun-
try. From the first she is aware of a " muffled unfriendliness " to
England on the part of these new acquaintances ; it amuses and puz-
zles her, but her comments are light, for she is happy in her progress
and her teacher's encouragement and kindness. It is at his house
that she meets her future lover, and through him she is enabled to
pay a visit to the country, which she describes delightfully. Then
comes the news of the murder of the Archduke and with it the reve-
lation of unsuspected ferocity, of fanatical adoration of " Majestat."
She sees many of those who have been friendly to her transformed
by England's declaration of war into frigid aliens, and, filled with
horror and deadly fear, she attempts to escape.
The manner in which this is told is extraordinarily vivid, yet
marked with a moderation that gives a more telling effect than could
252 NEW BOOKS [Nov.,
be obtained from any intricacy of plot. The book is, as the preface
states, " a picture of the state of mind of the German public immedi-
ately before the War." As such it is most graphic and convincing.
THE METHOD IN THE MADNESS. A Fresh Consideration of
the Case between Germany and Ourselves. By Edwyn Bevan.
New York: Longmans, Green & Co. $1.50.
This English book on the Great War has two unusual char-
acteristics : it is written in a style of fine and deliberate quality, and
its writer is almost as much as it is humanly possible to be, fair
and dispassionate. Mr. Bevan, who is an Honorary Fellow of New
College, Oxford, set himself indeed a most difificut task — to lay
bare, in the midst of the present turmoil and hurly-burly, the truth,
the real facts; and he has, we believe, accomplished his object as
far is it is possible to do so at this time.
The chief value of Mr. Bevan's book lies in his endeavor to
pierce through to those basic truths which good men of all countries
unite in holding, and by thus finding a common ground, to discover
also a plan by which not only a just peace may be concluded, but a
safe means may be provided for the subsequent expansion and con-
traction of the various nations and so remove a potent cause of
future embroilment.
With regard to the attainment of peace, his chapter entitled
"Differences on the Major Premise" is of especial worth as showing
that after all the difference between the contending parties is not so
much a difference of primary principles as of judgment on particular
facts. Concerning the second object, the provision of a safe means
for the transference of sovereignty over land, the author has some
very wise remarks in his final chapter, " Practical Conclusions."
His ideas on colonial expansion or, as he terms it, " imperialism in
the tropics," are exceptionally good.
In one place only throughout this book would we take issue
with the author on the validity of his principles, and that is in his
chapter " Concerning Lies." His definition of a lie, for instance, as
" a false statement made with the consciousness of its falsehood "
omits the further necessary element of " intent to deceive." This,
however, we would incline to let pass, were it not for certain state-
ments of his later on, where he says that " in this connection one
may reflect that there is no concrete moral principle which is abso-
lute." And again, after instancing various exceptions to the pre-
cepts against lying and killing, he remarks, " And so with all other
1917-] NEW BOOKS 253
concrete moral rules." This is very loose language or very loose
thinking.
With the exception noted, this book certainly deserves a wide
reading. Mr. Bevan is neither intellectually cold nor passionately
controversial, and though his affections are, of course, a priori on
the side of England and the Allies he does not permit that fact to
be the deciding factor in his judgment. Moreover, there is an ab-
sence of mere denunciation in his book that is most grateful to an
ear Iqng wearied with extravagant charges and passionate accusa-
tion.
THE LIFE AND POETRY OF JAMES THOMSON (B. V.). By
J. E. Meeker. New York: Yale University Press. $1.75 net.
Here we have one of those tragic stories of the life of a man
of genius with which the annals of literature have taught us to be
but too familiar ; and it is the sad distinction of the present work
that it has to do with perhaps the most utterly gloomy and tragic
of them all. For not only was Thomson's life from his earliest
years to his miserable end in a London hospital one long, unrelieved
experience of grinding poverty, religious darkness, absolute pessim-
ism, and physical and spiritual loneliness, but it was also almost
completely devoid of that literary recognition, either present or pros-
pective, with which the man of letters is wont to splace hardship
and failure.
James Thomson, or " B. V." as he always signed himself, was
the son of Scotch parents, and besides inheriting from his mother a
strong bias to melancholy, was brought up by her in the most rigid
conformity with Calvinistic doctrine. This last influence on coming
to manhod he threw off, but despite his apparent emancipation and
his complete disavowal of faith in God or a hereafter or even in any
merely, natural joy in human existence, his nature was essentially
religious, and his philosophy of life was simply the extreme rebound
from the grim creed of his childhood.
This philosophy of his, of complete and absolute negation of
hope, temporal as well as eternal, and the death in early youth of the
girl he profoundly loved, were the chief inspirations of his genius;
and these working upon the harsh materials of his life, first as an
army schoolmaster, then for the greater part of his career as a hack-
writer on obscure London journals, served to create that sombre
masterpiece, The City of Dreadful Night, on which his fame is
chiefly built.
254 NEW BOOKS [Nov.,
Thomson, as his present biographer forcibly puts it, " finds a
tragic irony in the fact that man's one short life should be a spasm
of pain between two eternal oblivions," and on this he never ceases
to ring the changes.
I find no hint throughout the Universe
Of good or ill, of blessing or of curse;
I find alone Necessity supreme,
or again :
The world rolls round forever like a mill ;
It grinds out death and life, and good and ill ;
It has no purpose, heart or mind or will.
With such an outlook it was of course inevitable that Thomson
should not win popularity ; and his greatest poem failed of adequate
recognition, partly on its own account and partly because of the
medium of its appearance, a radical and far from literary periodical.
Failure indeed seemed to mark his every endeavor, and public in-
terest either in his life or poetry has never been more than languid
and intermittent.
This is not entirely as it should be, for as a man Thomson
possessed certain admirable qualities, notably courage, that deserves
commemoration, and moreover his life in itself has an interest for
us beyond that of a mere human document ; while as a poet his lines
give forth an austere ring, an iron music, which is singularly ap-
propriate to his dark theme of despair and which we can find no-
where else. He gave powerful utterance to an essentially forbid-
ding subject-, and though profoundly fatalistic he was neither a cynic
nor a mere railer. His sincerity kept him very far indeed from the
theatricalities with which Bryon would have invested such a theme.
Mr. Meeker's book is clearly and entertainingly written; and
he did well in his account of such a life as Thomson's to adopt the
method, as he tells us, of " using his poems and his prose chronolog-
ically as a key to his inner development." The author compares his
subject's career to that of Poe; but a much closer parallel could be
drawn out between the external lives of Thomson and another
little-known genius, James Clarence Mangan. In both an early
disappointment in love was the source of a life-long sorrow and a
dominent influence on their poetry, both were abject failures in
practical affairs, both were addicted to drink, and both have had
meted out to them a full measure of the world's neglect in life and
1917-] NEW BOOKS 255
in death. To such a parallel, however, one important exception is
to be made, and that is the matter of their spiritual inheritance and
possession; though both " paced the places infamous to tell," it was
faith that spelt the tremendous difference between them, the dif-
ference between My Dark Rosaleen and The City of Dreadful
Night.
MERLIN. A Poem. By Edwin Robinson. New York: The
Macmillan Co. . $1.25.
The reader whose knowledge of this old tale is derived from
the Idylls of the King will find Mr. Robinson's treatment of the
Arthur-story arrestingly modern in method. The author of Merlin
has worked in the tradition of the most realistic, least conventional,
of the modern poetic schools, and the result has little in common
with the symbolism and stately harmonies of the Tennysonian line.
Especially in diction is the heroic strain abated — the wording of
the poem, is every-day, terse, conversational, at times lapsing into
a state of almost ludicrous " undress." Yet the experiment suc-
ceeds, on the whole; the reality of the medium helps to establish
the reality of the story conveyed.
It cannot be said, however, that the triumph of realism is com-
plete. If the method is free from the ambiguities of symbolism, the
structure itself is not. An undefined but terrible power called fate
is the chief factor of the poem, fate moves through Merlin to make
Arthur his creature, through Vivian to make Merlin hers. Not
Vivian's treachery but change and destiny work the evil magic in
Merlin's life. He wanders from Broceliande, her retreat, back to
Camelot to behold the sin-wrecked kingdom he had once established
for Arthur. The fate foreseen by him at the height of his feasting
with Vivian, has fallen at last, and the end is " a wild and final rain
on Camelot." This taste of futility and desolation lingers longest
after the poem is read, and puzzles most as to its meaning. A faint
promise is half-given, in the end, that catastrophe will be the teacher
of men, and that the world will finally profit by these mistakes and
sins. But it is hard to reconcile this tentative afterthought of hope
with the strong sense of fatalism in the poem ; the sense that a will
before which the human will is powerless, has caused each act and
directed each disaster.
On the whole, in spite of Mr. Robinson's literary power, we
prefer the terrors of " mid-Victorian morality " and the symbolism
of the Idylls of the King.
256 NEW BOOKS [Nov.,
YOUR PART IN POVERTY. By George Lansbury. New York:
B. W. Huebsch. $1.00.
The author of this book is an Englishman, and he writes of
English conditions. With much feeling, though without violence
or bitterness, he outlines the economic and social evils of his day
and country, headed: Workmen; Women and Children; Business;
Churches; What We Must Do. Perhaps the main distinctive
feature of his descriptive pages is the insistence that concrete
human beings and institutions are responsible for the evils. The
Church (meaning all the churches) comes in for a great deal of
blame. After having one's moral indignation roused by his por-
trayal of social suffering, one begins eagerly and hopefully the last
chapter in which the author tells us " what we must do " in order
to cancel the responsibility for " our part in poverty." We are
there urged to examine the source of our incomes, and if we find
that they include interest or profits we must use every means in our
power to " transform the present social order from competition to
cooperation." Specifically, we are exhorted to join the more ad-
vanced section of the working class movement, the section which
aims at the complete control of the great industries by the workers
in each industry — what is frequently called " Guild Socialism."
The difficulties which would confront such a system are lightly
brushed aside by the author in a spirit of simple faith. As regards
the land, apparently he would have it taxed to the full extent of its
rental value. In other words, he would have the State confiscate
the land properties of all present owners. About the only general
statements in the last chapter that can be accepted without reserva-
tion are these: "there is no royal road or short cut to social sal-
vation," and " we all need a complete change of heart." Most
persons who subscribe to the first of these declarations will reject
the " short cuts " which the author himself proposes. When we all
have experienced a " complete change of heart," we shall find prac-
tical reform devices less important than they are today.
YTORKKEN'S COMPENSATION. By J. E. Rhodes. New York :
The Macmillan Co. $1.50.
The remarkable extension in the United States within a few
years of the policy of compensating workmen for injuries, has
made the subject of very general interest. An immense amount of
literature has become available, but it is mostly in the form of
articles in periodicals, or of treatises on some particular phase of
1917.] NEW BOOKS 257
the matter. Hence the appearance is to be welcomed of a volume
which aims to give a brief history of the whole compensation move-
ment, and an outline of the general principles upon which is based
the compensation system. In the introductory chapter the reader
will find a good summary of the origin, essence, development and
defects of the doctrine and practice of employer's liability, which
has been superseded by the policy known as workmen's compensa-
tion. Then follow chapters on accident insurance, the development
of the compensation principle in Europe, the agitation for and
early attempts at legislation embodying this principle in the United
States, the constitutionality of such legislation, the essential ele-
ments of the legislation as we have it today, some important ques-
tions of administration, and some social aspects of the policy. In
addition to these chapters, there are three very useful appendices,
an extensive bibliography, a table of court cases, and an index. All
in all, the book will be found extremely useful by the reader who
desires to get a fairly comprehensive knowledge of the essentials
of workmen's compensation. Chapter VI. on the constitutionality
of compensation legislation is a good example of the author's ability
to present clearly within a brief compass all the important elements
of a complex situation.
THE NATIONAL BUDGET SYSTEM AND AMERICAN FI-
NANCE. By Charles Wallace Collins. New York: The Mac-
millan Co.. $1.25.
In December, 1909, President Taft organized a national Com-
mission on Economy and Efficiency for the purpose of investigating
the method by which our Government is financed. What that com-
mission found and told in its report would make sensational
reading, even in these days of war excitement, if it were published
in a form accessible to the general reader. Over and above the self-
praises we love to sing to ourselves and our neighbors about our
" American efficiency," rise vague rumors of " American slip-
shod," " American bungling," and so on. Perhaps these rumors
are echoes of the report which President Taft's commission made
a few years ago. At any rate, the report is there, for anyone who
will, to read; and, better still, here, from the pen of a member of
our Congressional Library staff, is a little book giving us presum-
ably all the essential facts that lie buried in that report, with
a very interesting and illuminating commentary on them.
" Today there is not a student of affairs nor a man in public
VOL. cvi.— 17
258 NEW BOOKS [Nov.,
life who would venture to defend the haphazard way in which the
Government [of the United States] is provided with funds for its
running expenses," says Mr. Collins in his treatise on the budget
system. As he reveals the facts to us, we see indeed that we " have
consciously retrograded from decade to decade " in the management
of our national business. No merchant or manufacturer in the land
would dream of conducting his affairs as we do those of our coun-
try; to do so would be to court disaster. The natural inference,
then, is that we are courting national disaster, and that a day of
reckoning must yet come when we will have to pay for our folly.
But there is an obvious remedy. It is the budget system, already
in use in all the progressive countries of the world except our own.
It is almost unbelievable that we have held back so long. The think-
ing reader of Mr. Collins' book will not be slow, however, in con-
cluding that there is a reason for our tardiness in this regard, and
a selfish reason at that. The budget system would practically wipe
out " the pork barrel," the " local drag," and all that sort of thing,
on which greedy politicians thrive. Until a higher ideal is achieved
by those selfsame politicians, or a new light is seen by them — or
forced on them by their constituents — we will have no national
budget system. It is not hard to believe, however, that the time is
being hastened — and hastened not a little by the war of today —
when popular demand will at last achieve this much needed reform.
OVER THE TOP. By Arthur Guy Empey. New York: G. P.
Putnam's Sons. $1.50.
Out of the vast tide of war books this volume will perhaps
remain " on top " longer than the majority, not because it is a
literary masterpiece — for truth is, it shows every sign of hasty writ-
ing— but because it is a genuine human document, a living testimony
from the heart of the great conflict, by one who has veritably passed
through fire and lived to tell the tale. A rather refreshing, if not
indeed "fresh," touch of typical American humor lights the pages of
Gunner Empey's book, and through it all there breathes the spirit
of buoyancy and optimism that is characteristically American. It
is easy enough to understand how it came about that our young
American recruit in the British army found himself disciplined now
and then for " Yankee impudence." But however trying this same
" impudence " might prove in the military ranks, it makes the book
delightfully human, and enables the average person to read its ac-
count of war's horrors without being completely nauseated.
1917-] NEW BOOKS 259
There is one chapter in Mr. Empey's story that bids fair to
become a classic of the World War. It is the story of " Albert
Lloyd," an English boy who was a slacker and a coward, but who, in
the last moments of his poor, weak life, retrieved himself so vali-
antly and with such an exaltation of heroism that none who have
read his story can ever forget it. The account of the actual Over
the Top is likewise a remarkable bit of graphic writing. " I knew I
was running but could feel no motion below the waist. Patches on
the ground seemed to float to the rear as if I were on a treadmill
and scenery was rushing past me " — and so on : it is all an uncon-
scious piece of quite wonderful writing, and indicates, perhaps, what
the author may yet do with his pen. An entertaining and informa-
tive " Tommy's Dictionary of the Trenches " completes the volume;
and here again the " Yankee impudence " of the American soldier
of fortune lights things up with a happy grin.
I
THE LIFE OF ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. By Ed-
mund Gosse, C.B. New York: The Macmillan Co. $3.50.
Mr. Gosse's book, which has been awaited with lively interest,
will probably remain the standard life of Swinburne. The author
brings to the acomplishment of his task not only recognized literary
ability, but the additional advantage of an intimate acquaintance
with the poet, supplemented by the recollections of relatives,
friends and other contemporaries. The portrait he has drawn will
be pronounced by some a speaking likeness, while others may crit-
icize or condemn details of outline or treatment.
It is undeniable that, along with vagaries and perversities ap-
proaching, at times, to eccentricity, Swinburne possessed endow-
ments of the highest order. His sense of beauty, cultivated and
refined by education, his unsurpassed faculty of producing exquisite
musical effects through the mere medium of language, produced
an art which, by its vigor, freedom, and variety of movement and
cadence, has exercised a potent and beneficial influence on English
verse.
But as we trace his course, we are reminded that the Muse
which could soar so buoyantly, could also wallow. The compara-
tively clean paganism of Atalanta in Calydon was destined to lapse
in later productions into gross animalism, downright lewdness and
blatant impiety. This, his biographer does not explicitly declare.
Indeed, he rather rallies, with indignant zeal, to the defence of his
hero against what he satirically calls the " Podsnapian " morality of
26o NEW BOOKS [Nov.,
the British public. From this very vindication, however, we can es-
timate the extent to which that morality was startled and scandal-
ized by the poet's audacity.
But if Mr. Gosse elects to minimize or ignore these decadent
propensities, he notes, with more readiness, another defect of Swin-
burne's, which he terms the ossification of his genius — a tendency
to wordiness and vagueness which grew with advancing years.
Swinburne was always too eager to rhapsodize, and his very facility
of utterance beguiled and finally overwhelmed him. This fault
makes the perusal of some of his longer poems a veritable task,
from which the jaded reader rises with a confused impression of
nebulous ideas and still-born fancies buried under cloying masses
of sonorous verbiage.
The poet's prose works, of which probably the best known are
his Shakespearean studies, receive a larger share of the biographer's
eulogy than their lack of popular favor would appear to warrant.
Swinburne, though versed in the literature of several languages be-
sides his own, did not have the judicial patience and stability nec-
essary for a trustworthy critic.
Mr. Gosse advances a theory in regard to the connection be-
tween the physical traits and imaginative gifts of famous artists,
notably exemplified in the case of Swinburne. But whatever may
be its general merits, the theory does not afford a satisfactory
basis for definite judgment. Admiral Swinburne furnished a
better one in an interview recorded in the Life. After one of his
son's periodical orgies, he lamented that the latter in receiving the
gift of genius, had not received that of self-control.
On the whole, the book makes thoroughly interesting reading.
The author, while keeping the chief figure steadily in view, con-
trives to throw numerous sidelights on the cultured circles of the
Victorian era, especially the pre-Raphaelite group of which Swin-
burne was the supreme pontiff.
ARTHUR STANTON. A Memoir. By Right Hon. George W. E.
Russell. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. $3.50 net.
The life of Rev. Arthur Stanton, curate for fifty years in the
Anglican Church of St. Albans, Holborn, has special interest be-
cause of the insight it affords into the history of the High Church
movement in England since 1862. Soon after his ordination Mr.
Stanton offered his services to Dr. Pusey, but was rejected on ac-
count of his extreme ritualism and his personal views concerning
NEW BOOKS 261
the province of Anglican Sisterhoods. He next offered his serv-
ices to the rector of St. Albans, a man of his own way of thinking,
and was at once accepted. He spent his whole life in this slum
parish doing his utmost to win the poor by attractive " Catholic "
services, frequent preaching, social clubs and leagues, and unstinted
giving, both of his time and money.
St. Alban's extreme ritual and its determined advocacy of
Catholic doctrines and practices brought its rector, Mackonochie,
and his fighting curate, Stanton, into constant conflict with the
Protestant bishops of the Establishment, and their Erastian ec-
clesiastical courts. After twenty years of controversy the rector
was finally deprived of his benefice, and Stanton was forbidden to
preach in a number of English and Welsh dioceses.
Many have wondered why Mr. Stanton never became a Cath-
olic. This book fully answers that question. He had the average
Englishman's hatred of the Papacy and the Jesuits, and like a big-
oted sixteenth century Protestant declared his chief objection to the
Roman Catholic Church to be " its untruthfulness and its worldli-
ness." Moreover, his constant disagreement with his superiors made
him utterly restive under authority. As one of his friends put it :
" He never would have been a success in any church where obedi-
ence was required." Stanton himself declared this friend to be
right.
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES, 1917. By Arthur Gleason. New
York : The Century Co. $2.00 net.
It is somewhat hard at first to say just why Mr. Gleason's im-
posing volume of four hundred and twenty-eight pages does not
make a stronger impression. He certainly has a sufficiently interest-
ing subject — the rise and spread of democratic principles through all
classes of British society — and evidently he has been at some pains
to gather his facts; and yet his book is diffuse and unsatisfying.
Perhaps the best word to describe its effect would be " scattering,"
for though democracy is a frequent term with him, his instances
are isolated rather than bound together by a common principle, and
in general he betrays a want of philosophic grasp.
The handling of such a theme as Mr. Gleason's is indeed no
easy task, and there are just two satisfactory ways in which it
might be accomplished : either the investigator should approach his
subject with a perfectly open mind and draw out his facts to their
logical conclusion, or, if he has preconceived notions, he should
262 NEW BOOKS [Nov.,
make liberal allowance for their presence and not permit them to
govern his findings. Unfortunately it is this last that Mr. Gleason
has largely failed to do, so that the impression he creates is of a
mind previously made up, and using only those facts which will sup-
port his thesis.
The jacket of this book describes it as " a vivid picture of the
changes and prospects of change wrought by the War in the social
fabric of Great Britain." As to the actual changes already brought
about, Mr. Gleason's instances are neither numerous nor important
enough to justify a general conclusion; but prophecy is an easier
affair and it is on the prospects of change that he lays emphasis.
For many readers this book will have a strong appeal, for democ-
racy is in the air nowadays, and popular journalism consists in
telling people what they want to hear. Not that Mr. Gleason is
consciously and in principle a popular journalist; but he is so in ef-
fect. For by the turn of events it happens that many socialistic
tenets, which Mr. Gleason has long held — many of which are com-
mendable, divorced from their basic principle — have now caught
the popular fancy, and Mr. Gleason has only to preach what he has
long sincerely believed, in order to win wide approval. But this
very state of things militates against his impartiality as a thinker
and makes us accept his conclusions with too great reservations.
In other words, Mr. Gleason is a special pleader rather than a philo-
sophic investigator, and it is only a philosophic investigator who
could convincingly treat such a subject as that of the present book.
NOTRE DAME VERSE. Compiled and edited by Speer Strahan
and Charles L. O'Donnell, C.S.C. Notre Dame, Indiana: The
University Press.
" It happens just now that poetry is in fashion," the editors
of this little volume remark in their foreword. It is ; and it would
be better for the world if more poetry of the kind included in this
little book were fashionable — in preference to some of the elucu-
brations that are in vogue. Not that this is a complete collection
of poetic masterpieces; nor that devotional verse is the only kind
to be commended. It is rather the spirit of the writings herein
gathered that appeals; the uniform sense of high ideals, of nobil-
ity in aspiration that is refreshing.
Some famous names are included in the list of contributors.
Charles Warren Stoddard is here, with his inimitable Lahaina, and
his Indiana; Maurice Francis Egan with an equisite sonnet, An
1917-] NEW BOOKS 263
Eventide; Father Charles L. O'Donnell offers four beautiful se-
lections, one a quatrain of the sort that the lamented Father Tabb
was wont to write; Speer Strahan is also represented, whose verse
is well known — and whom we also suspect of being ("somebody
else !") and two or three others, perhaps not quite so familiar. Paul
R. Martin's sonnet, Kathleen ni Houlihan is one of the best pieces
in the book.
The little volume is a fitting literary memorial of the recently-
celebrated golden jubilee of Notre Dame University, where poetry,
as the editor tells us, " is a tradition." Any school might be proud
of having produced such a group of poets.
A SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FAMILY. By
Arthur W. Calhoun, Ph.D. Cleveland : The Arthur H. Clark
Co.
Dr. Calhoun, of Clark University, is adventuring something new
and rather daring in historical writing in this, the first volume of a
work treating of the Colonial period of American social life. Three
volumes are contemplated, the second bringing the history through
the Civil War period ; the third focussing its attention on the present
generation.
Recognizing the family as the unit of society, every historian
must go to the family as his source in studying the life of a nation.
But here is a work that does more than merely advert to the intimate
social life of the American people; rather, it wholly concentrates its
attention on the family, opens the inner doors, and goes straight to
the hearthstone for its material and its authority. Such a work
must be of the most practical value.
The socialist's materialistic conception of history has so colored
the glass through which many men now contemplate life that what
Dr. Calhoun calls " the economic interpretation," is practically ines-
capable to the present-day writer. In plain English, this " inter-
pretation " means that we are to look for the cause of human events,
not so much in men themselves as in the material circumstances
surrounding them: with the Marxian socialist it means that, if
people are criminal, it is because they are poor. Such a theory makes
no account of the very human possibility that, if certain people are
poor, it may be because they are criminal; and reckons not at all
with the corrupting power of the wealth which it would make so
coveted. Of this " economic interpretation " the modern historian
must beware if he is to record life in its due proportions. Dr. Cal-
264 NEW BOOKS [Nov.,
houn, despite his avowed intention not to exaggerate in this direc-
tion, does, we think, lay too much stress at times on the " economic
interpretation " of life.
However, in Dr. Calhoun we have unquestionably a sincere and
ardent searcher into the human problem. Only a sincere historian
would have dared to explode, as he does, so many of the picturesque
and romantic ideas of our Colonial life which we have all cherished
from infancy, and which the fiction writers have so long and zeal-
ously fostered. Dr. Calhoun, we must remember, is studying the
sources of modern social evil. By the medium of his book we behold
what a vast and inevitable process is the making of the life of a
whole people; with the touchstone of a " spiritual interpretation " —
in contradistinction to the " economic " — we can sense, through the
same medium, how inescapable are the fruits of sin, " even to the
third and fourth generation."
The Catholic student, although he finds Dr. Calhoun on the
whole impartial and careful, will be inclined, nevertheless, to chal-
lenge such a reference as he makes in his chapter on " Old World
Origins " to " mediaeval ecclesiastical jugglery which sold divorces
while pretending to prohibit them." No footnote or appendix
explains or substantiates these bald words; they are stated as a
matter of fact ; and perhaps it is the spirit of the utterance, as much
as its context, that the Catholic critic resents. We suspect that, in
this instance, Dr. Calhoun has not acquainted himself, as he should,
with the Church's marriage laws. For the general reader it will be
only necessary to note in refutation that the Church which refused
King Henry VIII. a divorce, when every material advantage argued
for it, can hardly in justice be accused of the " ecclesiastical jug-
glery " of which our author speaks with such assurance. But on the
whole, as we have said, Dr. Calhoun is clear-sighted and open-
minded. He has, for instance, the courage to show what dire fruits
the Reformation and the loose moral teaching of Luther have borne
to the world. His history will be a valuable addition to our Amer-
ican social literature.
THE CITY WORKER'S WORLD. By Mary Kingsbury Simk-
hovitch. New York: The Macmillan Co. $1.25.
In this slim volume, Mrs. Simkhovitch has crystallized her im-
pressions of fifteen years as Director of Greenwich House, the So-
cial Settlement in Jones Street ; and those curious to know how the
majority of their neighbors live will here find the loves, fears, joys
I9I7-] NEW BOOKS 265
and sorrows of the industrial family painted with a sympathy al-
ways vivid, yet refreshingly lacking in sentimentality.
By the term industrial family, Mrs. Simkhovitch includes
those engaged in trade, manufacture, etc., whose maximum wage is
not over $1,500. The minimum amount now compatible with main-
taining an American standard of living, as reached by the latest
researches, is $1,000, and at the time of the thirteenth census the
average yearly income in New York City was five hundred and
eighty-four dollars. The fact that a large number of our fellow-
citizens are living in actual want, is thus brought home to us with
uncomfortable certitude, particularly when we consider that with
less than eight hundred dollars, under-nourishment is almost inevit-
able.
Overcrowding and semi-starvation, Mrs. Simkhovitch, declares,
constitute the ablest factors of physical and moral deterioration.
" The longer and intenser the hours of labor, the more debasing the
forms of recreation will become." Before we can increase our
citizens' ideals, we must see that their families are fed. " To create
interest in the submerged is to attempt to teach the kindergarten
child — calculus. The man or woman on the raft wants neither
libraries nor cooking lessons — but rescue."
Mrs. Simkhovitch affirms that, as all reforms must come from
within, she believes that the poor must ultimately secure for them-
selves the organization, the insurance and the safeguards to health
that their situation demands.
Though frank to admit that Catholicism retains its hold far
better than either Protestantism or Judaism, Mrs. Simkhovitch
lacks that faith in the enduring power of the Church which is the
Catholic's heritage. Like many Protestants, she gropes for some
intangible, future expression of religion, which she defines as "the
capacity to face life triumphantly." Catholics know that power
is to be found only under the shadow of Christ's Cross in His
Church.
THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR. By W. Macneile Dixon. Bos-
ton : Houghton MifHin Co.
There was a time when people, this side of the water at any
rate, believed that the World War would soon be settled by some
great battle of dreadnoughts on the high seas. That was in the
early days of the conflict, when a mighty naval clash was hourly
anticipated. It did not come. Instead came the submarine. And
266 NEW BOOKS [Nov.,
in the dread and horror of the submarine, we have been prone to
forget almost altogether the part actually played by the water
fighters of the sea. Mr. Dixon's little volume comes, then, as a
sort of an eye-opener in this direction. Every word of it makes
interesting reading; and not a small part of the pleasure the book
imparts, is due to the author's clear and flowing style. In the com-
pass of less than one hundred pages he tells what the British navy
has done in the present war, and he tells it with the graphic word
and high spirit that are infectious. The charts, maps and photo-
graphs which illuminate his text are as clear as his own swift and
telling phrases. On the whole, the book is valuable, makes good
reading, and is just a bit refreshing after the long sieges of trench
warfare and shell-hole fighting which the present-day critic of
books must endure. A dash of the salt spray seems to flavor the
little volume from cover to cover.
FAITH, WAR AND POLICY. Addresses and Essays on the Euro-
pean War. By Gilbert Murray. Boston : Houghton Mifflin
Co. $1.25 net.
The present volume of the well-known Professor of Greek at
Oxford has, for a book on the War, a plan refreshingly out of the
ordinary. It is made up of papers written at various times since the
beginning of hostilities down to March of the present year, and
since, as he tells us, " I have not altered a sentence," we have here
the extremely interesting record of the mind of a scholar and a
Liberal through the last three cataclysmic years. There is discover-
able, of course, here and there a change or widening of the wri-
ter's views as the War went on, but it was not a basic change, and
this f?ct speaks eloquently for the high quality of his thought and
of the political principles with which he started.
"First Thoughts on the War," "How Can War Ever Be
Right?" " The Evil and the Good of the War," " Ireland," " Amer-
ica and the War," " America and England," " The Sea Policy of
Great Britain," are titles of some of the most interesting papers.
His chapter on Ireland, with its three subdivisions of " The Dublin
Insurrection," " The Execution of Casement," and " The Future
of Ireland," treats a troublesome question with sanity and enlight-
enment; and his paper on " Democratic Control of Foreign Policy "
is a particularly clear and judicious showing of the difficulty and
grave danger of popular meddling in intricate affairs of state. The
least satisfactory chapter is the one called " Herd Instinct and the
1917.] NEW BOOKS 267
War," which is an endeavor to explain mass consciousness in the
terms of brute creation. His principles here contain more than a
hint of Darwinism, and if it were not for the scholarly reputation
of the author, we should say that in places his words sound peril-
ously like nonsense, and nonsense of a discredited sort.
Because of the unusual method of the book's composition, it
is to the preface we must look for a summary of the author's pres-
ent views and position, his ripened conclusions. The preface, there-
fore, with regard to immediate problems at least, is the most valu-
able part of the work, and concerning two of the most momentous
of these immediate problems — the Irish question and the question
of peace — the author has some striking things to say.
The big lack in political thought here in America, is an almost
complete want of knowledge of international politics, and though
circumstances hitherto have been so disposed as to allow us to dis-
pense with such knowledge, that day has now passed. If we are
not to make egregious blunders and perhaps fatal ones on the
world's stage, henceforth we shall have to concern ourselves with
questions outside our own immediate interests, and it is to such
books as the present that we shall have to apply to obtain this es-
sential knowledge. Professor Murray's book affords a wise and
statesmanlike view of complicated problems, and not the least of
its merits is the temperate spirit with which these problems are dis-
cussed. As he himself says of another work, " Even if this book
were less good than it is, it would deserve reading for its admirable
manners."
ITALY, MEDIAEVAL AND MODERN. By E. M. Jamison, C M.
Ady, K. D. Vernon and C. Sanford Terry. New York: Ox-
ford University Press. $2.90.
This volume purports to be a textbook for use " as an introduc-
tion to more detailed studies." The number of such manuals of
Italian history in English being quite limited, a new work to supply
the want should be " a consummation devoutly to be wished. " Un-
fortunately the authors of the book under consideration have not
brought to their task that freedom from bias and prejudice so es-
sential for the adequate treatment of the many phases of Italy's de-
velopment and organization. For in Italy, more perhaps than in
any other European country, the national history is interwoven
with that of the Church, and cannot be fairly presented unless
Church history receives its meed of studious attention and just judg-
268 NEW BOOKS [Nov.,
ment. These the authors of the present work have not seen fit to
give it. Old slanders pass muster as facts, and statements and ex-
positions of Catholic beliefs and practices are made which no Cath-
olic can possibly accept. Hence, while the work may have its par-
tial uses as a reference book, it cannot be recommended as accurate,
authoritative or comprehensive.
SUCCESSFUL CANNING AND PRESERVING. By Ola Howell.
Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co. $2.00 net.
This is the second volume of a prospective series of " Home
Manuals " in process of publication by the Lippincott Company.
It is designed for practical use in schools and clubs, as well as the
home, and is arranged with a list of questions after each chapter,
concerning the instruction given therein. The title does not do
full justice to the extent and value of the information contained
which is on a most comprehensive scale, including directions for
the preservation of meats, a chapter on the place of fruits and
vegetables in the diet, another on the organization of canning clubs,
etc. A list of supplies needed in small canning laboratories is pro-
vided, also lists of addresses of firms furnishing supplies for can-
ning and preserving; and there is an alphabetical list of state
institutions that direct agricultural work. The book is fully in-
dexed and profusely illustrated. No better guide could be found
for those who wish to take part in the patriotic work of food con-
servation.
WORD-BOOK OF THE ENGLISH TONGUE. By C. L. D. Lon-
don : George Routledge & Sons. 40 cents.
To that good old-time mentor of ours who first showed us how
to dip pen in ink, and who was never done warning us to " beware
of the Latin derivative," this little handbook would prove a delight.
Its avowed object is to show the speaker or writer, or whoever deals
in the English language, how beautifully he can get along on pure
Anglo-Saxon, how easily he can dispense with " the Norman yoke
that lies so heavy on their speech." No doubt the book will prove
very useful, and in due time will take its place on the reference shelf
along with other standard dictionaries and compendiums. The
author is careful to note, however, that he deals less in synonyms
than in " other good English words," which may stand in the stead
of the less vigorous and less accurate Latin or Norman French
word too often put to use.
IRccent Events*
The political and military condition in Rus-
Russia. sia during the past month has been a cause
of deep anxiety to the Allies. Towards the
end of the month the internal situation showed improvement. This
improvement was due to the success of the effort of M. Kerensky
in resisting the attempts of the extreme radicals to gain the suprem-
acy. The extreme radicals hoped to secure political domination,
but they were in the end defeated and a Coalition Government, to
which they were bitterly opposed, has been formed. The stable
existence of this new Coalition Government is, however, not yet
secured, for the extreme radicals still maintain an attitude of hos-
tility and still plot to gain absolute control. Although defeated in
their attempt to elect as the President of the Executive Committee
of the Council of Workmen's and Soldiers' Delegates the arch-
anarchist, Lenine, they secured the election of one who is almost
equally radical, M. Troitsky. Strange to say, Troitsky a few
months ago was declaiming his doctrines in New York City. He
returned to Russia when the Revolution called back the exiled
political agitators.
The Coalition Cabinet which has been formed, with M. Keren-
sky as Premier, embraces some of the more conservative elements
of the Revolution, although those who are looked upon as the most
experienced statesmen, such as Premier Lvoff, M. Rodzianko and
M. Miliukof, who prepared Russia for the Revolution and guided
it in the beginning, are not found in it.
Until the last few days the Russians have maintained some-
thing of a defence against the Germans, but even that seems
now to have broken down. The German fleet has entered the Gulf
of Riga, German troops have been landed and a march on Petrograd
is threatened. The Germans have so far failed to advance much be-
yond Riga, nor have they entered into Bessarabia, where stores of
grain are a tempting prize for them. Whether their failure to do so
was due to an insufficient number of troops, or to the fear of once
more uniting Russians in the defence of their country, cannot be
known. In one sense, at least, it is to be hoped that the threatened
march on Petrograd will be taken, for it will divert German troops
270 RECENT EVENTS [Nov.,
from the Western Front and will probably unite Russia as nothing
else could.
The situation in Russia deserves the most careful study of
every student of political affairs, since it shows clearly the result
of several centuries of autocratic government. President Wilson
has declared that one of the objects of America in entering the war
is to make the world safe for democracy. When the practical
results of autocracy in Russia and of a like autocracy in Germany
are considered, it will be clearly seen how necessary is the task which
the United States has undertaken for the world's well-being. The
untold miseries which the world has suffered in the Great War, are
due to the fact that the autocratic Hohenzollern dynasty, having
secured first of all the complete domination of Germany, has been
able to rally all its forces to an assault, upon the freedom of its
neighbors, and to an endeavor to secure a dominant position in the
world at large. This is what a strong autocratic government has
been able to do. In Russia, on the other hand, are seen the effects
of a weak autocratic government. The Russian Government, al-
though the life or death of the country depended upon its victory
over Germany, was unable to achieve such a victory because of the
treachery of its own ministers. From the beginning of the war,
when success might reasonably have been looked for, the bureau-
crats, fearing to lose their place in power, began to intrigue with
Germany for a separate peace. The war minister, the prime min-
ister and various other officials, even it is said the Empress, entered
into such intrigues. As to the Emperor, there -is reason to believe
that he was true to his country. But as a consequence of the treach-
ery of many in high places, the soldiers were without arms and
without food. The .people themselves were faithful, but they had
not wherewith to defend themselves. More than nine millions of
them, women and children, old and young, had to abandon their
homes and take refuge as best they could in the interior of Russia,
because forced to give up to waste and destruction vast districts of
their country that might otherwise have provided food for the
invading Germans. The motive back of this treachery on the part
of the ruling classes of Russia, that is to say the bureaucrats, was
the fear that the free principles of government which characterize
France and Great Britain should penetrate Russia and strengthen
the democratic ideas already at work in that country. They pre-
ferred to see Russia defeated by Germany than to have the form
of government change — an outcome which they regarded as inev-
1917.] RECENT EVENTS 271
itable if victory were secured with Russia in alliance with France
and Great Britain.
When the Revolution broke out, the entire nation was thrown
into disorder. Liberty being proclaimed, Russians were unable
to distinguish between true liberty and license, a distinction indeed
which requires special education and which even President Wilson
declares to be a difficult matter. Hundreds of thousands of the
soldiers deserted from the army, simply for the purpose of securing
for themselves the possession of the lands at home, which as
a result of the Revolution, they expected to obtain by any means, fair
or unfair. The discipline of the army was destroyed. Committees
were appointed to pass upon the orders given by officers. Many of
these officers who had been cruel in pre-Revolution days were sum-
marily shot. The soldiers when ordered to attack, refused to do so
until they had consulted these popular committees. For this reason,
the offensive undertaken by General Korniloff failed, and the Rus-
sians were forced to retire from Galicia and Bukowina. The Rus-
sian reverse was caused by the voluntary defection of the Russian
troops. Back of these troops and the instigators of their action,
was the propaganda of the Bolsheviki or the Maximalists, the ex-
treme radicals, who adopted a policy similar to that of the bureau-,
crats who were in power prior to the Revolution. They also advo-
cated a separate peace with Germany, but for reasons differing from
those of the bureaucrats. The extreme radicals, represented the
international organization of the workingmen of the whole world
against the capitalists. They regarded the capitalist in Russia as
the greatest of all enemies, even greater than the German invader.
They claimed that a victory won by Russia with France and Great
Britain as her allies, would be a capitalist victory. They are ready
to sacrifice their country rather than to secure such a success.
These extremists are unaccustomed to bear any responsible part in
the conduct of state government. They could not see that all dis-
cussions concerning capital and labor in Russia were futile unless
the war with Germany was won. If Germany gained the day, she
herself would take care of all these relations. This sudden intro-
duction of amateur and extremely radical forces into the govern-
ment of the country is one, among many others, of the direful con-
sequences following upon the sudden release of the country from all
definite governmental control.
It would take many pages to enumerate the further similar
instances which the recent history of Russia affords. The result
272 RECENT EVENTS [Nov.,
has been all but chaos and anarchy. The railways have broken
down, and their failure to carry food has resulted in starvation
for many in the midst of plenty. The workmen have refused to
labor except for wages exorbitant and almost impossible. Soldiers
have stopped trains only to rob them. Every possible and impos-
sible theory of government or of no government at all, was advo-
cated and propagated. This perhaps is only natural among people
who have never before been able to discuss freely their own political
interests.
With regard to the future something like hope may be reason-
ably entertained, provided we are willing to be optimistic. Indeed,
there are some entitled to attention who feel confident that Russia
will eventually find a way out. Among these is Mr. Elihu Root who
was sent to Russia by President Wilson. His report, however, has
not been published in detail, and it is still more or less a matter of
conjecture. Others, far less confident, are of the notion that the
country will not reach a political settlement without a civil war.
Last July the Bolsheviki made an attempt to establish their rule by
force of arms. They were defeated by the Provisional Govern-
ment. General Korniloff assigns, as the reason for his action, the
knowledge he possessed of a similar attempt which was to have
been made last September. The dictatorship is still looked upon as
a possible means of bringing about unity. In the minds of some it
is the one remedy. Others believe that in place of a dictatorship
a constitutional government with a king who has only nominal
powers, should be formed. If events take the course which the
present Provisional Government with M. Kerensky at its head has
marked out, the Republic, at present declared to be the form of
government, will be definitely established. The method by which
the Republic is to be established is the calling together of a pre-
liminary parliament. This parliament is in turn to prepare the way
for the meeting of the Constituent Assembly. The Assembly will
represent all Russia and settle definitely the Constitution of the
country. Little fear is entertained of a reversion on the part of Rus-
sia to the autocratic rule of the Romanoff dynasty, although it
must still be reckoned as one of the possibilities.
The great lack of Russia today is unity. Russia is in sore
need of a leader and a guide. The country has no established and
even no definite traditions of democracy. A long time will be re-
quired for their formation and acceptance. Even in a country
where such traditions have been the very life of the nation, national
1917.] RECENT EVENTS 273
unity is absolutely necessary, particularly in time of danger. In
our own land of ordered liberty, with all our life-long traditions
of democracy, the need of national unity and its public expression
is universally felt. It was this need that gave birth, among us, to
the Association called the League for National Unity, of which
His Eminence Cardinal Gibbons is Chairman. The purpose of the
League is " to create a medium through which loyal Americans of
all classes, sections, creeds and parties can give expression to the
fundamental purpose of the United States to carry on to a success-
ful conclusion this new war for the independence of America, and
the preservation of democratic institutions and the vindication of
the basic principles of humanity." No one will maintain, despite the
patriotism of the vast majority of Americans, that such a League is
useless. There are unfortunately those, among us, who seem to
think that after the law-making authority has reached a decision,
they are at liberty to oppose, to attack, to resist, if not openly at
least covertly. They do not seem to understand, however lawful
such a protest might be in ordinary circumstances, it is absolutely
criminal when, as now, the very life of the nation is endangered.
Having entered into the war it is a matter of life and death that
our country should win. For such a victory the complete unity of
the nation is absolutely necessary. The Catholic Church, as repre-
sented by Cardinal Gibbons, in thus fostering the movement for
National Unity among us, is but repeating her century old and tra-
ditional work for national concord, national strength and national
peace. Throughout the ages the Catholic Church has proved her-
self the formative and directing instrument of national unity.
The great Ambrose brought Maximus and Theodosius to mu-
tual understanding; Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, reconciled
Henry of Anjou with Stephen, and as a consequence, the Treaty of
Wallingford ended the civil war; Catherine of Siena " entered into
correspondence with the princes and Republics of Italy and
set herself to heal the wounds of her native land and to stay the
ravages of factions;" Bernardine of Siena was an apostle of Italian
unity, and the founder of the " Peace Congress " movement was a
Catholic monk, Emeric Cruce. It is historically appropriate that
a Prince of the Church today should be a leader in national
unity.
As far as one may judge at the present time Russian foreign
policy, there is no prospect of that country making a separate peace
with Germany, The present Russian Government has so assured
VOL. CVI.— 18
274 RECENT EVENTS [Nov.,
the Allies. But, of course, all this is contingent upon the defeat
of the Bolsheviki's attempt to obtain supreme power.
The revelations of Bolo Pasha throw light
France. upon the fall of M. Ribot's cabinet. The
first blow that it received was the compara-
tive failure of the attack made by the French last April on the
Aisne. Although this attack achieved some measure of success, it
involved so great a loss of life, which France could ill afford, that
the Commander-in-Chief was removed. The refusal to allow the
French Socialists to attend the Stockholm Conference also weakened
the Cabinet. But the movement for a separate peace with Germany,
of which nothing was heard at the time, was perhaps the factor that
determined its downfall. M. Malvy, the Minister of the Interior,
was charged with neglecting to take such steps as would absolutely
prevent any such movement. The movement, as far as it went, was
due to the subvention of certain newspapers in France by German
sympathizers who advocated a separate peace. As a result of popu-
lar condemnation, M. Malvy was forced to resign, and eventually
the Cabinet was overthrown. The Bolo revelations show that the
so-called movement for peace was insignificant, and that France as
a nation is resolved to carry on the war until, as has been declared,
Alsace-Lorraine is restored.
In every country much is being said about
Peace Talk. the conditions on which peace should be
made. The starting point of these discus-
sions may be taken to be the resolution passed last June by the
Reichstag. That resolution declared : " that, putting aside the
thought of acquisition of territory by force, the Reichstag is striv-
ing for a peace of understanding and lasting reconciliation of na-
tions ; that with such a peace political, economic and financial usur-
pation are incompatible, and that the Reichstag repudiates all plans
which aim at the economic isolation and tying down of nations after
the war." If this resolution of the Reichstag be examined closely
it will be seen to be ambiguous. It has failed to secure even in Ger-
many the adhesion of all parties. The Pan-Germans have abso-
lutely repudiated it. They still demand indemnities and annexa-
tions. The southern states of Germany have also repudiated it, and
entertain the same hopes as the Pan-Germans. The new German
Chancellor, Dr. Michaelis, has definitely refused even to discuss the
I9I7-] RECENT EVENTS 275
restoration to France of Alsace-Lorraine. Therefore, so far as
Germany is concerned, any discussion of peace is futile. France has
declared her determination to insist upon the restoration of Alsace-
Lorraine as her lowest terms, and England has recently declared her
determination to stand by France in this demand. In the mind of
the Allies, the demand for the restoration of Alsace-Lorraine pre-
supposes that Germany will restore Belgium and make restitution
for the damages inflicted upon that country. It also presupposes
that Germany will return the present occupied provinces of France.
The demands of the Allies go further than this. They include the
restoration of Serbia and that part of Rumania now occupied by
German troops. It is unnecessary to add that the Russian territory
of which so large a portion is now in possession of Germany, would
have to be evacuated and restored by that country. What satisfac-
tion is to be given to the Serbs, the Zechs and the Poles, the Ruman-
ians and other races included in the Austro-Hungarian territory is
left open to debate and depends much upon the complete success of
the Allies. Of Poland very little is heard, except that Russia has
committed herself to its independence and has included in indepen-
dent Poland the parts which are now under Austrian and Prussian
dominion. It will be recalled that President Wilson has insisted
upon the restoration to Poland of complete independence.
The question of the German colonies has not been discussed.
It may be taken as certain, however, that Great Britain will never
consent to the restoration of these colonies, except possibly that of
East Africa. An attempt on the part of Great Britain to restore
these colonies would, it is almost certain, result in the disruption of
the British dominions. Neither Australia nor New Zealand nor
South Africa would consent to give back to Germany colonies which
are in their immediate neighborhood.
But perhaps of all the demands to be made upon Germany as
a condition of peace, the most exacting has been that of President
Wilson. He has set aside all discussion of details, and has insisted
upon the establishment in Germany of a Government which can be
trusted. The President has said : " We cannot take the word of the
present rulers of Germany as a guarantee of anything that is to en-
dure, unless explicitly supported by such conclusive evidence of the
will and purpose of the German people themselves as the other
peoples of the world would be justified in accepting. Without such
guarantees, treaties of settlement, agreements for disarmament, cov-
enants to set up arbitration in the place of force, territorial adjust-
276 RECENT EVENTS [Nov.,
ments, reconstitutions of small nations, if made with the German
Government, no man, no nation could now depend on." Such are
the terms, so far as any authoritative statement has been made, on
which peace may be based.
A conference of the Allies will soon be held in Paris, at which,
because of the request of Russia, the terms of peace will be dis-
cussed. The United States will not take part in this conference,
being unwilling to change its definite policy of refraining from po-
litical alliances. At a later conference, however, to arrange the de-
tails of the campaign of 1918 of the Allied Nations, our country will
be represented. A military decision is now the only possible means
of obtaining a definite peace.
Some time ago leading Catholics of
Belgium. Spain, priests and laymen, presented an
address expressing their deep sympathy
with Cardinal Mercier and with the Belgian bishops for the out-
rages which had been inflicted upon them by the Germans. It has
been left to the bishops of Spain's smaller neighbor in the Peninsula,
Portugal, to present a collective address. In this address the Car-
dinal Patriarch of Lisbon and the archbishops and bishops of Por-
tugal join their voices with those of the Catholic world and cor-
dially greet the bishops of Belgium, and especially Cardinal Mercier.
They express their admiration for the way in which the Belgians
have endured the extreme sufferings brought upon them by those
who have outraged their country. They also express full approval
of the action of the Belgians in taking up arms in defence of their
rights against the invaders. They declare their gratitude for the ex-
ample Belgium has set in preferring justice and patriotism to ma-
terial well-being. They assert that the achievements of Belgium
during the past three years will live forever in the pages of history,
and express admiration for the ravaged ranks of the clergy who have
added so many names to this latest martyrology. They also recall
the protest uttered in every country against the inhuman treatment
that is being inflicted on the civil population of Belgium. " Con-
trary as it is to the rights of nations, to international right and the
moral law, contrary, too, to the most cherished traditions of the
Church and all that she has won by her long and patient efforts, such
violence cannot but meet with direct and formal reprobation from
us." They rejoice in what they believe to be the end of deportations,
and they hope for a peace which will come soon, but will be con-
1917. ] RECENT EVENTS 377
ditioned upon the full restoration of Belgium's independence, and a
complete compensation for all she has suffered.
It will be fitting here to publish the protest of the burghers of
Antwerp sent in 1916 to Governor General von Bissing on the sub-
ject of the Belgian deportations. The letter was published for the
first time in America in the. October, 1917, Atlantic and appears
in Vernon Kellogg's book Headquarters Nights.
To His EXCELLENCY BARON VON BISSING, Governor of Belgium, in Brussels:
YOUR EXCELLENCY:
By virtue of an Order of the Military Governor of' Antwerp, rendered in
accordance with the instructions of the German General Government in Bel-
gium, dated November 2, 1916, our citizens without work whose names are on
the lists of the Registry Office (Meldeamt) are instructed to present themselves
immediately at the Southern Railway Station. From there they will be trans-
ported, by force if necessary, into Germany, where they will be compelled to
take up work which will be assigned to them. The same measures have been
taken in the rest of the country. Without having committed crime, and without
trial, thousands of our free citizens are being thus deported, against their will,
" into an enemy land, far from their homes, far from their wives and their chil-
dren. They are being submitted to that most terrible treatment for free men;
being forced to labor as slaves.
We, Deputies, Senators, and notables of Antwerp and its environs, would
believe ourselves recreant to all our duty if we allowed such things to occur
under our eyes, without resorting to the right that we have of addressing the
executive power under any circumstances, in order to make known to it our
griefs and our protests.
By what right is this forced labor with deportation introduced into our
unhappy country? We seek in vain for a response to this question. The
Rights of the People condemn such a measure.
There is no modern author who justifies it. The articles of the Convention
of The Hague, defining requisitions made for the benefit of the occupying army,
are directly opposed to such a measure.
The constitutional right of all European countries, including Germany, is
not less opposed to it
The most illustrious of your sovereigns, Frederick the Second, has regarded
and honored as a dogma, individual liberty and the right of every citizen to
dispose of his capacities and of his work as he wishes. An occupying authority
ought to respect these essential principles which have been the common patri-
mony of humanity for centuries.
It cannot be denied that the Belgian deported workers, under the conditions
created by this action, will set free a proportional number of German workers
to go to the front to fight the brothers and sons of the deported Belgians. This
makes them forced partakers in the war against our country, something that
Article 52 of the Convention of The Hague prohibits in express terms. That
is not all. Immediately after the occupation of Antwerp thousands of our
citizens had fled the country and taken refuge in that part of Holland stretching
along the Belgian frontier, but the German authorities made most reassuring
declarations to them.
On October 9, 1914, General von Beseler, Commander-in-Chief of the be-
278 RECENT EVENTS [Nov.,
sieging army, gave to negotiators from Contich a declaration stating : " Un-
armed members of the Civic Guard will not be- considered as prisoners of war."
Under the same date, Lieutenant-General von Schutz, the German Com-
mander of the Fort of Antwerp, gave out the following proclamation : " The un-
dersigned, Commander of the Fort of Antwerp, declares that nothing stands in
the way of the return of inhabitants to their country. None of them will be
molested; even the members of the Civic Guard, if they are unarmed, may
return in all security."
On the i6th of November, 1914, Cardinal Mercier communicated to the
population a declaration signed by General Huene, Military Governor of Ant-
werp, in which the General said, for purposes of general publication : " Young
men have nothing to fear from being taken to Germany, either to be enrolled
in the army or to be employed at forced labor." A little later the eminent prelate
requested Baron von der Goltz, Governor-General of Belgium, to ratify for the
whole country, without limit as to time, these guarantees which General Huene
has given for the Province of Antwerp. He was successful in obtaining this.
Finally on the i8th of October, 1914, the military authorities of Antwerp
gave a signed statement to the representative of General von Terwiega, Com-
mander of the Holland Field Army, to the effect that the young Belgian men
and unarmed members of the Belgian Civic Guard could return from Holland
into Belgium and would not be molested. One of his sentences was : " The
rumor according to which the young Belgian men will be sent into Germany
is without any foundation."
Upon the faith of these solemn public declarations, numerous citizens, not
alone of Antwerp but of all parts of the country, have returned across the
Holland-Belgian frontier to their own hearth-stones. Now these very men,
who, once free, returned to Belgium, relying upon the formal engagements of
the German authorities, will be sent tomorrow into Germany, there to be forced
to undertake that labor of slaves which has been promised would never be
put upon them. Under these conditions, we believe it right to demand that the
measures taken for these deportations be countermanded. We add that the
agreement of Contich formally stipulated that the members of the Civic Guard
would not be treated as prisoners of war. Surely, then, there can be no ques-
tion of transferring them to Germany to give them a treatment even more
severe.
The preamble of the Order for the deportations seems to reproach our
workers with their idleness, and it invokes the needs of public order and regrets
the increasing charges of public charity to take care of these men. We beg to
remark to Your Excellency that, at the time of the entrance of the German
armies into Belgium, there were in this country large stocks of raw materials
whose transformation into manufactured articles would have occupied innum-
erable workers for a long time. But these stocks of raw materials have been
taken from us and carried to Germany.
There were factories completely equipped which could have been used to
produce articles for exportation into neutral countries. But the machines and
the tools of these factories have been sent to Germany.
Certainly it is true that our workers have refused work offered by the
occupying authorities, because this work tended to assist these authorities in
their military operations. Rather than win large wages at this price they have
preferred to accept privation. Where is the patriot, where is the man of heart,
who would not applaud these poor people for this dignity and this courage?
No reproach of idleness can really be made to our worker classes who,
it is well known everywhere, are second to none in their ardor for work.
1917.] RECENT EVENTS 279
The Order refers in addition to the necessity of good order, and refers
also to the necessity of not allowing an increasing number of workless people
to become a burden on the public charity.
Public order has never been trouble. As to charitable assistance, it is true
that millions of francs have been spent in charity since the beginning of the
war, but, for the accomplishment of this immense effort of benevolence, nothing
has been asked from the German Government, nor even from the Belgian
Treasury, administered under your control and fed by our taxes. There should
be, then, no anxiety on the part of Germany concerning this money, which in no
way comes from it. Indeed, your Excellency well knows that this money does
not even come from immediate public charity, but is arranged for by the Comite
Nationale, which will continue to arrange for it in the future, as it has in the
past.
None, then, of the motives invoked to support the Order of deportations
seems to us to have any foundation.
One would seek in vain in all the history of war for a precedent for this
action. Neither in the wars of the Revolution, nor of the Empire, nor in any
which have since that time desolated Europe, has any one struck at the sacred
principle of the individual liberty of the non-combatant and peaceful popula-
tions.
Where will one stop in this war, if reasons of State can justify such treat-
ment! Even in the colonies forced labor exists no longer.
Therefore, we pray Your Excellency to take into consideration all that we
have just said, and to return to their homes those unfortunates who have already
been sent into Germany in accordance with the Order of November 2, 1916.
The fall of Von Bethmann Hollweg, it
Germany. seems clear, was due to the influence and
power of those who favored a more drastic
war policy. For some two years he had been a moderating influence
and had excited the bitter opposition of the Pan-Germans and their
sympathies. The new Chancellor, Dr. George Michaelis, has
proved to be a representative of those who favor extreme methods,
and although he made a show of yielding to the demands for parlia-
mentary control by nominating a committee, consisting of the heads
of the various parties of the Reichstag, whom he was to consult on
important matters, yet even this small modicum of the desired re-
forms has not been realized in practice. His management of affairs
has been of such a character as to excite the criticism of the Social
Democrats, the largest single party in Germany, in which criticism,
to a certain extent, the Centre Party and the Radicals have joined.
His resignation has been demanded, but whether the demand will
meet with success or not, the future must disclose. The fact that
such an open expression of criticism has been publicly made, indi-
cates how the spirit of dissatisfaction has increased in Germany.
At the beginning of the War there was no evidence at all of such a
280 RECENT EVENTS [Nov.,
spirit or, if it existed, the Government felt strong enough to suppress
it entirely. The spirit of disunion in the civil population at large
has extended to the navy, in which mutinies have taken place. The
Minister of the Marine, Vice-Admiral Von Capelle, before a com-
mittee of the Reichstag declared this propaganda to be seditious, and
threw the blame upon three members of the Socialist Minority.
This accusation was proved to be detrimental to the Government, for
it was looked upon as unjust both by the minority and the majority
of the Socialists and led to their reunion on this point at least. They
united in demanding the resignation of Von Capelle, a demand
which so far has not been granted.
The demand for Von Capelle's resignation indicates indirectly
Germany's dissatisfaction with the progress of the submarine cam-
paign. For this warfare has been carried on under his direction,
and if it had been the success which the Germans had hoped for, he
would have been the hero of the day, and no demand would have
been made for his resignation.
The fact that insurances against losses due to the submarines
have been reduced by twenty per cent, makes it evident that there
has been a noteworthy decrease in these losses, but the situation is
still serious. In fact, within the last few days, the report has spread
that United States ports are to be blockaded by the submarines.
With Our Readers.
"PHE public question that is of most vital interest to Catholics at
I the present hour, and indeed to the whole world, is the true doc-
trine of the State. Upon one's concept of the State rests his patriot-
ism, the zeal, devotion and sacrifice with which he defends and cham-
pions his country, or on the other hand his lack of patriotism, his
indifference, his false pacifism, his allegiance to theories that mean
the undoing of the State and the passing of the nation.
* * * *
1ITHAT constitutes the State; what are its powers; what is to be
V» understood by its sovereignty; how that sovereignty is to be
reconciled with individualism; how liberty is to be coupled har-
moniously with law; how freedom is to be saved from license; what
are the fundamental rights of the individual and of the family with
which the State may not interfere; to what extent the State may go
to defend its own existence, what are its powers as to property, wages,
capitalism and labor — all these questions are subjects of discussion in
the public forum, in newspaper, in magazine.
What has been and is the academic teaching of American text-
books with regard to the power and authority of the State is pointed
out in this issue of THE CATHOLIC WORLD by Dr. John A. Ryan.
Fortunately, it has not received wide acceptance in practical political
life. Yet signs are not wanting which tell us that its practical sphere
is extending wide and wider. The street campaigner, the pamphleteer,
the popular periodical voice more and more frequently just such doc-
trines as these text-books give forth. They have succeeded at least in
creating a confusion in the minds of many persons as to what is the
legitimate office and authority of the State; of blinding them to the
true doctrine on which rests the only secure foundation of the State ;
of sowing the seeds of political hopelessness, bewilderment, discord
and anarchy.
* * * *
HOPELESS will be the condition of the world if after fighting to
make it safe for democracy, we have no definite concept of democ-
racy itself. " The very notion of civilization," wrote Leo XIII., " is a
fiction of the brain if it rest not on the abiding principles of truth and
the civilizing law of virtue and justice, and if unfeigned love knit
not- together the wills of men and gently control the interchange and
the character of their mutual service." We are fighting for right, for
justice, for humanity. What mean these terms translated into
concrete political law, authority and liberty? Upon the answer de-
pends the welfare of the individual, of the family, of the nation. A
282 WITH OUR READERS [Nov.,
thousand voices are attempting the answer. The result is a great
confusion. And the only hopeful note is the cry for some definite,
certain answer that will open the way for humanity's well being and
progress.
* * * *
OUR duty is therefore the more imperative. As Catholics we are
the children of those who had as great, if not greater, problems
to face and to solve. The conditions which confronted them are the
conditions that meet us. The truth by which they lived and con-
quered is ours also, by which to live, to guide and to conquer.
But we must constantly endeavor to understand that truth and
to make it our own. We must study the doctrine of the Christian
State and be able to expound and to defend it. It is unfortunately too
true that many Catholic leaders in different fields of influence, fail to
remember that no part of their life or activity or leadership is to be
divorced or left unguided by Catholic principle. We do not, as Catho-
lics, enter into party politics, yet a man's political life as a citizen,
as one who must always vote according to his conscience, can never be
separated from his religious life. A Catholic in business may never
ask an unjust price, even though everybody else in the same business
demands it. A Catholic capitalist may never consent to the em-
ployment of methods unjust, dishonest or deceitful ; a Catholic labor
leader may never lend his aid to methods unlawful — no matter what
the end which either has in view.
* * * *
OUR duty is imperative not only to realize our personal responsi-
bility, no matter how small or large our field of influence, but
also to study Catholic teaching which affects every relation of life
and contributes most effectively to make the perfect man, the perfect
family and the perfect State.
Never, perhaps, was there greater need to study the classical
encyclicals of Leo XIII. In a singularly prophetic way he foretold
the evils of the present day and masterfully he answered them.
In one of those Encyclicals, Leo XIII. wrote: "We must indicate a
craftily circulated calumny making most odious imputations against
Catholics, and even against the Holy See itself. It is maintained that
that vigor of action inculcated in Catholics for the defence of their
Faith has for a secret motive much less the safeguarding of their re-
ligious interests than the ambition of securing to the Church political
domination over the State. Truly this is the revival of a very ancient
calumny, as its invention belongs to the first enemies of Christianity.
Was it not first of all formulated against the adorable Person of the
Redeemer? Yes, when He illuminated souls by His preaching and
alleviated the corporal or spiritual sufferings of the unfortunate with
1917-] WITH OUR READERS 283
the treasures of His divine bounty, He was accused of having political
ends in view. 'We have found this Man perverting our nation, and
forbidding to give tribute to Caesar, and saying that He is Christ, the
King ...... If thou release this Man, thou art not Caesar's friend. For
whomsoever maketh himself a king, speaketh against Caesar ......
We have no king but Caesar.' "
* * * *
THIS calumny has been repeated lately in the pages of The New
Republic. In an editorial headed " The Future of the State," it
speaks of the Holy Father's peace letter as " a stubborn attempt made
by Catholicism to recover some of its lost prestige." The editorial pre-
tends to be a thoughtful study of modern tendencies in the theory of
the State. Its animus may be judged from passages like the follow-
ing: "Whose (the Catholic Church's) prelates are distinguished by
the length of their official memories ;" " the Pope is supposed to be
the earthly representative of a Divine Order, which possesses an
infallible recipe for the spiritual ills of mankind ;" " if he and his
hierarchy ;" " the Catholic hierarchy has been occupying an increas-
ingly equivocal and precarious position;" "while Catholicism has not
renounced its pretensions ;" " the war has presented to the Catholic
Church a seductive opportunity of undermining the authority of the
State ;" "the Catholic autocracy ;" " the Catholic Church wishes to make
the State a mere beast of burden in the City of God ;" " the Catholic
hierarchy must succeed in undermining the authority of the State
and increasing its own prestige or else its pretensions and the educa-
tional system associated with them will scarcely be tolerated in the
future as they have been in the past." " It is now or never for
Catholicism."
* * * *
TTERBERT CROLY, who wrote this article in The New Republic,
A 1 knowingly states what is false. The pronouncement of the three
American Cardinals, the pastorals of many bishops, the patriotic ac-
tivity and unselfish service of the Catholics of America are evidence
well known to Mr. Croly, but which it suits his purpose to conceal
and deny.
This is not surprising since, as our readers know, The' New
Republic is with malice aforethought determined to misrepresent the
Catholic Church. No American can look upon it as a just critic.
objections which may be urged against the Catholic doctrine of
the State, namely that the State is sovereign and supreme in its
own field, but that the State also is ruled by the commandments of
God, may be urged against any theory that presupposes the existence
of God and man's personal responsibility to Him.
284 WITH OUR READERS [Nov.,
Religion, the relation and dependence of man upon God, is the
basis of patriotism. The denial of religion, results in the denial of
patriotism. Faith in country is like faith in God, says a writer in The
Unpopular Review. Both are, according to this author, unreasonable
and objectionable. "The outer trappings and suits of fixed orthodoxy
and of blind patriotism are strikingly similar." The chalice as well as
the flag is to be despised.
* * * *
HAVING neglected both definite religion and definite patriotism,
and neither can be indefinite, the author gives himself to a mean-
ingless internationalism. It is but an escape from the obligations and
duties of citizenship, just as indifference and agnosticism in religion,
is an escape from the definite responsibilities of the citizen of heaven.
He finds his refuge " in the logical opposite of both religion and nation-
alism," i. e., as he says, the spirit of Science.
* * * *
OUR spiritual warfare of today is not so much against Protestant-
ism, for Protestantism as a definite religious system has disinte-
grated. It is against the denial of God and man's personal responsibility
to Him ; God's authority over man ; man's dependence on Him, man's
obligation to know the truth of God. To the thinking man of today
the very foundations of the moral world have suffered shock. One
Power, One Voice, One Security remains. Without knowing why,
thousands who do not profess to believe in her are turning towards
the Catholic Church. She stands unshaken : the only Visible Author-
ity that dares to speak a definite, spiritual message, that claims to
possess the truth for the healing of the nations, the sole Guarantee
of the eternal, supreme worth of that soul which gives to every man
his personal worth and dignity.
* * * *
"OEYOND the world-wide War, above the carnage and the sacrifice,
L) we dream of the beautiful future, beneficent in its peace, blessed in
its favors. Will it be thus inviting and inspiring; or will it be dis-
cordant, hopeless, chaotic? It depends not so much on military vic-
tory, but on the nature of the principles that have conquered. Is it
to be born of socialist irresponsibility; of continued protest against
law and order and right living ; of the denial of God and the eternal
worth of the human soul, or is it to be born of the truth and the right-
eousness revealed by Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ: the jus-
tice and the humanity that are built upon the Christian constitution
of the State?
* * * . *
future, following upon the end of the War and coming with
A the dawn of peace, should be shaped and guided even now by
1917.] WITH OUR READERS 285
Christian principles. We should not leave it to unprincipled agitators,
to weak pacifists, who champion not the principles of eternal justice.
Christ is the Prince of Peace because He is the Sun of Justice.
That the future may be so guided is the aim and purpose of the
noble work which the Holy Father is doing and will do for the cause
of peace. His work is of this world : yet it is above the world. They
who criticize his messages from the viewpoint of prejudice or party
sympathy, alleging that he pleads the cause of one nation rather than
another, simply do not see the larger, the higher mission which is in-
trusted to him and which he must undertake. For the future of civil-
ization we, who have as our inheritance the truths upon which civil-
lization is founded, must shape now the peace that is to be, and our
leader is Pope Benedict XV.
IN a recent issue of THE CATHOLIC WORLD, Dr. James J. Walsh
pointed out how Spencer, once an idol of the scientific world, now
has few, if any disciples. A writer in the May Blackwood's, in an
article entitled The Exploded Quack, is even more severe upon the
once famous scientist.
We have seen, in a paragraph above, how a certain writer appeals
to science as the guide by which we will live together as individuals
and nations in peace and harmony. Nothing is so effective an argu-
ment as a concrete example. Spencer was " scientific." The writer
in Blackwood's having enumerated those characteristics which test a
man's livableness with his fellows, states, " the fatal flaw in Mr.
Herbert Spencer's character was his essential inhumanity."
Spencer, the writer shows, was not prepared by any adequate
education for the task he undertook. His reading of the philosophers
was meagre. " I have taken up Plato's Dialogues," he said, " and
have quickly put them down with more or less irritation. And of
Aristotle I know even less than of Plato." Spencer's standard of
scientific knowledge " hardly rose above that of the man in the street."
Spencer's recent biographer said : " Had his philosophy been based
upon the technical knowledge already known, it might possibly have
had a more enduring value but would certainly have had a less popu-
lar appeal."
This, Blackwood's contributor says, is a " most damning apologia "
on behalf of one of the Makers of the Nineteenth Century. It is in
this series that the biography of Spencer was published.
* * * *
O FENCER'S modus operandi was sheer effrontery. He lacked any
^J historical sense. He was obstinate in his prepossessions. He hired
persons to do reading for him and made his books an agglomeration
of disconnected statements. Time has permitted us to see the empti-
286 WITH OUR READERS [Nov.,
ness of the definition on which he based his so-called law of evolu-
tion : " an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of mo-
tion; during which the matter passes from a relatively indefinite,
incoherent homogeneity, to a relatively definite coherent heterogeneity,
and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel trans-
formation."
His great aim, according to his biographer, was " the discovery
of a single formula which should unite all classes of phenomena in the
universe." The present critic adds, " to seek to reduce all classes of
phenomena to a single formula is the mark of the incompetent amateur.
To profess to have done so is the mark of the essential quack."
AN eloquent appeal to the men in the Service of the United States
to maintain a moral standard worthy of country, home and re-
ligion, has been issued under the joint auspices of the New York
Social Hygiene Society and The Chaplains' Aid Association. The
booklet is entitled The Honor Legion, and may be highly recom-
mended for distribution among our soldiers and sailors, exposed as
they are to unusual and extraordinary temptation. Its appeal is emi-
nently sane, strictly scientific and sincerely spiritual.
* * * *
WE also wish to bring to the attention of our readers a small
publication of the Catholic Soldiers' Series, entitled Who Goes
There f It is a practical appeal for the exercise and discipline of
thrift, and will be helpful also in promoting the moral and spiritual
well-being of our soldiers and sailors. The pamphlet is another evi-
dence of the important and zealous work of the Central Verein
in the present national crisis. Sixty-seven thousand of their publica-
tion, Guide Right, and twenty-three thousand of their prayer book,
God's Arrow, have already been distributed.
To THE EDITOR OF THE CATHOLIC WORLD :
REV. AND DEAR SIR: I have read with interest the article, entitled The
Apple of Discord, published in the October number of your review. The author
seems to be au courant of the affairs of Canada. However, allow me to differ
with him in the last paragraph of his article where he says that the English-
Canadian "is exactly what he ought to be" when he is first a British subject
and then a Canadian.
Canada is an autonomic country, although a colony of England. It has its
own government, and as far as its administration and economic conditions are
concerned, it is independent. This is so true that an Englishman coming from
England has to be naturalized before he can become a citizen of Canada. If
England and Canada were one and the same thing, the author would be right.
But as they are separated, as their interests are different, a citizen of Canada,
whether he be English or French, ought to be Canadian first, although a loyal
subject to the British Crown, otherwise race division is promoted.
Sincerely yours, A READER.
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THE
CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. CVI.
DECEMBER, 1917.
No. 633.
THE DRAMA OF THE NATIVITY.
BY CHARLES PHILLIPS.
HE story of the Nativity of Our Saviour is in itself
so essentially dramatic, it is no wonder it has ap-
pealed through all the Christian ages to the histri-
onic instincts of peoples of every race to whom the
Gospel of Christ has been preached. The Birth of
Jesus Christ at Bethlehem was destined by its very nature to be
told and retold in the form of " play-acting " wherever Christians
might gather together. All of the elements of the dramatic are in
it — suspense, contrast, common human sympathy, the interaction
of supernatural and natural, everything that has ever gone into the
making of drama : suspense in the poising of the outcome of its
event; contrast in the juxtaposition of its every scene and charac-
ter— darkness and light: shadowed earth and illumined heavens;
poverty and riches: shivering shepherds and fur-robed kings;
midnight silence and skies bursting with the music of angelic
choirs; a flower-like maiden, virgin and yet a mother, set in the
midst of the roughest surroundings; and, infinite climax, the God
of all, from Whom all riches, all warmth, all glory issue, born a
tiny babe in a cold stable-cave on the wintry hills of Bethlehem.
Could anything so dramatic be imagined by the mind of man? God
alone could stage so divine a play !
Katherine Bregy in one of her studies of Christian poetry,
quotes Aubrey de Vere as saying that the Nativity is one of the
Copyright. 1917. THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY OF ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE
IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK.
VOL. CVI. — IQ
290 THE DRAMA OF THE NATIVITY [Dec.,
few Christian mysteries which does not contain matter too stupen-
dous for poetry — or for drama, we would add. " It is so tender
that it ceases to confound. Unlike the Crucifixion or the Resur-
rection, or even the Ascension, it is, at least in its externals, com-
fortingly human."1 Small wonder, then, that the Christmas theme
has, from the beginning, touched and awakened the dramatic im-
pulses of men, which are essentially poetic, human and childlike.
Out of the liturgy of the Church, itself dramatic, sprang the
drama of the stage; and dealing, as it did, entirely with sacred
matters — with the story of man's fall and his salvation — the Na-
tivity became, perforce, the keystone of the whole vast plot of the
Miracle and Mystery plays of the Middle Ages. The fall of man
in Eden might be depicted, but it led inevitably to the climax of
Bethlehem. The Crucifixion, or the Resurrection, or the Ascen-
sion, might be shown, but they sprang directly from the movitating
drama of the Nativity. The Nativity was the pivotal centre of the
entire action of the early Christian drama.
But long before we had any such thing as Mystery or Miracle
play, or formal drama of any kind, drama was shaping itself out
of the story of Bethlehem, in the form of The Office of the Shep-
herds, a dramatic prologue or interlude given at the Midnight Mass
on Christmas Eve. If we go back to the France and §ngland of
seven or eight hundred years ago, we will find this Office of the
Shepherds enacted in many of the great churches of the time. In
it the shepherds were impersonated by the clergy, carrying crooks
and bringing in their train into the church and up to the altar, real
dogs and real sheep, as well as rustic attendants, playing musical
instruments, or bearing offerings of fruit. The " shepherds " were
grouped in the transept, at the entrance to the choir, feigning to
sleep or to watch their flocks, when suddenly, in the stillness of the
church, the musicians sounded a long and piercing blast and a boy
dressed as an angel, with golden wings and clad in white, mounted
the pulpit and intoned in Latin the words of St. Luke, " Fear not !
For behold I bring you tidings of great joy !"
This was assuredly drama of the finest essence, and one can
imagine the thrill that went through the great throng as the " play "
began. This striking opening scene was followed by a burst of song
from the choir boys in the clerestory, singing the Gloria, And then
the grand climax. The shepherds advancing to the altar, where the
creche or manger, hidden by a curtain, is erected, are met by the
1THE CATHOLIC WORLD, vol. xcvi. no. 573, p. 351, December, 1912.
1917.] THE DRAMA OF THE NATIVITY 291
procession of priests who are to officiate at the Mass, and are
halted and questioned : " What seek ye, shepherds?" " We seek the
Saviour, Christ the Lord !" they cry out in answer. Whereupon the
priests draw back and part the veil before the crib, revealing with
one dramatic stroke the figure of the Child, laid in the straw of
the manger. This is indeed genuine drama; and with such a zest
did our forefathers enact it that no touch of realism within their
power to achieve was neglected. They even contrived such in-
genious effects as oxen and asses that dropped on their knees in
adoration beside the creche at the moment the veil was drawn.2
This same Office of the Shepherds is still preserved in Pro-
vence, where also — its popular outgrowth — the Pastourla or Na-
tivity Play, vigorously survives, being given annually in every city
and town and almost every village, either by professional or amateur
actors. Thomas Janvier, a lifelong student of Provence, describes3
an Office of the Shepherds which he witnessed some twenty years
ago, apparently an almost exact replica of the same Office enacted
in the Middle Ages. In this case, however, it was given at the
Offertory, instead of before the Midnight Mass ; the shepherds were
laymen; and a special offering, of a spotless lamb, all beribboned and
wreathed with flowers, was brought to the altar, the procession
marching the full length of the church. The Provenceaux, in fact,
dramatize everything connected with Christmas, even the lighting
of the home creche. This, in a darkened room, is illumined pre-
cisely at the stroke of midnight, in the presence of the entire family,
the youngest child of the household lighting the first taper amidst a
burst of song. Even the Noels of Provence are in dramatic form ;
as in the popular Hou de I'housteau of Saboly, wherein St. Joseph
argues and pleads with the innkeeper of Bethlehem. Their still
more famous C'est le bon lever, opens dramatically this wise (" the
angel, as becomes so exalted a personage," Mr. Janvier notes,
speaking in French, the shepherd in common Provencal) :
Angel: It is high time to get up, sweet shepherd! In Beth-
lehem, quite near this place, the Saviour of the world has been
born of a Virgin.
Shepherd: Perhaps you take me for a common peasant, talk-
ing to me like that! I am poor; but I'd have you to know I
come of good stock. In old times my great-great-grandfather
'Theodore Child and M. Luc Olivier Merson, in Harper's Magazine, vol.
Ixxviii., no. 463, p. 59, December, 1888.
*The Century Magazine, December, 1896.
292 THE DRAMA OF THE NATIVITY [Dec.,
was mayor of our village! And who are you, fine sir? Are
you a Jew or a Dutchman? Your fine jargon makes me laugh.
A virgin mother! A child God! No, never were such things
heard !
" But when the angel reiterates his strange statement," Mr. Janvier
concludes, " the shepherd's interest is aroused. He declares that he
will go and steal this miraculous child, and he quite takes the angel
into his confidence!"
That dramatic — that melodramatic — touch, we might say, the
threat to " steal " the Divine Child, is a favorite device of the Pro-
venceaux. Even in fashioning their Christmas cribs they like to
show the figures of gypsies lurking near the stable of Bethlehem,
bent on kidnapping the Holy Infant! But this bit of Christmas
play-acting of old Provence illustrates an even more remarkable
feature of practically every " Nativity " produced in the olden times
—the unfailing presence of the spirit of comedy. Professor Charles
Mills Gayley, of the University of California, in the introduction to
his reconstruction of Towneley Cycles,4 emphasizes this constant
recurrence of the comic vein in the old Nativity plays. The hope-
ful happy note is repeatedly sounded. " The massacre of the Inno-
cents " (always an integral part of the old Nativities) " empha-
sizes not the weeping of a Rachel, but the joyous escape of the
Virgin and Child." Always there is a " hell," with grotesque and
comical demons, in these Middle Age Nativities. And invariably
some of the shepherds are rustic fools, designed to supply a laugh.
Doubtless it was not alone because the Nativity drama was intrinsic-
ally one of happiness, but also because it afforded such unusual
opportunities for comic relief, that it was from the beginning so
popular with the masses.
• From the Office of the Shepherds to the Miracle and Mystery
plays, was but a step and a logical development in the dramatic
treatment of the Christmas theme. By the fifteenth century, the
Nativity play of the sanctuary had expanded into a full-fledged
spectacular drama, produced and acted quite separately from the
Church ritual, though still arranged and superintended by the clergy.
This, at any rate, remained the case in France ; although in England
the guild plays eventually resulted, presented by strictly profes-
sional actors who moved from one town to another, carrying their
scenery and equipment with them in a great van, the arrival of
which was, very likely, much akin to the landing of a three-ring
* The Star of Bethlehem, Fox. New York: Duffield & Co., 1904.
I9I7-] THE DRAMA OF THE NATIVITY 293
circus in the twentieth century town. Where the Nativity drama
was still more or less of a civic celebration of Christmas, however,
city fathers, rich laymen, the cathedral chapter, and other individ-
uals or organizations, joined together to insure its production by
pledging both funds and active help. A great mass meeting was
first held, whereat the parts were assigned, and, as we might say,
the " advertising campaign " began. The leading roles were taken
by the more learned, the clergy; the others by laymen, mostly the
trained artisans of the various crafts. No women took part at all ;
and only the comeliest boys wrere chosen for angels, the Blessed
Virgin and so on. The competition for the characters of the Blessed
Virgin and the Angel Gabriel was especially keen. The costumes
were gorgeous and often quaintly incongruous. " Poor shepherds,"
for instance, being decked out in jewels and silks, the finest raiment
of the period that could be borrowed for the occasion. In the cos-
tuming of Herod and the Three Kings, the stage director " out
heroded Herod."
The performance lasted three days. It was given on a great
stage one hundred feet square erected in the city marketplace.
As many as sixteen thousand people, gathered from all the sur-
rounding country, were known to have witnessed such a production.
Old manuscripts give records of Nativity plays requiring seventy-
eight leading actors and one hundred and fifty figurants; angels,
devils, etc. Some thirty different scenes were shown, all on one
great stage — Bethlehem, Nazareth, Jerusalem, Rome, heaven, hell,
and so on. The play was divided into five parts, and opened with
a prologue or protocol, read by the author, who was some learned
doctor of the town, and who, according to the records, like most of
his brother playwrights of every age, drew copiously on former
productions, as well as on the Scriptures, for his material. After
this prologue came an act of Prophecies, in which Balaam was
heard, followed by Daniel, David, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and
lastly by the Sibyl, foretelling the coming of Christ, creating, as our
modern stage manager might put it, " atmosphere," and cleverly
building up the dramatic suspense of the spectacle. Part First ended
with these Prophecies, and closed the first morning's performance.
In Part Second, begun after the midday meal, which was more
or less of an outdoor picnic, the Annunciation and Visitation were
enacted, with elaborate musical interludes.
The second day's morning performance comprised the Edict
*f Augustus, the departure of St. Joseph and the Blessed Virgin for
294 THE DRAMA OF THE NATIVITY [Dec.,
Bethlehem, the first shepherd scenes, the latter affording plenty of
comic relief, and finally the pathetic story of the arrival at the
stable. In this, we find some beautiful dramatic writing, showing
how keen was the sense of the ancient playwright for the element
of contrast. St. Joseph complains against the sorry fortune which
brings the Saviour of the world to a lowly stable to be born ; but the
Blessed Virgin responds with sweet resignation to his every lament,
" It pleases God that it be so." Some of the quaint lines of the
dialogue are as follows :
St. Joseph: Alas, where are those grand castles, those fine
towers with battlements, so pleasantly built? And the Son of
God is here so poorly lodged !
Blessed Virgin: It pleases God that it is so.
St. Joseph: Where are those halls so finely painted with
diverse colors, and paved with tiles, and so pleasant that it is a
consolation to behold them?
Blessed Virgin: It pleases God that it is so
and so on; St. Joseph enumerating every imaginable device of bodily
ease and fleshly comfort, chambers hung with golden tapestry, beds
richly blanketed with silks and furs ; and the Blessed Virgin always
answering with the same sweet avowal of faith in God and patience
under His decree.
The climax of the play, thus skillfully led up to by every trick
of the imagination calculated to create sympathy and suspense, was
the triumphant birth, with music and song crashing forth in
joyous clamor, the idols of the pagan temples of Rome tottering
and tumbling to the earth, and finally the mouth of hell itself open-
ing in gorgeous impotent rage, to reveal the fury of Lucifer and
his frustrated demons at the happy consummation of Bethlehem.
Sometimes, as in Northern England, because of the inclement
weather of Christmastide, the Nativity play was given indoors, in
the cathedral; and when this was the case many striking effects
were achieved by reason of the darkness of the vast interior and
through the manipulation of torches and lanterns and candle-light.
Here a curtain was used, as in modern days; and but one scene at
a time was shown on the stage, the platform being much smaller
than that erected for the marketplace presentation and the imagi-
nation of the spectators being called much more into play. The
dimly lighted cottage room of the Annunciation, with the Blessed
Virgin spinning by a little lamp, and singing the Magnificat as she
1917.] THE DRAMA OF THE NATIVITY 295
spun, instantly caught the hearts of the audience; and, the next
moment, those hearts were thrilled with high emotion when, in a
burst of light, the Angel Gabriel a glorious golden- winged and white-
robed creature, suddenly appeared on the scene. When the curtain
was once more drawn, out of the darkness of the deep-vaulted
edifice the sound of bleating lambs was heard, and the red glow of
a shepherds' camp fire appeared. Later the darkness was pierced by
the glory of the reappearing Gabriel who was, very likely, the
handsomest young stone carver of the guild, and cousin or brother
to the comely, slender lad who played the Blessed Virgin. And then
the people enjoyed the savory taste of genuine drama, as real and
impressive to them as any conjurer of the stage could contrive for
us.
These were the beginnings of the Nativity drama; and they
mark also its highest consummation. But if the splendor of the
mediaeval Mystery passed with the golden era of the old cathedrals,
the dramatization of the story of Bethlehem continued on never-
theless through all succeeding ages — a natural impulse wherever
that story is told. Have we not an immortal dramatization of
Christmas in Handel's Messiah of the eighteenth century ? " All
our Christmas thoughts and emotions," writes John Addington
Symonds, " have been gathered up for us by Handel in his drama of
The Messiah."5 The Messiah is universal property; it belongs to
all lands, like the story it tells. In Provence, as we have seen, the
old time Nativity play survives to the present day. Today also, as
for many generations, the children of Dachau give their Manger
Plays at Christmastide. Rumania has its shepherd actors. Up to
a few years ago, in Italy, the pifferari came down annually from the
mountains, into Naples and Rome, making a dramatic entrance
through the city gates, and playing their pipes before the crib and
also, out of compliment to St. Joseph, before the shops of the car-
penters! Spain dramatizes Christmas in her Holy Night spectacles.
In old Mexico — one is not very sure of anything in new Mexico —
Mystery plays were performed every year, acting out the story of
the Nativity with much quaintness and naivete. There the play was
given out of doors, with the town plaza for a stage and the actors
laymen, both men and women, of the place. The chief personages
in these Mexican Nativities, besides the Holy Family, were King
Herod, the Magi and the devil — a sort of harlequin, designed,
just as in the ancient Mysteries, to supply comic relief. The cos-
*The Book of Christmas, p. 368. New York: The Macmillan Co. 1910.
396 THE DRAMA OF THE NATIVITY [Dec.,
turning of the characters also, as in ancient days, was at times not
a little incongruous: a startling mixture of native red sashes,
brightly colored serapes, and antiquated military uniforms. And
the management of the star was somewhat primitive: it was strung
on a wire, and pulled backward and forward, as the scene required.6
But it was all dramatic to the beholders, and it thrilled and satis-
fied the drama-hungry hearts of the populace.
In our day and country the giving of Nativity plays is far from
being unknown. Many a country or village parish, and city parish
too, has its Christmas play, most often a cantata, with shepherds,
angels, and magi, though not always attempting the final triumphant
scene of the holy manger. Non-Catholics as well as Catholic congre-
gations present these plays; they are often a feature of the Protes-
tant Sunday-school's celebration of Christmas; and they are usually
an event in the community or at least in the immediate neighbor-
hood. We all know what a joyous zest there is in the planning and
rehearsing of amateur plays; and this is all the more marked at
Christmas time, when the spirit of holiday is in the air and friends
and relatives are hearkening home for visiting and merrymaking.
Thomas Hardy, in his Wessex novels, shows us the rustic English
people enjoying their age-old pastime; and so does Eden Philpotts,
whose scene of the Christmas rehearsal in The Three Brothers
cannot be surpassed for homely comedy. The keen local rivalry
for the parts in the play, the fun and pranks of the fore-gathered
actors and singers, these are common experiences. Of course some
of these present-day Christmas plays can hardly be said to approxi-
mate the Nativity drama proper. Thus, one which I saw a few
years ago in a little Wisconsin town, told a simply story of local
life instead of recounting the actual scenes at Bethlehem; but it all
led up to a very effective Christmas Eve climax, with the company
very sweetly and reverently singing Holy Night as the final curtain
dropped. But whatever the variant they offer of the original story,
they are in a degree at least a dramatization of the Christmas theme;
and in time they may lead to better things.
With the revival of community pageantry — a distinctive
feature of the dramatic history of our time, somewhat halted by
the War but destined, nevertheless, to great proportions — it is pos-
sible that we may yet happily witness a return of the Nativity drama
in its full beauty. There are, indeed, signs of its actual return
already. The community Christmas Tree may be a beginning.
•Bayard Taylor's Eldorado.
1917.] THE DRAMA OF THE NATIVITY 297
Some of the larger Settlement Houses in the various American
cities have lately been celebrating Christmas with Nativity plays;
and even the civic Nativity — like unto the productions of the Mid-
dle Ages — is becoming known. At Bethlehem (in Pennsylvania,
not Judea) as befits the name, the divine story has become a part
of the local Christmas celebration. New England, which in the
days of the Puritans proscribed Christmas as a " popish mummery,"
has lived to see its own civic Nativity dramas.7 In St. Paul, Min-
nesota, two years ago, large audiences witnessed a Nativity called
Christ kind, which met with much success. And in California,
where open-air pageants are so easily carried out in the mid-winter
season, a really telling impetus has recently been given the move-
ment— if movement it may be called. There, on Christmas Eve in
1915, a remarkable Nativity pageant and spoken drama was given
in Los Angeles, four hundred volunteer actors and singers par-
ticipating, and an audience of fifteen thousand people — equal to the
best crowd that Rouen or Chester, London or York, could bring
forth in the heyday of the Miracle play — witnessing it. This Los
Angeles Nativity, written by Susanna Clayton Ott, has been pub-
lished under the title, A Masque for the Commonwealth of Los
Angeles, arid perhaps may yet be produced elsewhere. I myself saw
a modern Christmas Mystery presented in San Francisco. It was a
parish event, given indoors by the people of St. Paul's, which at-
tracted many thousands of people before it was done with, and be-
came an almost sensational theatrical event, rivaling the commercial
show-houses with its "run." On several occasions this play has been
revived, and invariably it succeeds; interest in it does not die out.
Another San Francisco Nativity drama, one which makes striking
use of the element of suspense, by keeping the door of the stable-
cave of Bethlehem closed till the final climax, has been written by
a young California poet, Daniel Doran. Less formal than these
plays, prepared expressly for the stage, but nevertheless equally in-
teresting, and equally valuable as signs of the return of the Nativity
drama, are such festivals as that given two or three years ago in
Muir Woods, on the slope of Mt. Tamalpais, in California. At
this fete, something of the primitive simplicity of the Middle Ages
was achieved in the acting out in pantomime, before the great open
fireplace, the story of the birth of Christ, the adoration of the
shepherds and the coming of the Magi.
1 Nativity: A Miracle Play in New England. Country Life, vol. xxv., p. 49.
December, 1913.
298 THE DRAMA OF THE NATIVITY [Dec.,
There is excellent material at hand for a revival of the Nativity
drama ; and what is lacking may be easily supplied by the writing of
new Nativity plays, one of the desired results of such a revival.
Some few years ago Professor Gayley prepared for the use of the
English actor, Ben Greet, a very fine example of the Nativity play in
The Star of Bethlehem, of which we have already made mention.
This is an arrangement, designed for the modern stage, of the
Towneley and other old English Cycles of the thirteenth, fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries. Woven from passages and scenes taken
from the Towneley Annunciation, the York Angels and Shepherds
and Coming of the Three Kings; the Coventry Birth of Christ,
Adoration of the Shepherds and Adoration of the Magi; and from
other sources, it supplies modern players with an authentic and at
the same time a practicable working drama of the Nativity. It is a
delightful thing, quaint and charming, and full of good comedy, the
latter woven around the adventures of the shepherds who have a
hard time of it keeping track of the sly movements of Mak, the
sheep-thief. It has such irresistibly quaint lines as these of the
rustic Coll, who brings his poor gift to the Infant Saviour, crying
joyfully :
Lo, he merries!
Lo, he laughs, my sweeting!
A full fair meeting! —
I give thee greeting —
Have a bob of cherries !
And there is Coil's fellow shepherd, Gyb, who advances to the
manger saying, as he kneels:
Hail! I kneel and I cower. A bird
I have brought to my Bairn ;
And Daw :
Hail! Darling dear, full of Godhead!
And there is the shepherd's song, sung to the tune of the pipes :
Doune from Heaven, from Heaven so hie
Of angeles ther came a companie,
With mirth and joy and great solemnitye:
They sang " terly terlowe."
So merreli the shepherds their pipes can blow !
It is as reverent as a prayer, ^although unquestionably the arranger
was guilty of an artistic blunder in his use of the sweet old lullaby
beginning : " Lulla, lulla, thou littel tine Child !"
1917.] THE DRAMA OF THE NATIVITY 299
The late Monsignor Benson gave us a Nativity drama8 de-
signed for practical use, and already used, I believe, with
success at Cambridge, England. And there is Laurence Housman's
Bethlehem,9 stupidly forbidden by the British censor, not for any
intrinsic fault, I imagine, but simply because some of the obsolete
rules of the old puritanical censorship statutes are not yet repealed.
It is a very beautiful and reverent Christmas drama, very Catholic
in thought and feeling, vivid, simple and poetic, and full of the old-
fashioned naivete which we find in the ancient Mystery plays. In
the writing of Bethlehem Mr. Housman, according to his own testi-
mony was not attempting anything " naturalistic or realistic," but
endeavoring only to concentrate in a symbolic drama " all the love
and delight and wonder which has come to be associated with
Christmas."
A modern Nativity drama of the highest value, both as drama
and as an inspiring spectacle, is Douglas Hyde's The Nativity,10 al-
ready presented in Ireland. The lovely simplicity of this little
one-act play is in the full spirit of the event it celebrates. Even the
stage directions have a charm about them ; as f of instance :
The dawn of day is rising and the colors of morning com-
ing. Two women come in — a woman from the east, and a
woman from the west, and they tired from the journey. There
is a branch of a cherry tree in the hands of one of them and a
flock of flax in the hand of the other of them.
Here we see the " bob of cherries " of the Towneley Cycle re-
curring again; and likewise in this, as in a majority of Nativity
dramas, the story is retold of those who turned Our Lady away
from their doors in her hour of travail. The climax of Dr. Hyde's
play, when the two guilty women are about to hurry away in shame
to conceal themselves from the eyes of the Infant God and His
Blessed Mother, and the Blessed Virgin calls them back, is highly
dramatic. The lines read :
Mary Mother (rises up and stretches out her hands, beckon-
ing to the women) : Come over here. Come to this cradle. The
Son of God is in this cradle, and His cradle is nothing but a
manger. But yet he is the King of the world. There is a
*A Mystery Play in Honor of the Nativity of Our Lord. New York : Long-
mans, Green & Co.
* Bethlehem: A Nativity Play. By Laurence Housman. New York: The
Macmillan Co. 1902.
"In Poets and Dreamers. By Lady Gregory, p. 244. London: John Murray.
1903.
300 THE DRAMA OF THE NATIVITY [Dec.,
welcome before the whole world coming to this cradle ; but it
is those that are asking- forgiveness will get the greatest wel-
come. ( The two women fall on their knees.)
There are other modern Nativity plays available. Rev. Charles
L. O'Donnell's The Nativity: a Miracle Play, published in his book
of poems, The Dead Musician,11 is a beautiful poetic drama,
which weaves a rather unusual story around the incidents of the
divine birth, and has a striking climax. In this again, the re-
pentance of those who closed their doors and their hearts to the
Imminent Christ, figures in the plot. Elsa Seton's A Christmas
Mystery,™ telling the story of a miraculous cure wrought at the
holy manger is of the same order, highly poetical, and full of
tender appeal. -With very slight rearrangement, these plays could
be produced on the stage.
Josephine Preston Peabody's The Wolf of Gubbio13 is a novel
treatment of the Nativity theme, framing the story of Bethlehem in
the Franciscan legend of the institution of the Christmas crib. It
is written in musical verse, and is wistfully beautiful, and filled, at
the same time, with that gentle spirit of jocund humor which so
strongly characterizes the literature of Christmas. Indeed I have
found in all my researches no Nativity drama, old or new, more
effectively pervaded with the holy and joyous spirit of the great
festival than The Wolf of Gubbio which tells in a compelling dra-
matic narrative :
How lowly to this world He came, alone
A naked Babe;
and sings of the Crib in these unforgettable lines:
St. Francis: O, Nest !
Nest of all hearts' desire !
Even to Thee the blinded birds go seeking;
Nest of all love!
O empty nest, —
Be filled, be filled with these —
The wayworn sorrows, thronging, weeping, thronging —
The lost compassions, yea, the lack and longing ..
Without hearts-ease !
Nest that no man nor bird did ever build,
Be filled, be filled,
"New York: Laurence J. Gomme. 1916.
"Published in San Francisco Monitor, December 19, 1914.
"Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.
I9I7-] THE DRAMA OF THE NATIVITY 301
Over, — above —
All our sore longing,
All our blind weeping, —
Hopeless of rest;
O Nest of the Light of the World!
While at the first glance one may feel that this play is not a
practical stage vehicle — one of the principal roles being that of the
Wolf himself, a very difficult part to enact — still, on second thought,
when it is remembered that symbolism and not realism is the chief
characteristic of the successful Nativity drama, the difficulty van-
ishes. Symbolism is strong in The Wolf of Gubbio, The story is
of the turning away of a poor peasant couple and their babe by the
selfish citizens of Gubbio, who shut their doors on them as the inn-
keeper of Bethlehem did on St. Joseph and his Spouse; and of the
rescue of the unhappy beggars by St. Francis. The conclusion of
the play, with its offering of gifts to the manger, is beautiful; and
the whole spirit of the drama is summed up in the words which St.
Francis speaks to the townsmen and their women- folk:
St. Francis: Hark ! . . . . Know ye not, on this high feast
There is a truce 'twixt man and beast ?
— Ye may not touch the least
Of brother creatures vengefully; —
Nor hurt nor hound him that he die. —
That pact between you, ye shall keep :
Unless you will Lord Christ to weep,
— Even Lord Love, on high!
;
— words not a little reminiscent of those familiar lines from Ham-
let with which the master of all dramatists (who, possibly, as a lad
of fifteen witnessed the last of the Nativity plays of the Middle
Ages at York, in 1579) introduced the story of Bethlehem into
his most famous play:
Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes
Wherein Our Saviour's birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long:
And then they say, no spirit dares stir abroad ;
The nights are wholesome ; then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallowed and so. gracious is the time.
THE DISTRIBUTIVE STATE.
BY HILAIRE BELLOC.
I.
jN the April issue of THE CATHOLIC WORLD I drew at-
tention to those major tendencies of our time which
are gradually drawing our society towards what I
have seen fit to call the Servile State. I propose in
this article to discuss the solution which will make
it possible for our society to avoid a return to servile conditions.
I stated in the previous article that we may take it for granted,
as reasonable men, that the condition of society known as " indus-
trial " is quite abnormal to men, and cannot endure. It has in-
volved us in abominations which we cannot tolerate. It is unstable,
and actually in ruins as I write. Its prime characteristic is not the
instruments with which it produces wealth nor the manner in which
it produces it, but the concentration of the ownership of the means
of production in a few hands, and the relegation of the mass of the
community to the condition which is technically called (in the terms
of modern economic science) "proletarian." That is, the mass
of men in such a society are dependent upon a wage paid them at
short and regular intervals, and by their necessity for that wage,
which is absolute life and death to them, they are as absolutely
controlled.
To escape from so vicious a product of false philosophy or
false religion (whichever we choose to call it — for the outward con-
dition of a society proceeds from its mind, and not its mind from
that condition) there has been imagined a political theory called So-
cialism, according to which the means of production should be taken
from the small minority which possesses them and vested in political
officers responsible in some fashion to the whole state, and in-
structed so to put the citizens to work upon capital and land as to
produce what they, these officers, direct. This produce to be next
distributed according to the orders of these officers, under the control
(however established) of the mass of citizens. This theory, as we
have seen, is attractive to many because, if the officers were really
controlled or were really just, it would forbid all exploitation of one
1917-] THE DISTRIBUTIVE STATE 303
citizen by another, and find sufficiency and security for all. To
others it is repellant because it seems to them to destroy men's chief
opportunity for independence and for the control of their own lives.
But it has largely convinced the modern world, both those whom it
attracts and those whom it repels, that it is a sort of necessity ; those
who have the misfortune to be caught in an industrial society and
who have not the privilege of possessing a religion or a philosophy,
are offered no alternative.
Now we have also seen that in practice Socialism thus influenc-
ing the mind of an industrial society by no means results in the es-
tablishment of its own ends. By which it is not meant that these
ends are not yet established, nor that they are imperfectly estab-
lished, but that industrial society, acting more and more upon and
influenced more and more by Socialist theory, is making with
greater and greater rapidity and in firmer and firmer fashion for
a state of affairs quite other than Socialist : something which is not
Socialism at all, but something utterly different, to wit, the Servile
State. And this Servile State is a condition of society in which the
few still possess the means of production and are specially secured
in their possession of it. The many not only still remain prole-
tarian, but are settled and bound into a proletarian framework and
are granted, against this, those fundamental advantages of security
and sufficiency which, in the brief interlude of industrial anarchy,
they had increasingly lost.
This is not a matter of theory, not a conclusion arrived at to
fit in with some social ideal scheme. It is a conclusion of observa-
tion, based upon obvious and glaring facts, which no one who cares
to use his eyes and to see things as they are, can for a moment deny.
Men occupied in the reform of our modern industrial societies are
not asking themselves : " By what machinery can we confiscate the
property of the few and put it into the hands of political officers?"
They are not framing laws to that effect, they are not tending to-
wards it in any fashion. They are asking themselves, upon the
contrary : " How can we put into the hands of political officers the
management of this capitalist community ? How can we best regu-
late through the authority of political officers the lives of the vast
proletarian mass, so that that mass shall have sufficiency and se-
curity?"
In this work the capitalist class is the most active of all ; indeed,
the reformers in question come mainly from that class, while those
who do not, are in many cases openly its servants. Many laws al-
304 THE DISTRIBUTIVE STATE [Dec.,
ready exist which are initiating and strengthening a policy of this
sort; universal arguments believed to be unanswerable are quoted
in its favor, both by men who detest the idea of confiscation or even
of the state ownership of capital and by men who still continue to
talk vaguely of the old-fashioned theory of Socialism, but put all
practical energy and thought, not into the furtherance of Socialism
at all, but into the production of the Servile State, which is no more
Socialism than Stoicism is Christianity, or than a Prison is a Re-
public.
We have suggested as the best solution of this strange and now
far advanced development, the necessary effect of the conflict be-
tween Socialism and the soul of man. The soul of man would not
permit the translation into practice of a theory which eliminated
property in the means of production, but it demanded certain con-
sequences of that theory and particularly security and sufficiency.
These the Servile State could afford not only as well as, but better
than, Democratic Collectivism; therefore, in practice, the Collec-
tivist pressure acting upon society, as it is, has canalized it along a
line of least resistance, produced a resultant direction for its devel-
opment, which direction points to nothing resembling Socialism, but
to something very closely resembling that old condition of many
slaves living under a few free men. A condition universal before
the appearance of the Christian religion, and which may very well
succeed its disappearance in any state.
Had space permitted, the argument might have been strength-
ened by considerations as concrete and as practical as those we
brought forward. Thus it is remarkable that the first steps taken
towards this new state of affairs were taken in that area of North-
ern Germany external to Western civilization, which was also the
first to shake off the religious tradition of the West and is now the
most frankly atheistic part of Europe. Again, we might have
strengthened a presentation already obvious enough, by pointing
out in what centres of our own society (still partially Christian)
the active work of developing the Servile State is being done.
But without these and numerous other subsidiary concrete il-
lustrations, it should be sufficiently clear that industrial society is,
as a fact, developing upon those lines, not upon Collectivist lines;
that the experiments of reformers are based more and more upon
borrowing, less and less upon confiscation ; that the function in the
state which is growing under their hands is not the political owner-
ship of lands and capital — for that grows less and less — but the
[917.] THE DISTRIBUTIVE STATE 305
administration by a great body of salaried servants of the mass of
the proletarian in the interests of the rapidly strengthening capital-
ist class. All these, we say, are the postulates of any inquiry or of
any suggested remedy for the future.
Those to whom this tendency towards the Servile State (under
whatever name they call it) is satisfactory, will of course seek no
other solution, nor is it to them that the arguments we are about to
develop should be addressed. But, even among the few who clearly
appreciate the nature of the very rapid pace of the modern change,
there is certainly a majority which is not contented with it, which
is attempting to react against it, and which lacks only a method of
reaction. It is for this majority that our arguments are designed.
There is but one alternative to the state of society in process of
creation, and that alternative is a society in which the means of
production are severally possessed by a determinant number of the
units, family and individual, that go to build up the state. " Sev-
erally:" that is, with a division between who owns and who does
not own, lying between unit and unit, so that this family, that cor-
poration, this individual, own lands and capital in absolute property
as against others, and that the great mass of regulations limiting
such rights ( for the furtherance of cooperation, for the checking of
competition, etc.) shall arise spontaneously from below, and shall
be the product of men economically free, acting in communion.
"Determinant:" that is, a number which is not a bare majority,
nor any fixed proportion, but such that it determines the general
economic sense and opinion, character and air of society.
Such a state of affairs is that upon which the whole of our
past is built, which the whole of our jurisprudence presupposes, and
in terms of which all our familiar conversation is still couched. It
exists firmly planted and ineradicable in many still healthy districts
of the modern world. It has in some, and notably in Ireland, been
recreated by an insistent popular demand. But being normal to
man, there is no name for it. We know what we mean by a Manx
cat, but what particular adjective have we to denote the tail-bearing
breed? It might be called by those deaf to barbaric cacophony the
" Proprietarial State," or any other name equally removed from
healthy English. Since a thing must be given a name if we are to
discuss it, let us give this thing the name of "The Distributive
State," though that is a very poor and mechanical name for the
sort of society which is nothing more nor less than the fixed tradi-
tion of all society normal to Christian Europe.
VOL. CVI.— 20
306 THE DISTRIBUTIVE STATE [Dec.,
If it be any man's desire, however vague or ill thought out, to
restore, to establish, or to protect the Distributive State, when that
man is acting in the midst of industrial conditions, two questions
must be put down at the outset upon the answer to which the whole
of his effort must return.
The first question is : " Can such a society be established — es-
tablished, that is, out of the elements which the industrial welter
provides?" The second question is: "If such a society were es-
tablished, would it be stable ?" To these two questions we will now
turn.
Now it is to be carefully noted by anyone who approaches
this problem that the two questions, though frequently confused in
the minds of disputants, are essentially distinct. There is many a
man who cherishes in his heart the ideal of some ancient primitive
society in which the means of production shall be well distributed
among citizens, but who is convinced that " under modern condi-
tions " (whatever that phrase may mean) the thing is impossible.
Such men accept a collectivist solution with regret, however sin-
cerely they press for that solution ; but they only accept it as being
much the less of two evils. Such a man at bottom was William
Morris, who, for all his large and inspiring acceptance of Social-
ism, at once described (when he let his imagination go) not an
ideal Collectivist State but an ideal Distributive State.
The type of man and the type of argument concerned with
the second question are radically different. Here you have a per-
sonal judgment or a line of reasoning which is not concerned to
deny the possibility of distributing property in the means of pro-
duction— that question is regarded as quite a minor one — but which
is concerned to point out that " modern economic conditions " would
turn such a society into a Capitalist Society again, in no time.
The second kind of character or type of reasoning is not that of
the imaginative man who sees a certain goal but believes it unattain-
able, and regretfully abandons it for a possible alternative, it is
rather that of the calculating man who believes himself to have
justly estimated the forces of life around him, and who despises the
static expression of a problem which he perceives to be essentially
dynamic.
It may be perfectly possible to answer the first question in the
affirmative and yet find that answer useless because the second
question must be answered in the negative. But unless the first
question can be answered in the affirmative it is not worth while
1917.] THE DISTRIBUTIVE STATE 307
pursuing the inquiry any further; for if there is in modern condi-
tions of production something which inherently prevents the wide
distribution of property in the means of production, then there is
no practical object in discussing the effect or advantages of such
a distribution at all. Let us therefore come to a clear conclusion
upon this point: can property be redistributed after it has fallen
into a few hands?
A man possessing some acquaintance with the history of
Europe and the actions of military and decided societies will be
struck at the very outset by the terms of the question. " How (he
will say) can any purely human arrangement be impossible for
human beings to arrange?" After all it is only the question of
doing the thing, and if there is human resistance, then of human
fighting and winning. In societies without number the means of
production have concentrated during periods of corruption into
a few hands and then possessors have been violently dispossessed,
hardly ever without bloodshed, but usually successfully after blood-
shed, because they were but a minority opposed to a determined
majority. Where that non-propertied majority consists of free
men, clothed with legislative power and capable of bearing arms,
time and again the few possessors have found themselves deprived
of their monopoly and their goods redistributed throughout the
commonweal. This process is called, upon the model of antiquity,
an Agrarian Revolution, . and where men are willing to make all
sacrifices for that object, an agrarian revolution can, of course, and
very often has, taken place. We had one in this generation
in Ireland, and we might have one tomorrow in any society, agri-
cultural or industrial, where the free men not only desired it, but
were so determined to accomplish it that they were willing to risk
wounds and death in its achievement. The Irish were imprisoned,
tortured and killed to make them give up their assault upon the
concentrated ownership of the means of production in the shape
of land. They defied imprisonment, torture and death, they con-
tinued that military effort, the essence of which is making your
enemy exceedingly uncomfortable at your expense, and they have
won.
What men mean when they say that it is " impossible " to
effect a redistribution of property in any society is, (though they
do not often clear their minds on the subject), that, given the psy-
chology of the society in question, the thing cannot be done. The
society they speak of will not, as a matter of fact, confiscate. . The
308 THE DISTRIBUTIVE STATE [Dec.,
majority of free men in it do not as a matter of fact sufficiently
desire property to run a physical risk in its attainment. This is
what men mean when they talk of such and such methods of re-
form as being " practical." They mean that, as a matter of fact,
in such and such a society the rich are accustomed and will submit
to taxation in certain forms and in a certain degree only. That
the poor will not attempt to compel them to accept taxation in other
forms or in a higher degree, and that, therefore, anyone desiring
to achieve a new distribution of property in that society, can only
act in a capitalist atmosphere and with social forces created by cap-
italism.
The question, therefore, narrows itself to this: Can we in a
society where the means of production are owned by a small minor-
ity of the free men, and where from inertia, ignorance, confusion,
cowardice, the purchasable habit in their souls, and other such men-
tal characteristics combined, men's initiative is lost, gradually es-
tablish by manoeuvre, a state of society which courageous, clear-
thinking and unpurchasable men could certainly accomplish at once
and by direct effect. It is exceedingly important to make this dis-
tinction, because in the diseased moral conditions which accompany
industrialism the impossibility of getting men to take physical
risks or even to visualize clearly the economic object they have in
view, is taken for granted as something normal to humanity. It
is of course nothing of the sort; but it may be normal to the par-
ticular diseased body with which we are dealing, just as it is normal
to the drunkard to have lost his will. And, just as in reclaiming
a drunkard we can no longer appeal to the will which is no longer
there, but must act from outside the man, and by gradual and in-
direct pressure, so in a society which is sunk into industrialism we
may be compelled to indirect efforts external to itself, and in de-
spair of the revolution must attempt transformation instead.
Granted all this, it is evident that there are two separate avenues by
which the means of production congested in a few hands may con-
ceivably be slowly and methodically redistributed among many.
The first method is that of Purchase. The second method is
that of canalization. Both may, and should, work together in any
attempt to redistribute property, to socialize it, or in any slow
fashion to transform its present arrangement. But each is quite dis-
tinct from the other. In purchase you offer goods in voluntary ex-
change against some portion of the means of production, and thus
again leave it to the state to retain or redistribute that portion.
I917-] THE DISTRIBUTIVE STATE 309
In canalization you take advantage of the fact that wealth is al-
ways in a state of flux — in act of production, accumulation and
conception — and so frame your laws that accumulation of the
means of production shall be easier in many than in fewer hands.
I will now discuss the first method, Purchase, and discover what
purchase of the means of production means in economic reality,
and whether its action is illusory — a mere exchange of one form
of the advantage of the rich for another — or a real, i. e., a true
dispossession in the means of production of their former owners.
Purchase, as I have said — purchase by or through the state of the
means of production — is the offering to the possessors thereof of
power, of demand over goods in general, in exchange for those par-
ticular means of production. And as goods in general will always
include goods immediately consumable, a process of state purchase
gradually expropriates the owners of the means of production.
There are two forms in which the state can purchase. It can either
purchase out of taxation or it can purchase with the proceeds of a
loan.
What happens when the state purchases the certain partic-
ular means of production with funds furnished by taxation ? When
the state purchases certain means of production out of the funds
provided by taxation, it takes from the owners and non-owners
combined, a power of demand to the loss of which they are grown
accustomed as necessary for the management of the community,
at the same time the state sets aside a portion of that power of
demand wherewith to tempt the owner of the means of production
to exchange his ownership against such portion.
Now it is evident that purchase thus conducted out of revenue
furnished by taxation can only be upon a small scale, as the state
is at present organized. The modern state can demand but a small
fraction of the annual revenue of its citizens — short of revolution,
which, as it would demand virile action, we must expressly exclude
from this study of contemporary methods — and of the total so
demanded, only a small proportion can be set aside for such social
experiments as the transformation of ownership in the means of
production. It would be a strain upon the social structure of a
country to demand a tenth of its annual consumable values: that
tenth would only yield a tenth again (i. e., one per cent of the
whole) for social experiment if this were played upon the largest
scale. Purchase by taxation, the direct method, is therefore very
slow.
310 THE DISTRIBUTIVE STATE [Dec.,
Nevertheless, this direct method is, as we shall presently see,
the method to be pursued. For let us contrast with it the alterna-
tive method, that of loans. When the state borrows money for the
purpose of buying out some form of 'the means of production, it
is invariably borrowing the means of production. This is no true
transformation. The lender regards the loan as an investment. He
puts into it what he would otherwise have put into some other pro-
ductive enterprise, and though the state establish a sinking fund the
annual payments on which shall be met by taxation, that is only
a way of paying for the things " purchased " by small installments
spread over a great length of time, commonly with usury added,
and it is the most expensive way of consummating the transaction.
It may be politically advisable to purchase by loan in particular
cases, where rapidity of action is essential, as for instance in an
acute quarrel between a dispossessed peasantry and its landlords,
threatening civil war. In such a case (the Irish Land Act is an
example) the state as a matter of policy says to the mortgagees of
Irish land : " I will spend, over a period of seventy years, ear-
marked revenue of mine obtained through taxation, although I
could have bought you out bit by bit to the same extent in fifty
years : I sacrifice to usury the amount of twenty years taxation and
put it into the money-lenders' pocket as a bribe to allow me to an-
ticipate the business."
But as an economic transaction, purchase by loan is always an
error. A lucky gamble may prove advantageous to the state which
has purchased by loan; but on a large scale, unlucky ventures will
more than counterbalance them. For the state has neither the
machinery, nor the inducement, for gambling that the money-
dealers have.
In general the idea that we can transform ownership in the
means of production through a succession of great loans is un-
sound in pure economics, and more unsound in practice because of
the fact that, in a capitalist state of society, the few monopolizers
of the means of production, with their subsidized press, their banks
controlling reserves, their toll of " brokerage," will be very wide
awake to their opportunity and will bleed the state to their utmost.
Indeed, the greatly tightened grip which capitalism has gained over
Europe in the last forty years is largely due to " municipalization "
of means of transit and exchange, and even production by loans. It
is, therefore, upon purchase out of taxation that we must rely. It
is the only true form of purchase.
I9I7-] THE DISTRIBUTIVE STATE 311
I have already remarked that this form is necessarily slow and
exerci sable in practice over only a small field at a time. But there
are expedients which largely increase both the area and rapidity of
its action. The first of these expedients is to set aside taxation
not for direct purchase of the means of production with the object
of distributing them, after the purchase, over the greater number
of the community, but in aid of voluntary purchase from the great
possessor by the small. A very little difference one way or the other
in the way of a bonus will determine an increasing volume of trans-
actions, thus distributing the means of production. You have but
to consider the state as a broker — but as a broker who, instead of
charging a similarpercentage to all purchasers with special terms for
the greatest, especially favors the small purchaser — to perceive how
powerful an instrument for the distribution of the means of pro-
duction it can become. The process is of course an " uneconomic "
one; in other words, it involves a loss. It is the recouping of that
loss through taxation that will enable the state to act in this benefi-
cent fashion, to play the part of co-purchaser with the small man,
and to turn the balance of the market in his favor.
The chief difficulty does not lie in the economic side. The ex-
position of the theory of distribution by purchase is no difficult
task ; the difficult task is to create a nucleus of old well-divided own-
ership in a society whose traditions and institutions are rapidly
making for servitude; to make a man think of owning as well as of
increasing or securing his wages; to secure the politicians who
could be trusted to act in the interests of the community rather than
of the rich, and to establish laws which prevent the immediate ruin
of the smaller man by the greater.
There is further the cognate difficulty of discovering or es-
tablishing an institution wherewith to inaugurate purchase in aid.
The beginnings of an institution whereby this process might be
effected we have — comically inefficient — in the modern Savings
Bank. It already deals in its absurdly inadequate form with con-
siderable sums: about fifty dollars per family of the state and one
hundred dollars per depositor, in England, for instance.
By extending its own operations, by offering to cognate insti-
tutions state guarantee at the expense of some state control, it
could enormously increase them.
The system might have been devised to prevent the distribu-
tion of the means of production, but at the present time in England
this system itself with two hundred million pounds of the smallest
312 THE DISTRIBUTIVE STATE [Dec.,
savings, although it has hitherto been rightly regarded by those who
have had recourse to it, not so much as a means of acquiring capi-
tal as a very safe place in which to keep small savings until they
must be drawn upon to meet some necessity. At present English
Savings Bank offer but sixpence in the pound interest (a reward for
which no large capitalist will save, let alone a small one) and
permits of practically no accumulation of over two hundred pounds
(a thousand dollars).
A reversal of that economic process, which is taken for granted
in this as in every other function of our capitalist society, could
extend its action indefinitely and give it some sort of positive value
as a transformer of social conditions. A high rate of interest on a
small regular deposit, lowering gradually as the deposit rose (which
is no premium against saving but quite the contrary) ; the purchase
of securities free of brokerage below certain amounts and upon a
scale which favored the smaller investor throughout, until a com-
paratively large unit was reached; the provision for a bonus on
the purchase of specially selected securities; the extension of its
operations, as we have said, by the guarantee and affiliation of sim-
ilar voluntary associations — such methods, strictly kept within
limits which certain earmarked taxation should render secure and
only as the experiment succeeded, spread over a wider and wider
field, would become within a generation a permanent and increas-
ingly efficient instrument for the formation of a nucleus of free
men and the establishment in practice of a popular possessing class.
[TO BE CONCLUDED.]
THE GLORIES OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH.
BY F. AURELIO PALMIERI, O.S.A., PH.D., D.D.
II.
UNITY.
HRIST is the foundation of the Church which bears
His name. Whatever may be said or fancied as to
the historical origin of the Church, it is an indisput-
able fact that the Church is indissolubly linked to the
words, teaching and influence, the action and will of
Jesus Christ. The earliest records of her life in the history of the
world speak of her as an institution built up by Jesus Christ, as a
society with characteristic traits, individual notes. Those traits
and notes are so pronounced as to make us distinguish her from all
human institutions; still more, from those which usurp her name,
and prerogatives, rob her of the gems of her diadem, and strive to
reproduce her outward lineaments.
In the Sacred Writings we can trace the original features of the
Catholic Church. There the Church is styled an organism, a body
whose members are harmoniously joined in a living unity. Accord-
ing to St Paul, as Christians, we are members of Christ.1 As the
body is one, and has many members, and all the members, whereas
they are many, yet are one body,2 so the Church is the body of
Christ.8 We are its members and being many, we are one body
in Him.4 Christ is the head of that body, which by Him is being
compacted and fitly joined together.5 From that divine head, the
whole body, by joints and bands, is being supplied with nourishment
and compacted, and it grows unto the increase of God.' In that
body we are urged to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of
peace.7
From the above comparison, which so frequently occurs in the
Epistles of St. Paul, we can discern the main characteristics of the
Church of Christ. She is a living organism. Her members are
bound and joined together by one and the same principle of super-
li Cor. vi. 15. 'i Cor. xii. 20. *Eph. i. 33; iv. 12. 4Rom. xii. 5.
•Eph. iv. 15; v. aj. *Col. ii. 19. 'Eph, iv. 3.
314 THE GLORIES OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH [Dec.,
natural life. They cannot be separated from each other, lest they
be lost in death ; the same blood circulates in her veins. A member
detached from that body no longer shares in its life. It is the mo-
tionless member of a corpse; it is the dead branch cut off from the
living trunk. Life in the Church of Christ consists in the perfect
adhesion of the members to the body, which receives its vital powers
from the head, Jesus Christ Our Lord. The divine organism of
the Church does not consist in a mechanical juxtaposition of mem-
bers, each one endowed with individual life. Life belongs to the
whole body. As Christ is one and not divided, so the vital principle
of the Church, Christ Himself, is one and not divided.
Hence it follows that unity is one of the characteristic notes of
the Church of Christ. " The Church is one," we read in a beautiful
passage of a Father of the third century, " and she is spread abroad
far and wide into a multitude by an increase of fruitfulness. As
there are many rays of the sun, but one light ; and many branches of
a tree, but one strength based in its tenacious root ; and since from
one spring flow many streams diffused in the liberality of an over-
flowing abundance, yet the unity is still preserved in the source. Sep-
arate a ray of the sun from its body of light, its unity does not allow
a division of light; break a branch from a tree — when broken, it
will not be able to bud; cut off the stream from its fountain, and
that which is cut off dries up. Thus also the Church illuminated by
the light of the Lord sheds forth her rays over the whole world, yet
it is one light which is everywhere diffused, nor is the unity of the
body separated. Her fruitful abundance spreads her branches over
the whole world. She broadly expands her rivers, liberally flow-
ing, yet her head is one; her source one; and she is one mother, plen-
tiful in the results of fruitfulness. From her womb we are born,
by her milk we are nourished, by her spirit we are animated."8
Thus unity is, as it were, the label of the genuine Church of
Christ. Moreover, it is the most visible of her distinguishing traits.
The Church's unity reveals itself in oneness of doctrine, of minis-
try, of government. On earth the Church enjoys an intellectual
life, for she is the living body of the divine Teacher; a pastoral life,
for she carries on the redeeming work of the divine Saviour; and
a social life, for she applies the maxims of the divine Civilizer.
Only in the Catholic Church do we realize that triple unity of doc-
trine, of ministry, of magisterium. It is only in the Catholic Church
that Christian thought reflects the rays of the wisdom of Christ;
8 St. Cyprian, De unitate Ecclesia, 5.
I9I7-] THE GLORIES OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 315
that the Christian heart beats in unison with the heart of Christ,
or rather, forms one heart with Him; and lastly, it is only in the
Catholic Church that Christian souls are fully joined in a perfect so-
cial organism, whose head is Jesus Christ Our Lord. In this way,
the divine unity of the Catholic Church conveys to us the fullness of
doctrinal, sacramental and social life. The Catholic Church is truly
one mind, one heart, and one soul. All the chords of her multifari-
ous life vibrate in perfect harmony.
First of all, the Catholic Church is one mind. Even those who
do not belong to her are forced to acknowledge that " among Catho-
lics there is but one opinion, one teaching about the sacraments and
about every other point of Christian doctrine which has been defin-
itely settled by their Church."9 Centuries have passed over her, yet
the doctrine she announces in the name of her divine Founder do
not change. Her utterances do not follow the windings of human
error. In her ceaseless struggles for the defence of her doctrinal
inheritance, in her daily efforts to put in a fuller light the deep
meaning of revealed truths, she makes appeal to the past ; she evokes
the dead legions of saints and martyrs to confirm by their testimony
the genuineness of her teaching. She is truly, as Vincent of Lerins
described her in the fifth century, " the careful and watchful guar-
dian of the doctrines deposited in her charge. She never changes
anything in them, never diminishes, never adds, does not cut off
what is necessary, does not add what is superfluous, does not lose
her own, does not appropriate what is another's."10
The teaching of the Catholic Church is a link of continuity
between the past and present generations. Catholic theology is in-
creased by the treasures of human speculation upon the sublime
mysteries of divine revelation. But, Catholic Faith has added
nothing to its deposit of sublime truths. The beliefs of the Apos-
tolic age reecho faithfully in the Creed which we repeat devoutly in
our churches today. The words which the Church utters are su-
perior to social divergencies and cultural peculiarities. They sound
with the same meaning to the East and to the West ; they have the
same binding force for the civilized as for the uncivilized. No
warring creeds can flourish within the pale of the Catholic Church.
She has never striven to fit her immutable beliefs to the " frames of
mind " of passing generations. She does not fear the victories of
man over the forces of nature, nor his ascent to the highest summit
• F. G. Lee. Essays on the Reunion of Christendom. London, 1867, p. 153.
10 Commonitorium, 23, 59.
316 THE GLORIES OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH [Dec.,
of intellectual life. She knows, by the experience of the past and
her faith in the future, that the doctrinal foundations laid by Our
Lord cannot be shaken by seducers. She is the only Church which
chronologically and geographically shows the most perfect unity
of doctrine. Even what her foes contemptuously call dogmatic for-
geries, namely, her lately defined dogmatic truths, rest first of all
on the testimony of the past. And her claims to a never broken
identity of belief are so well founded that, to deny them, men have
been forced to assault one of the sources of Christian faith, sacred
tradition.
The Catholic Church alone possesses unity of sacramental and
pastoral life. As the mystical body of Christ, the Catholic Church
distributes to her members the merits of the Incarnate Son of God.
She is a redeeming power in a world of sin. She is the reservoir
of the streams of a divine life which flows from the heart of Christ.
The sacraments are the channels of that life. They were divinely
instituted by the Saviour, and consequently the Church cannot re-
ject or change them without altering the whole economy of the
divine plan of Redemption, without frustrating the will and powef
of God. Outside of the Catholic Church, sacramental life has lost
or impaired its unity. Even the Eastern Churches, although firmly
clinging to the traditional teaching of Christian antiquity, have
made innovations in their sacramental life. The Catholic Church
alone has given to all the Sacraments an equal value, the value of
tokens of the Divine Love. They are the channels of supernatural
life in the souls cherished by God. Man therefore may not purloin
from them an iota of their divine stability. And when so sacrile-
gious a crime is perpetrated, then sacramental life languishes, both
in individuals and in communities. " We Protestants," sighs
Newman Smyth, " we baptize, we teach in our Sunday-schools for
a little while; we marry and we divorce; we keep some men in our
places of worship; we lose others from our own household; rarely
do we bring back those who have gone from us ; and, instead of a
sustaining sacrament for the hour of death, too often the reasonable
hope of immortality withdraws itself in the last darkness from the
hearts of many over whom we have not always watched."11
Lastly, the Catholic Church alone is endowed with the most
perfect unity of government. Because of that unity an Anglican
divine called her the backbone of Christianity. That unity is not a
human unity. If it were, the waves of time and the hatred of men
^Passing Protestantism and Coming Catholicism. New York, 1908, p. 16.
1917-]. THE GLORIES OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 317
had long since swept it away. The Catholic Church claims that
Jesus Christ is her invisible head; and the source of her spiritual
life. But, being a visible society among men, claiming the right to
lead them to the attainment of their supernatural aims, she needs
also a visible head.
If the Church is a perfect body, units homo, vir perfectus,
Christus et Ecclesia,12 according to St. Augustin, her natural per-
fection requires a visible head. The grossest inconsistency of
those who deny the Catholic notion of the Church, consists in their
denial of a supreme visible head to the mystical body of Christ. If
the Church is really that mystical body; if she lives among men in
a visible society, we cannot conceive her as lacking a visible head.
If St. Paul rightly compares the Church to the perfect man, and if
in man the invisible soul, the source of his inward and outward
life, does not preclude a visible head for the beauty and perfection
of his human body, so neither does Jesus Christ, the source of the
supernatural life of the Church, deprive her of a visible head. It
is inconsistent, I repeat, to admit that the Church is a visible body,
and at the same time to deny to that body the most important of its
visible parts. If the Church has been instituted by Christ as a per-
fect society, she ought to have that root of social unity and order,
viz., a supreme ruler. Anarchy is the corrosive acid of society.
And the Church, as a perfect society, cannot have anarchy as the
foundation of her social life. Outside of the Catholic Church we
find all the symptoms of rapid dissolution or of lifeless inertia. The
intellectual life of Christianity has been brought to a standstill by
the Churches which have broken their bond of allegiance to Rome,
or it has lost its powers in the maze of rationalistic conceits. On
the one hand nationalism, with the narrowness of its spirit and its
bounded interests, has loosened the ties of a unity which in the
Catholic Church levels all national frontiers ; on the other, the revolt
against Rome has culminated in the most anarchical individualism,
in the disruption of the unity of the intellectual life of the Church.
In Eastern Orthodoxy, the unity of the Church has been lost with
profit to the political powers; in the Western Reformation that
same unity has been dissolved to the profit of egotistical aims.
While both in the East and the West, the Catholic Church stands
firm in divine unity against the assaults of a narrow nationalism
and of an anarchical individualism.
By nationalism the Orthodox Churches have sunk to the level
"Enarr. in Psalmos xviii. 10; P. L. xxxvi. 161.
318 THE GLORIES OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH [Dec.,
of mere tools in the hands of political power. Nationalism has been
the great weakness and the great sin of the Byzantine Church, the
mother of the so-called autonomous churches of the East. It has
been also the grave of the Byzantine hierarchy. When the Byzan-
tine Church shared in the life of the whole body of Christ, when
her councils and bishops turned their gaze to the West, and in
their times of trial heeded the voice of Rome, she enjoyed the full-
ness of youthful energy. By the genius of her doctors she unfolded
the treasures of divine truth; by the labors of her apostles she en-
larged the Kingdom of Christ.
Her decay begins with the ascendancy of a narrow-minded
nationalism, which applied to the political and religious life cf
Byzantium the old saying: " He who is not Greek is barbarian."
In proportion as the underhand rebellion against Rome spread in
the ranks of the Byzantine hierarchy, the despotism of the Basileis
and their encroachments in the realm of religious life grew stronger.
Some Byzantine writers claimed for their emperors the right of a
supreme and uncontrolled power in every department of the life
of the nation. Even the laws of rhetoric and grammar were to be
promulgated by them. Nationalism infected the very roots of the
Byzantine spirit, and when its work was complete, the religious
schism, which had been brewing for centuries, became definite.
The defection of the Eastern Churches from Rome culminated in
the disintegration of Christian unity, and in the consequent ruin
was undermined the authority of the Byzantine hierarchy, itself
responsible for the consummation of the Eastern schism. To jus-
tify her revolt against Rome, the Byzantine Church appealed to the
theory of the legitimacy of national autonomous churches; while,
grossly inconsistent, she wished to keep under her sway the Slavic
barbarians converted to Christianity by Byzantine missionaries.
She did not forsee that the nationalistic theories laid down by her
Patriarchs, in the course of time, would be evolved to the utmost
consequences by their successors. In the fifteenth century, the Rus-
sian Church proclaimed her full independence from the Patriarchate
of Constantinople. In the nineteenth century her example was fol-
lowed by the Orthodox Churches of the Balkan States. Even the
redeemed Greeks of the Hellenic Kingdom refused to acknowledge
the supreme authority of the so-called ecumenical Patriarch, whose
authority extends at present over less than five million souls.
It was in vain that, in 1871, when the Bulgarians succeeded
in establishing a national church, the Greek hierarchy, in a synod
I9I7-] THE GLORIES OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 319
held at Constantinople, anathematized the principle of nationalism
as being in direct opposition to the universal spirit of the Church of
Christ, and its visible unity. In so doing that synod condemned
the doctrinal foundations of the Byzantine Church and did homage
to the Catholic principle of Christian unity.
The lack of that unity is the chronic disease of the Eastern
Churches separated from Rome. They form an agglomeration of
acephalous communities which Khomiakov declared bound to each
other by the ties of charity, but which in fact feel for each other
only national hatred. As a consequence of this fearful malady, the
Eastern Orthodox Churches have lost their power of resistance.
They have been turned into political churches; they are all sub-
servient to political powers. Their prosperity or decay depends
upon the victory or defeat of the political factions which lend them
support; their life is bound to the life of the state. They are
national churches and a national church is a captive one, one sepa-
rated from the universal Church of Christ, who has thrown off
the yoke of Christ on earth merely to accept the yoke of a political
ruler. Rebellion against the visible ecclesiastical authority has en-
slaved the particular churches of the East to a visible political au-
thority. Hence we may rightly infer that the principle of a visible
and central power in the Church, the principle of cohesion in its
visible organism, comes from God, not from man. As to the fate
of the Eastern autonomous churches, we can repeat the stirring
words of a noble Russian lady, Princess Elizabeth Volkonskaia in a
book which may be called the diary of her conversion to the Catho-
lic Church : " All the Orthodox Churches appeal to their faith in the
One, Catholic and Apostolic Church. None of them, however,
realized that appeal, and all together do not constitute the Church
of their dreams, for their agglomeration lacks a centre of unity, by
virtue of which all the parts are joined into a perfect body, which
is the efficient cause of their organic unity. They believe in the
one and universal Church, I repeat; but they believe in it as in an
earthly institution which in reality never exists. They have cast
away one of the foundations of the Church. They have broken their
relations with the centre of unity. That is the reason for their
helplessness. No power in the world is able to heighten their value,
to strengthen their authority, for what is human and temporary
cannot support what is everlasting. We went away from the uni-
versal Church; we cut ourselves from her life. Since the age of
the separation of the East from the Apostolic see, the Eastern
3ao THE GLORIES OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH [Dec.,
Churches have no voice to speak the language of truth. Their
cloisters no longer lighten the world. Social life evolves and makes
progress, while they sleep profoundly. Still more, they are buried
in the sepulchral darkness of sterility. Their teaching is lifeless and
vague."13 No wonder, then, we assert that nationalism is the worst
enemy of the Church of Christ and that the Catholic Church, being
Christ's Church, fulfills her duty whenever she crushes nationalistic
tendencies. But we must not confound nationalism with patriotism.
The love of one's country is a natural feeling, which the Catholic
Church beautifies and elevates by her influence. The Church does not
interfere with the legitimate aims of Christian patriotism which is
not based on violation of the laws of justice. When she stands out
against nationalism, her conduct is inspired by the loftiest evangeli-
cal doctrine, by the doctrine of the equal dignity of all races before
God, of the equal right of all races to the inheritances of Our Cru-
cified "Lord. Experience has sadly taught us that nationalism is
almost always saturated with paganism and rests upon contempt
for other races. To quote Nietzsche, " nationalism from time to
time lets loose the beast of prey, the magnificent blond brute,
avidly rampant for spoil and victory."14 The Catholic Church de-
tests the preachings of Zarathustra, who in name of Dionysian
charity pushes to the wall the weaker races for the benefit of the
stronger. All races belong to the Catholic Church by the same
right, in the name of the Christ, " Who will have all men be saved
and to come to the knowledge of truth."15 Consequently, national-
ism conceals in its heart a germ of social dissolution, and in preying
upon the mystical body of the Church, jeopardizes its living reli-
gious unity.
By virtue of her divine unity the Catholic Church, while the
world powers are grappling with each other in a giant conflict, ex-
tends the same maternal care over all the warring nations which, in
spite of political enmity, follow the dictates of the same Faith and
obey the same supreme Pastor. Nothing strikes so forcibly a truly
Christian heart as the sight of that perfect unity midst the stormy
ocean of racial hatreds. It points out the divine character of the
"O tzerkvi (Essay on the Church). Berlin, 1888, p. 329- In our Theologia
Dogmatic Orthodoxa we have shown that the consideration of unity affords the
strongest arguments for the defence of Catholic doctrine against Orthodox contro-
versialists. The theological accuracy of our statement as concerns its practical
value, has been brought into fuller relief by Th. Spacil, S.J., 1st die Lehre von den
Kennseichen der Kirche zu andernf Zeitschrift filr katholische Theologie, 1912,
vol. xxxvi., pp. 715-741.
"The Gtntalogy of Morals, i. n. Edinburgh, 1910, p. 40. "i Tim. ii. 4.
1917-] THE GLORIES OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 321
unity of the Catholic Church, a unity which soars aloft above the
raging billows of human passions, which stills the discordant voices
of conflicting political interests; which blends in the same prayer
hearts rent asunder by inveterate rancors ; which stretches over them
the healing and appeasing hand of the Saviour. By that unity the
Catholic Church has truly leveled national frontiers and realized
the universal brotherhood. It has truly become, as St. Augustine
defines her in a beautiful metaphor, a nest hewn from the wood
of Christ's Cross, a nest which offers tender asylum to all the peo-
ples of the world.16
Eastern Orthodoxy has perverted the notion of Church Unity
by the introduction of the principle of nationalism into the con-
stitution of the Church. The Western Reformation went still fur-
ther. As Alexis Klomiakov remarked, it sacrified ecclesiastical
unity in its hatred for the principle of authority. The corrosive
acid of an unbridled individualism, of an absolute freedom in the
field of religious beliefs is the logical inference from the theories
laid down by the theologians of the Reformation. They have not
only denied the visible ecclesiastical authority : they have inflicted a
fearful blow on Christianity as a distinct religion; as a body of
doctrine emanating from Christ.
For many centuries Christianity has been the most powerful
factor in the religious evolution of mankind. Amid the Babel of
pagan polytheism, it arose as a compact body of beliefs, as a reli-
gion readily discernible by its characteristic traits. It introduced
unity into the scattered flock of its followers who found peace
within its harbor of salvation. It acted in the world as a unifying
society whose members professed the same creed, recognized the
same rulers, labored for the same goal. Christianity was not a
reality apart from the Church. Both names are synonymous in the
writings of all the exponents of Christian truth from the earliest
days till the later age of Christian patristics. The Catholic Church
proclaims her faith as a treasury : it is not the property of individ-
uals, nor does it follow the phases of decay, and of revival of
philosophic systems. The saying of the Gospel, " One Lord, one
faith, one baptism,"17 is the ruling norm of the Catholic faithful
who boast of incorporation in the Church of Christ, and of the high-
est cleric enlisted in her armies. In the history of her intellectual life
the Catholic Church does not allow any room for the elaboration
MEcclesia Dei nidum de lignis crucis Ipsius. Enarr. in Psalmun, ci., 8.
»'Eph. iv. 5.
VOL. rvi— si
322 THE GLORIES OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH [Dec.,
of an individual creed. She declares herself the sole keeper and
guardian of Christian truths, and forbids individuals to fit them
to suit their tastes. " I cannot sufficiently wonder," wrote Vincent
of Lerins, " at the madness of certain men, at the impiety of their
blinded understanding, at their thirst for error, so that, not con-
tent with the rule of faith delivered once for all and received from
times past, they are every day seeking one novelty after another, and
are constantly longing to add, change, take away in religion, as
though the principle — let what has once for all been revealed suf-
fice— were not a heavenly but an earthly rule, a rule which could
not be complied with except by continual amendment, nay, rather
by continual fault-finding."18 The unity of the Church is preserved
by faith in the same God, by the profession of the same creed, by
the reception of the same sacraments. The Church must recog-
nize but one divine Teacher, Saviour and Founder. To say that
Christianity is the ceaseless evolution of individual religious con-
sciousness means the denial of its very essence — a body of divinely
revealed truths as unchangeable as their divine Revealer.
Protestant and Modernist writers, when they touch on the
unity of the Church, often blame the Catholic Church for what
they call a ceaseless attempt to level all the native divergencies of
individual religious experiences, to the profit of a deadening and
militaristic uniformity. The philosopher of Modernism, Tyrrell, at-
taches more value to Protestant divisions than to Catholic unity:
" Of the two evils, a sterilizing uniformity seems to me far greater
than the divisions and subdivisions of Protestantism. These, at
least, are evidences of energy and vitality, however wasted for
lack of the unifying pressure of rational authority. Here are people
who live and feel and think their religion ; who are interested
enough to quarrel about it, as about the most vital of all questions.
Here, at least, is a variety out of which it is possible to make a
unity. But from a mechanical unity, secured by the discourage-
ment and repression of individual interest and initiative, what can
result but that which has resulted ? By regimental drill, by govern-
mental coercion, you may form a political party, you may drive
the multitudes to Mass and to the sacraments, you may teach them
the same formulas, you may scare them into obedience, you may
make them wheels in a machine, but you will never make them living
members of a living organism, you will never make their interest in-
telligent or enlist their profoundest enthusiasm. In spite of all their
u Commonitorium, xxi., 5 1 .
1917-] THE GLORIES OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 323
theological heresies and divisions, the religious interest still lives and
grows in Protestant countries, whereas it languishes and dies
among Catholics under the modern craze for centralization and
military uniformity."19
Tyrrel's theory is a defence of Voltaire's aphorism : " Believe
me, my friend, error also has some merit." In his eyes, the sta-
bility of eternal truth is a mental catalepsy, while the contradictions
of human systems are the manifestations of an intense life! First
of all it is absolutely untrue that the life of the Catholic Church
does not exhibit any variety. What Protestants call " religious
experience," and what we know under the name of " Christian
devotion," follows thousands of ways according to national charac-
teristics, individual aspirations, the breath of divine grace. The
waters of Catholic piety are drawn from the same well, but he who
drinks of them feels differently their beneficent influence. In the
Catholic Church the heroes of Christian perfection do not wear the
same garb. Everyone of them reproduces this or that feature of the
spiritual beauty of the divine Teacher. The same Spirit Who burns
unceasingly in the bosom of the Church, " dividing to everyone
according as He will,"20 works to make the Church " clothed round
about with varieties."21 There is no saint of the Catholic Church
who does not strike a special note of the divine symphony of sanc-
tity. There is no moral perfection which has not been idealized
with extreme variety of expression in the Catholic Church. Mili-
tarism in piety is the keynote of the sportsmen of holiness (to
use an expression of Nietzsche), the followers of a vague and
aimless mysticism grounded on " evangelical freedom."
Even in her admirable unity of government the Catholic
Church is so far from militaristic uniformity that within her pale
we find a great variety of organizations. In the autonomous
Churches sometimes liturgical contests, or conflicting views upon
secondary points of doctrine have produced schisms and divisions.
The militarism of the Catholic Church, on the contrary, is not incon-
sistent with liturgical discrepancies. She joins to her body the
Uniate Eastern Churches with their apostolic liturgies, their dis-
ciplinary customs, and their pious traditions intact. Even more!-
Under the protecting wings of the Papacy, the Uniate Churches
have not been deprived of their own regimes. Their limited au-
tonomy is not at variance with the spirit of the Catholic Church.
They are organic cells vitalized by the life flowing from the
"Medievalism. London, 1908. pp. 32, 33. *°i Cor. xii. n. "Ps. xliv. 14.
324 THE GLORIES OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH [Dec.,
heart of Catholic unity. They afford us a striking proof that
Catholic unity does not exclude variety, that " where the Spirit of
the Lord is, there is liberty."22 On the contrary, in the Eastern
Churches, as for instance in the Russian, a futile contest about the
correction of liturgical books degenerated into a schism which has
torn away from it several millions of Old Believers. The same
rigid spirit of intolerance dominates many Protestant denomina-
tions.
The Catholic Church is taunted with a military uniformity
chiefly because of her unshakable steadfastness in the profession
of the same creed, in her adherance to the same beliefs. But the
term military uniformity is too weak to express the doctrinal unity
of the Church. Military uniformity comes from without: it im-
plies the notion of a mechanical drilling. But the doctrinal unity
of the Catholic Church comes from within: it is as natural, as
spontaneous as the movements of a living organism. It is rooted in
the very heart of divine truth, identical in space and time. It is
not forced upon the Church by external violence: it springs from
her inner life of divine truth, which is immutable. Religious ex-
perience cannot alter it. When we learn a mathematical axiom,
whatever may be our frame of mind, we feel bound to accept its
truth. In like manner, when the grace of God introduces us within
the sanctuary of revealed truth, and by faith brings into captivity
our understanding unto the obedience of Christ,23 we do not think
to sift out the truth of God with the sifter of human criticism.
" Heaven and earth shall pass, but my words shall not pass," says
Jesus Christ Our Lord.24 Lex Credendi in the Church does not
depend on individual taste and caprice. It has been established by
God, it participates in the eternal stability of Divine Truth. It is
false to compare the gradual disintegration of Protestantism to the
expansion of latent vital energies. The multiplication of Prot-
estant sects proves only that Christian thought has been seriously
affected by the principles of the Reformation. Religious thought
cannot rest on a perpetually shifting soil. If Christian beliefs could
die or change their meaning at the beck of human opinion, they
would cease to be the words of a revelation made by God to men.
They would sink to the level of hypothetical truths. They would
lead men astray into the maze of warring creeds, and finally so de-
face the main features of revealed truth as to make it unrecognizable
to them. This is precisely what has happened in Protestantism,
"3 Cor. iii. 17. "a Cor. x. 5. **Matt. xxiv. jj-
I9I7-] THE GLORIES OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 325
which, according to Newman Smyth, looks " like a conjuror's
chamber of many mirrors, set at all angles, and so multiplied at
every turn that the visitor, once having entered, can find no way
out, and wherever he looks beholds ever the reflection of his own
passing form."25
Protestantism has placed the doctrinal unity of the teaching of
Christ at the discretion of the mob. It is no longer God, but man
who fixes the meaning of divine truth. Within the pale of the
Catholic Church men are ready to sacrifice life and goods for the
sake of the truths which they firmly believe to have been derived
from God through the Church. In Protestantism, because of the
lack of living unity, men are ready to sacrifice their religious be-
liefs for numberless ephemeral causes. It is a matter of daily ex-
perience what a Unitarian writer says of the preaching of divine
truth in the bosom of Protestantism : " The people have full sway.
The Church considered as a body of subscribers to Christian creeds,
has taken its destiny into its own hands ; it is they who decide what
shall be preached and who shall preach it. They hold out promise of
large salaries and social inducements to a popular preacher. They
invite a man to preach in their church, and if he suits their taste,
is broad or narrow, orthodox or heterodox, according to their
particular line of thought, they give him a call and make him an
offer. Once installed in a church, he must use the greatest caution
in his sermons, lest he offend. His theology must suit his people,
above all he must please the women. If only a parson shall find
favor with the women, his success is as'sured. Heaven, hell, the
world, the flesh, and the devil must be mentioned only with infinite
caution to suit his people. He must, in short, to a great extent,
however learned, wise, and popular he may be, maintain the position
of an echo to the ideas of his congregation."26
Hence it follows that the break in the Church's unity has pro-
duced a practical and theoretical deflection from the authentic
Christian faith; has subjected it to the caprices of the mob. It is
the just punishment inflicted by God on the violators of Christian
unity, but it is false to deduce therefrom, as an Anglican writer
asserts, that " the Church of Rome feels that she can, with calm
complacency and satisfaction, view the spectacle of disordered and
disjointed Protestantism. She glories in it. She points to it with
self-conscious pride. She ridicules it. She calmly surveys the
**W. T. Hale, Christ versus Christianity. Boston, 1892, p. 169.
*0p. cit., p. 134.
326 THE GLORIES OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH [Dec.,
Babel confusion of Protestantism. She is self-satisfied."27 The
Church weeps over the wounds inflicted upon her divine unity.
She has never ceased to be a most loving mother who wishes to em-
brace with equal tenderness all her children. She feels that out-
side of her pale there is a growing yearning for the visible unity
which she fully embodies, towards the ideal of the one Church of
Christ, as Newman Smyth avows in these touching words : " The
ideal of the one Church wanders among us Protestants, like an
unembodied spirit, from Church to Church, until we almost cease
really to believe in it. The ideal is put far from us as a millennial
dream. It fades from our ordinary religious thought as a moment-
ary glory passes from the evening sky."28
The Catholic Church not only mourns over the divisions of
Christianity. She labors and prays for the restoration of her
primitive unity. Of herself she says with St. Basil : " It would be
monstrous to feel pleasure in the schisms and divisions of the
Churches, and not to consider that the greatest good consists in the
knitting together of the members of Christ's body."29 To those
who do not live under her vivifying influence she addresses the
beautiful words of Vincent of Lerins who thus depicts the ideal
member of the one body of Christ : " He is the true and genuine
Catholic who loves the truth of God, who loves the Church, who
loves the body of Christ, who esteems divine religion and the Catho-
lic faith above everything, above the authority, above the human re-
spect, above the genius, above the eloquence, above the philos-
ophy, of every man whatsoever; who sets little store by all of
these, and continuing steadfast and fixed in his faith, resolves that
he will believe that, and only that, which he is sure the Catholic
Church has held universally and from ancient times ; but that what-
soever new and unheard of doctrine he shall find to have been fur-
tively introduced by some one or another besides that of all the
saints, or contrary to that of all the saints, this, he will understand,
does not pertain to religion, but is permitted as a trial."30
WW. A. R. Goodwin. The Church Enchained. New York, 1916, pp. 291, 292.
nOp. cit., pp. 2-4. "Ep. clvi. *" Commonit orium, xx., 48.
DANTE AND HIS TIMES.
BY THOMAS C/HAGAN, M.A., PH.D., LITT.D.
N entering the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence your
attention is arrested by the portrait of a man who
has attained middle life — Nel Mezzo del cammin di
nostra vita. He is sitting in a reclining position with
a book on his lap. His face is sad, his cheeks hollow,
his forehead large and columned. This portrait is the work of
Domenico Peterlin and represents the great Florentine poet, Dante
Alighieri, in exile.
To understand properly the greatest of Christian epic poets it is
essentially necessary that we should know the times which gave
him birth, for while neither time nor place creates genius, both
are factors, to some extent, in determining what form creative art
shall take — what shall be its mold, its likeness and the spirit of
its message to the people.
Dante, who was born in the little gray Gothic city of Flor-
ence, full of pictorial sights and sounds, sometime during the end of
May or beginning of June, 1265, belonged to the old populus of
the Florentine burghers who traced their origin to Rome. His
birth was set in a remarkable period — in a remarkable century:
at the very day-dawn of the Italian Renaissance. For about this time
Cimabue discovered Giotto, the shepherd's boy who became painter,
sculptor, architect and engineer and was really the first of the great
painters of the Italian Renaissance. The year of Dante's birth
marked also the victory gained by Charles of Anjou over Manfred
of Naples in the battle of Benevento, which destroyed the power
of the house of Suabia and set up in its stead French influence
in Italy. In England coeval with the birth of the great Florentine
poet an event of far-reaching importance took place in the assem-
bling of the Knights of the Shires by Simon de Montford — the
beginning and outlining of the first English Parliament.
The great Christian epic poet was born two years before
Giotto. At his birth Florence, the " most beautiful and most re-
nowned daughter of Rome " of the Convito, was just creating itself
in art. There was as yet no church of Santa Croce, the mausoleum
of the great Florentine dead; Arnolfo had not yet laid the deep
328 DANTE AND HIS TIMES [Dec.,
foundations of St. Maria dei Fiori with its glorious dome ; nor had
that masterpiece of grace, crowning the architectural glories of
Florence, Giotto's Campanile, the " lily of Florence blossoming in
stone," yet been conceived in the great soul of its designer.
The age of Dante was an age of intense action and intense
faith. He was born five years before one of the greatest of French
kings, St. Louis, had died leading the ninth crusade in Tunis. Nine
years after his birth was held the Second Council of Lyons for the
purpose of setting on foot a new crusade and of healing the schism
between the Greek and Latin Churches. Dante inherited at birth
the gift of faction and all that was great and narrowly intensive in
the life of Florence. It was the age of the Guelf and Ghibelline.
The former were defenders of Italian independence and municipal
liberties, the latter, champions of feudal rights and the old suze-
rainty of the Holy Roman Empire. Yet it should not be forgotten
that also in the days of Dante men readily forsook a political party
for personal advantage. Indeed the party politician of the thir-
teenth century in Florence, did not greatly differ from the party
politician and partisan of today, in that he was quick to espouse a
cause and enroll himself under a banner which offered him the
greatest profit and quickest advancement.
At this time the Italian republics were exercising a widespread
influence on European civilization and culture. The supreme scep-
tre of social and intellectual leadership had slipped from the hands
of France at the beginning of the thirteenth century and Italy had
taken it up. Venice, a republic, though virtually not such a democ-
racy as Florence, was now catching in her sails every trade wind
of commerce. Florence though rent with faction, and possessing
less territory beyond her walls than did Athens, was a second
Athens in intensity of culture, fierceness of democracy and fullness
of trade.
Turning for a moment to consider the character of the Italian
of Dante's day, it is interesting to note that it was marked by marvel-
ous talent and administrative power. This wealth of talent for
administration obtained in Italy " at a time when French nobles
lived like Turks with a veneer of Christianity under the name of
chivalry; when German nobles occupied robber holds commanding
highways and waterways; when English and Scotch nobles fought
each other day and night at feast, at chase, at bridal or burial."
Mediaeval universities were taking root and shedding intel-
lectual light upon the fair face of Europe; the national impulse
DANTE AND HIS TIMES 329
was stirring the hearts of the people; the most sublime of arts,
Gothic architecture, was covering Europe — to use the words of
Hallam — with a white mantle of churches. It was an age of great
spiritual endowment and the blossoming of faith, and the things of
the soul were in evidence everywhere. Life was intense, full of aspi-
ration, full of virtue, full of faith, full of sin. Men hated and
loved, sinned and repented, made pilgrimages and vows, fell
from grace and became reconciled to God. But a sense of the
presence of God and the thought of the life hereafter reigned
everywhere.
Such was the extraordinary epoch into which Dante was born.
And, as if the better to nurture and develop the genius in the boy,
his youth was spent among gifted companions. We may well
believe that he had access to the best there was in the scholarship of
his day. Brunette Latini was his master, and his portrait, and that
of Corso Donati, appear in the Bargello portrait of Dante. This
portrait of Dante with his two companions was discovered in the
chapel of the palace of the Podesta of Florence, now a prison, in
1841.
Possibly the Divine Comedy would never have taken creative
form in the soul of Dante had it not been for two great events in his
life: his meeting with Beatrice at a May festival in Florence "when
he had almost completed his ninth year and she had just entered
hers, and his exile from his native city, during which he wandered
for nineteen years, to use his own words " like a ship without a rud-
der," uno peregrino quasi mendicando. Certain it is that had Dante
never met Beatrice he would not have written the Vita Nuova,
which marvelous and tender love story is the promise of the
Divine Comedy. It has been held by some writers that Beatrice
was not a person of flesh and blood — that in the Divine Comedy
she is merely a type, a model, an abstraction. I think, however,
that such a contention is absurd. That such a person as Beatrice
Portinaro lived, cannot well be gainsaid. Boccaccio who was born
eight years before the death of Dante and was appointed by the
Florentines as public lecturer on Dante in 1373, is authority for
saying, before an audience numbering friends and relatives not only
of the Alighieri but also of the Portinari and the Bardi, that Beat-
rice Portinari became the wife of Simone de Bardi. Furthermore
Joannes da Serravalle, Bishop of Fermo, who met the English
bishops of Bath and Salisbury at the Council of Florence in 1414
and was commissioned by them to translate the Divine Comedy
330 DANTE AND HIS TIMES [Dec,
into Latin, declares in his preamble to the Lain translation of the
Divina Commedia that Dante historically and literally loved Beat-
rice— Dantes dilcxit hanc puellam hystorice et literaliter.
Dr. Zahm in the chapter on " Dante and Beatrice " in his inter-
esting work, Great Inspirers, points out how literary men such as
Victor Hugo, Alfieri and Byron had felt the passion of love at a
very early age, and Dr. Zahm holds that to a soul as gifted and re-
sponsive as was that of Dante, it was entirely possible for the boy
Dante to feel the sway of love on meeting Beatrice, although that
love was entirely an ideal one. So we can very well under-
stand Dante's confession, when on first meeting Beatrice his spirit
tremblingly exclaimed : Ecce deus fortior me qui veniens dominabi-
tur mihi — " Behold a deity stronger than I who coming shall rule
over me."
In due time we find Dante becoming a burgher of Florence,
the father of a family, a politician, an envoy, a magistrate, a par-
tisan, taking his full share in the quarrels of the times.
As I have already pointed out Dante had during his young
years the advantage of the choicest and most gifted companions of
the day. Among these were the poets, Guido Cavalcante and Cino
da Pistoia, Giotto the painter, and Casella the musician. It may
well be imagined what an influence these gifted souls exercised
upon Dante. He who reads the Divine Comedy carefully, observes
that its author was much more than a poet — that he was also a
painter and musician. This gift of the painter enabled Dante,
when a wayfarer and wanderer, to store away in his soul the beau-
ties of earth and sea and sky. Dr. Zahm refers to this in a charm-
ing passage. " Whether Dante's wayfaring was during the rigor of
winter or during the balmy springtide, his poetic soul was ever alive
to all the myriad beauties of earth and sea and sky — to the blush and
fragrance of the fresh-blown rose; the caroling of the joyous lark
' in the gleam of the new-born day ;' the twinkling of the stars in a
clear Italian sky ; the silvery music of a mountain stream ; the gor-
geousness of the clouds painted by the rising or setting sun. Every-
thing— from the humblest flower to the loftiest Alpine Peak — was
submitted by him to the scrutiny of a trained artist and to the
critical acumen of the profound man of science."1 Indeed much of
the scenery described in the Inferno and especially that in the
Purgatorio is Alpine, for Dante was an Alpine climber.
In 1290 we find Dante as a cavalryman fighting under the
1 Great Inspirers.
191 7-1 DANTE AND HIS TIMES 331
banner of the great Guelf leader, Corso Donati, against the Ghibel-
lines at the battle of Campaldino, and so well did he acquit himself
that he gained thereby the favor of the leader of the Guelfs and
secured in marriage the hand of Gemma Donati, a daughter of the
great Guelf leader.
Mingling in the civic affairs of Florence, Dante became a
politician and a partisan, though it must be confessed not a very
successful politician. Intransigeant and idealistic characters do
not make successful politicians. The intensity of Dante's political
likes and dislikes is evident all through the Divine Comedy. It has
been said of the Divine Comedy: " It is so civic that the damned and
the saints amid their tortures and beatitudes turn excited politicians;
and not merely politicians but Italian politicians; and not merely
Italian politicians but Florentine politicians ; and not merely Floren-
tine politicians but Ghibelline politicians; and not merely Ghibel-
line politicians but Dantean politicians. In 1300, Dante was
elected one of the six Priors of the city of Florence. About this
time Pope Boniface VIII. contemplated invoking the influence of
the French king to quell factional strife and restore peace and
order in Florence. Dante was sent on an embassy to Rome to dis-
suade the Holy Father from this purpose. During his ab-
sence in Rome his enemies gained ascendancy in Florence. When
he had reached Siena, on his way home, Dante heard of the decree
of his banishment. He had been condemned for malversation and
peculation in office, and was forbidden to return to his native city
under penalty of death. And now began Dante's exile — his wan-
dering from city to city, from country to country.
We have no authentic account of this wandering, though we
are capable of tracing his footsteps to some extent through the
Divine Comedy. Dante was distinguished for local attachments,
and throughout his great masterpiece, which not only reflects, as in
a crystal mirror, the life and spirit of the Middle Ages, but the
man Dante in his every mood, we find hints and glints of his
wanderings. As has been said, we should ever remember that " the
idea of the Divine Comedy took shape and expanded into its endless
forms of terror and beauty, not under the roof tree of the literary
citizen, but when the exile had been driven out to the highways of
the world to study nature on the sea or by the river or on the moun-
tain track, and to study men in the courts of Verona and Ravenna
and in the schools of Bologna and Paris — and perhaps at Oxford."
Of no other poet are Shelley's lines so true as of Dante — they:
332 DANTE AND HIS TIMES [Dec.,
Are cradled into poetry by wrong,
And learn in suffering what they teach in song.
I think it is Father Hogan, the distinguished Irish scholar and
biographer of Dante, who passing in review the trials and sufferings
of many of the great poets, declares that " we search in vain
through the annals of literature for any poet to compare with Dante
either in the tragedy of misfortune, the bitterness of fate, the dis-
appointment of all earthly hopes, or in the dignity with which the
severest trials were borne and the perseverance of genius with
which they were turned to the profit of mankind." As the Olym-
pian Goethe reminds us, adversity draws out the highest powers of
genius :
Who ne'er his bread in sorrow ate,
Who ne'er the mournful midnight hours,
Weeping upon his bed has sate,
He knows you not, ye Heavenly Powers.
In the beginning of his exile, Dante remained near Florence
with the White Party who fraternized with the Ghibellines. But
many of them were men of low tastes and evil ways and the great
poet could find little kinship with them. In his Paradiso Dante
makes his ancestor Cacciaguida predict this:
And that which most upon thy back shall weigh
Will be the mad and evil company,
Which in that dreary vale with thee shall stay.
We next find Dante at Bologna and Padua. We can be quite cer-
tain that he visited Padua, for his name appears as witness to a con-
tract in this city in 1306. Here too he met Giotto the painter. In
the same year we are able to trace his sojourn in Lunigiana in
north Tuscany as the guest of the Marquis Malaspina. It is
thought by some that Dante went to Paris in 1309. On his way
through Liguria it is related that he stopped at the Convent of
Santa Croce del Corvo and gave Prior Hilarius the manuscript of
the Inferno which he had just completed, with the request that the
Prior give it to his brother the Podesta of Arezzo. From 1309 to
1314 it is somewhat difficult to trace the wanderings and sojourns
of the poet of the Divine Comedy.
Did Dante spend three years at Paris and Oxford? These are
the years of which we know nothing of his whereabouts. William
Ewart Gladstone in the June number of the Nineteenth Century,
I9I7-] DANTE AND HIS TIMES 333
1892, made out a pretty good case for the probability of Dante's
visit to Oxford. The first reference to such a visit was made by
Boccaccio in a Latin poem addressed to Petrarch. Boccaccio writes :
Thou know'st perchance how Phoebus' self did guide
Our Tuscan Dante up the lofty side
Of snow-clad Cyrrha; how our Poet won
Parnassus' peak and founts of Helicon:
How, with Apollo, ranging wide he sped
Through Nature's whole domain and visited
Imperial Rome, and Paris and so passed
O'er seas to Britain's distant shores at last.
Bishop Joannes da Serravalle, the translator of Dante into
Latin, also declares that Dante studied theology in Oxford as well
as in Paris — Dilexit theologiam sacram in qua diu studuit tarn in
Oxoniis in regno Anglie quam Parisiis in regno Frantic. The
same writer informs us, too, that Dante had qualified himself for
his doctorate in the University of Paris, but that poverty prevented
him from getting his degree. In support of the contention that
Dante may have visited Oxford is the fact that a chronicle of 1257
records Oxford University as a rival of Paris, and further contains
the statement that about this time English students were quitting
Paris University for Oxford. On the other hand, it seems highly
improbable that Dante who was much given to explicit descriptions,
would have made no reference to Oxford in the Divine Comedy
had he spent some time there. Of Paris he makes mention twice
in the Divine Comedy and also of his old teacher Siger of Brabant.
In 1314 we find Dante with the former Podesta of Arezzo,
now Governor of Pisa. Two years later he repaired to the younger
Malaspina in the Lunigiana, and in 1316 he became the guest of
Can Grande della Scala of Verona with whom he remained four
years. In 1320 Dante went to Ravenna as the guest of Guido da
Polenta. Here he completed the Paradiso and dedicated it to
Can Grande. In the dedication Dante sets forth the plan and pur-
pose of the Divine Comedy. This letter of dedication addressed to
Can Grande, is to the Divine Comedy what Spencer's letter to Sir
Philip Sidney, is to the Faerie Queen. In the summer of 1321
Dante undertook an embassy to Venice for the purpose of estab-
lishing an understanding between Venice and Verona in which em-
bassy however he failed. Returning to Ravenna, he caught a fever
on the marshes and died on the fourteenth of September, the feast
of the Exaltation of the Cross, and was buried in the robe of a
334 DANTE AND HIS TIMES [Dec.,
Franciscan tertiary in the Lady Chapel of the Friars Minor. Gio-
vanni da Virgilio, an intimate friend of the great Florentine poet,
wrote the Latin inscription on his tomb beginning with the line:
Theologus Dantes nullius dogmatis expers — " Dante the theologian,
master of dogmatic love," etc. There in the ancient city of Ra-
venna, once the capital of the kingdom of Theodoric the Ostragoth,
with its walls and quaint churches rich in mosaics, its campaniles,
its dark Pineta, rest the mortal remains of the great Florentine
poet, the pride of Italy and glory of the Catholic Church.
A Venetian, not a Florentine, built his tomb. He is still in
exile, nor will the people of Ravenna permit the translation of his
mortal remains. In 1865, on the occasion of the sixth centenary of
Dante, Florence asked that his remains be transferred to the city
of his birth but the request was rightfully denied. On the occa-
sion of this celebration of the sixth centenary of Dante's birth
in Florence, Tennyson greeted the greatest of Christian epic
poets in these noble and touching lines :
King that has reigned six hundred years and grown
In power and ever growest
* * *
,1 wearing but the garland of a day,
Cast at thy feet one flower that fades away.
Spencer has been called " the poets' poet," but the title more
justly belongs to Dante. Indeed nearly all the great poets of the
world are under obligation to him for some of their noblest and
most valued thoughts. The great Florentine has filled the whole
world with the glory and plenitude of his genius. Around his
work and the interpretation and significance of it, has gathered a
literature richer and more voluminous than around that of any
other poet. His Divine Comedy in its massiveness and sublimity,
in its spiritual beauty and power, in the delicacy of its artistic splen-
dor, in its union of grace and strength, has been likened to a Gothic
cathedral. Longfellow, the American poet who has given us a very
noble translation of the Divine Comedy, has made it the subject of
six beautiful sonnets. In the opening sonnet we find this likeness
of the Divine Comedy to a cathedral set forth or implied :
Oft have I seen at some Cathedral door,
A laborer, pausing in the dust and heat,
Lay down his burden and with reverent feet
Enter and cross himself, and on the floor
1917-] DANTE AND HIS TIMES 335
Kneel to repeat his paternoster o'er;
Far off the noises of the world retreat ;
The loud vociferations of the street
Become an undistinguishable roar.
So as I enter here from day to day,
And leave my burden at this minster gate,
Kneeling in prayer and not ashamed to pray,
The tumult of the time disconsolate
To inarticulate murmurs dies away,
While the eternal ages watch and wait.
The Divine Comedy was written during Dante's nineteen years
of exile. The Inferno was completed in 1308, the Purgatorio in
1319 and the Paradiso in 1321. The three parts of the Divine
Comedy are emblematic of the three-fold state of man — sin, grace
and beatitude. The thirty-three cantos into which each part is di-
vided are in allusion to the years of Our Saviour's life, and the
triple rhyme suggests the Trinity. The dramatic action of the
Divine Comedy occupies eleven days — from March 25th to April
5th, 1300. Dante called the poem a comedy because of its prosper-
ous ending. The prefix " divine " was given it later by admirers.
The Divine Comedy is sometimes called the Epic of Medievalism
and again the Epic of Man. Dante himself said : " The subject of
the whole work, when taken literally, is the state of the soul after
death regarded as a matter of fact; for the action of the whole
work deals with this and is about this. But if the work is taken
allegorically, its subject is man in so far as by merit or demerit,
in the exercise of his free will, he is exposed to the rewards or
punishments of justice." For according to Dante's dedicatory
letter of the Paradiso to Can Grande of Verona, the Divine Comedy
has a four-fold meaning: literal, allegorical, moral and mystical.
In the spring of 1904 the writer of this paper determined to
visits the haunts of Dante in Italy — to follow in his footsteps from
Florence to Bologna, thence to Padua, thence to Verona, and Ra-
venna. My visit to the ancient city which contains his tomb is
never to be forgotten. There was a labor strike in progress in
Ravenna, and the surging, turbulent crowd that choked the narrow
streets bore me back to the days of the Guelfs and Ghibellines. A
few days later I was in the city of Dante's birth — beautiful Florence.
It was in the first week in May and everything conspired to give joy
to the heart. As I sat in the room of the little Florentine hostelry,
looking out upon the court, thinking of the Florence that was and
336 CHRISTMAS [Dec.,
the glorious names that star its past history, listening, too, to the
little birds in the trees singing their matins and lauds, suddenly the
great bell of the Campanile rang out in throbbing tones the Angelus,
and my imagination peopled again the streets of Florence with the
factions of old. The drama of centuries unfolded before my eyes.
I beheld Savonarola led to martyrdom. I heard the epic voice of
Dante in exile yearning for his beloved Florence. It was indeed a
dramatic story that fell from the lips of the bell.
CHRISTMAS.
BY FRANKLIN C. KEYES.
THE great folk of the little town
They turned their Lord away,
" There is no room within ! " they heard
The gruff inn-keeper say, —
And morning came, and no one knew
That it was Christmas day.
Upon the pinnacle of time
Those careless people stood,
The centuries had met that night
In Bethlehem the good,
And from the dawn each claimed its name,
Yet no one understood.
O Bethlehem, the ages pass
And leave that night behind,
And still the inn is full of mirth
Where many men go blind, —
But some have gone into the night
Thy little Child to find.
VAGARIES OF MODERN SCIENCE.
BY J. GODFREY RAUPERT, K.S.G.
T must be plain to all men who are in any degree con-
versant with the movements of modern thought, that
there is no human faculty which displays such clear
marks of the effects of the Fall as the intellect. And
in no sphere of its activity is this aberration so mani-
fest as in that of physical science. The Church teaches that by
original sin there has been inflicted upon man " the wound of igno-
rance through which the intellect has been weakened so that it has
a difficulty in discerning truth, easily falls into error and inclines
more to things curious and temporal than to things eternal." How
strikingly is the truth of this statement illustrated in events of to-
day. How disastrously is the world misled and imposed upon ; and
how grave are the evils which are flowing from conclusions which
some scientific men are drawing from very imperfectly observed
phenomena.
Not so many years ago the materialistic philosophy was the
accepted scientific philosophy of life. No man with any scientific
pretensions had the courage to profess or defend any other, what-
ever his inner doubts and misgivings might be. In Germany it was
considered utterly unscientific and a sign of the grossest ignorance
for a man to speak even of the soul or to employ the term spirit.
Had not science settled it, once for all, that matter coming from
somewhere, or more probably existing from all eternity, was the
sole cause of all forms of organized life, and that the mind was
but a function of the most highly developed form of matter? The
contentions and objections of " unscientific common sense " to the
effect that there is no conceivable connection between an abstract
thought and the movement of a brain cell ; that consciousness and
memory and genius and numerous other manifestations of mind,
can never be explained in terms of matter, were rudely brushed
aside and even ridiculed. Needless to say, the very conception of
responsibility to God and of a life after death was proclaimed a
surviving superstition of " dark and unscientific ages," fostered and
kept alive by an ignorant and bigoted clergy. We have, in the
writings of Tyndall and Huxley and Clifford and Maudsley in
VOL. CVI. — 22
338 VAGARIES OF MODERN SCIENCE [Dec.,
England, illustrations of the lengths . to which this material-
istic science went and of its extraordinary arrogance and pre-
sumptions.
It is difficult to form any adequate estimate of the harm which
this so-called scientific teaching has done. Thousands of men have
been estranged from God: thousands of hearts have been broken
by it. Mr. Bernard Shaw made a statement the other day to the
effect that, in his opinion, Darwinism was largely responsible for
the European war and its horrors, and it requires little thought to
see that there is more truth in this assertion than may appear at
first sight.
But, by an extraordinary feat of mental gymnastics, this same
physical science is now drifting- in the opposite direction. It is
loudly professing a spiritistic philosophy of life. The persistent
assertions of " unscientific " men have compelled it to apply itself
to the study of phenomena which it had consistently ignored or
denied, but the reality and objectivity of which it has found itself
at length obliged to acknowledge. This acknowledgment has not
merely disproved all the earlier materialistic hypotheses, but has
presented to the materialistic scientists problems which they are
finding it very difficult to solve. Indeed some of these men have
no hesitation in stating that they know nothing at all about the
nature and properties of matter.
A right-minded man might reasonably expect that the repre-
sentatives of physical science would now exclaim with a loud voice :
"Peccauimus. We have been wrong all along and we have, by hasty
and immature deductions drawn from false premises, led thou-
sands astray. The Catholic Church, on the other hand, has been
right in its defence of man's highest and noblest characteristics and
prerogatives and in its doctrines respecting the origin and nature
of the human soul. Indeed, experience has shown that the man
in the street was better informed respecting certain phenomena
than we were. These phenomena were occurring all the time and
they would, if we had been acquainted with them, have at least
greatly modified our assertions. We have learnt a great and val-
uable lesson." But such is not the attitude of science. It does not
give the faintest sign of regret or repentance. It not only pro-
claims the phenomena referred to as its own discoveries, but it is
already busily engaged constructing upon them fresh hypotheses,
which are as premature and fallacious as its earlier materialistic
deductions and inferences. It is imposing them upon a wondering
1917-] VAGARIES OF MODERN SCIENCE 339
world and is again leading thousands of unwary souls astray. In-
stead of sitting a learner at the feet of the historic Church which,
in spite of contempt and ridicule, has never wavered in her teach-
ings, science is assuming the attitude of a reformer and is telling
her what she must teach respecting the newly discovered soul and
its life here and hereafter. It is re-constructing for her her dog-
matic system, and pointing out to her the truth respecting the per-
son and mission of Christ, the Lord.
The current reviews and newspapers are full of articles deal-
ing with Sir Oliver Lodge's recent book in which he claims to have
evidence that his deceased son is communicating with him. The
book has, in the course of a few months, passed through numerous
editions, and is arousing the interest and attention of the world.
Sir Conan Doyle, once a Catholic, is telling us that much of the
information emanating from the spirit-world by way of mediums
must be accepted, and that spiritism will most certainly be the basis
upon which religion will be constructed after the War. Everywhere
questions are being asked which must be answered, and it is mani-
festly of the utmost importance that the answer given to them
should be correct.
For those intimately acquainted with the subject, there can be
no question as to what that answer must be. It is quite certain that
had the book in question issued from the pen of some unknown
spiritist or psychical researcher, intelligent men, both Catholic and
non-Catholic, would have ridiculed it, seeing that its contents are
but a rehash of the jargon with which the literature of modern
spiritism has made us only too familiar. There is nothing in it
which has not been known for years and which cannot be traced
to the minds of those mediums upon whom the spirits, claiming to
be the surviving souls of the dead, have imposed their peculiar
teaching and philosophy.
Our answer must be a solemn warning against that class of
scientific men who, in their craving for demonstrative evidence of
the survival of the soul after death, have lost the power of form-
ing a right judgment, and whose " spirits of the air " are making
effective channels for the propagation of anti-Christian and soul-
destroying errors. In this connection one might fitly quote the
weighty words of the late Professor Dwight of Harvard : " It
would really seem as if there were an occult power at work to sup-
port those whose influence is against God, religion and decency
by the diffusion of sham science. It is preached so persistently
340 VAGARIES OF MODERN SCIENCE [Dec.,
and ubiquitously that even such as I forget to use its full name,
and dropping the 'sham,' find ourselves giving the title of 'science'
to what we despise. The work of sham science in first deceiving
and then demoralizing the population has been well done."
But evidence is increasingly coming to hand from which it is
clear that, even in the distinctly scientific sphere, a reaction of
thought is not very far off. There are some scientific researchers
who manifestly have the courage of their opinions, and who have
no hesitation in stating that the conclusions, so universally and in-
creasingly accepted, are not really as sound and as tenable as they
would seem to be at first sight. And among this class of experi-
menters are men who are intimately acquainted with the subject,
and who have been connected with the investigation of the phe-
nomena in question for a number of years. Some of them, indeed,
make statements which although clothed in scientific and un-Catho-
lic language, nevertheless express what Catholic theologians have
steadily maintained and what has been the unvarying teaching of
the Church throughout the ages.
Sir William Barrett, a member of the Royal Society, a past
President of the English Society for Psychical Research, and the
author of several works on spiritism, not only emphatically warns
against dangers, both moral and physical, unquestionably attending
the induction of spiritistic phenomena, but expresses it as his opin-
ion that at least some of the spirits are not the souls of departed
human beings. " For my own part," he writes, " it seems not im-
probable that the bulk, if not the whole, of the physical manifesta-
tions witnessed in a spiritual seance are the product of human-
like, but not really human, intelligences — good or bad dcemonia
they may be — which aggregate round the medium, as a rule drawn
from that particular plane of mental and moral development in the
unseen, which corresponds to the mental and moral plane of the
medium
" Moreover, if there is any truth in the view suggested of a
possible source of the purely physical manifestations, it seems to
me that the Apostle Paul, in the Epistle to the Ephesians, points
to a race of spiritual creatures, similar to that I have described,
but of a malignant type, when he speaks of beings not made of flesh
and blood inhabitating the air around us and able injuriously to
affect mankind. Good, as well as mischievous agencies, doubtless
exist in the unseen; this, of course, is equally true if the phenomena
are due to those who have once lived on the earth. In any case,
191 7-] VAGARIES OF MODERN SCIENCE 341
granting the existence of a spiritual world, it is necessary to be on
our guard against the invasion of our will by a lower code of in-
telligence and morality. The danger lies, in my opinion, not only
in the loss of spiritual stamina, but in the possible deprivation of
that birthright we each are given to cherish, our individuality or
true selfhood; just as in another way this may be imperiled by
sensuality, opium or alcohol."
" Of course," he says in his pamphlet on Necromancy and
Modern Magic, " it is true now, as then, that these practices are
dangerous in proportion as they lead us to surrender our reason,
or our will, to the dictates of an invisible and oftentimes mas-
querading spirit, or as they absorb and engross us to the neglect
of our daily duties, or as they tempt us to forsake the sure but
arduous pathway of knowledge and of progress for an enticing
maze which lures us round and round."
Again writes Sir William Barrett : " These practices were con-
demned in unmeasured terms by the Hebrew prophets They
were prohibited — as the whole subject undoubtedly shows — not
only, or chiefly, because they were the practice and part of the
religious rites of the pagan nations around, but mainly because they
tended to obscure the divine idea and to weaken the supreme faith
in the reverent worship of the one Omnipotent Being, Whom the
nation was set apart to proclaim Instead of the arm of the
Lord above and beyond them, a motley crowd of pious, lying, vain
or gibbering spirits, would seem to people the unseen; and weari-
ness, perplexity and finally despair would enervate and destroy the
nation."
In his criticism of a work on psychology by a foreign savant,
Mr. Hereward Carrington, of whom the late Professor James of
Harvard spoke to me with keen appreciation and whom he regarded
as one of the best-informed and most open-minded of psychical
researchers, wrote as follows : " When I wrote my book, The Com-
ing Science, some years ago, I contended (pp. 59-78) that there was
really no good first-hand evidence that spiritistic practices induced
abnormal and morbid states and conditions to the extent usually
supposed. Further experience has caused me to change that opin-
ion. I now believe that the danger of spiritistic practices is very
great, and I think that this aspect of the problem is one that should
be more widely discussed and more attention should be given to it
by members of the Society for Psychical Research. The recent
writing's of Viollet and Mr. J. Godfrey Raupert should be more
342 VAGARIES OF MODERN SCIENCE [Dec.,
widely known. But it is probable that all these books would not
have influenced me had I not seen several examples of such detri-
mental influence myself — cases of delusion, insanity and all the
horrors of obsession.
" Those who deny the reality of these facts, those who treat
the whole problem as a joke, regard planchette as a toy and deny
the reality of powers and influences which work unseen, should ob-
serve the effects of some of the spiritistic manifestations. They would
no longer, I imagine, scoff at that investigation and be tempted
to call all mediums frauds, but would be inclined to admit that
there is a true terror of the dark, and that there are 'prmcipalities
and powers,' with which we, in our ignorance, toy, without know-
ing and realizing the frightful consequences which may result from
this tampering with the unseen world."
In his more recent book on The Problems of Psychical Re-
search, Mr. Carrington writes : " I cannot but feel that there is
yet much to be learned as to the nature of the intelligence mani-
fested in these cases. And this was, as we know, the opinion also
of Professor James, for he wrote :x ' The refusal of modern en-
lightenment to treat possession as a hypothesis to be spoken of as
ever possible, in spite of the massive human tradition based on con-
crete experience in its favor, has always seemed to me, curious ex-
ample of the power of fashion in things scientific. That the demon
theory (not necessarily a devil theory) will have its innings
again is to my mind absolutely certain. One has to be scientific
indeed to be blind and ignorant enough to suspect no such pos-
sibility.'
" It must by no means be taken for granted therefore that the
intelligences operating through Mrs. Piper and other mediums are
all that they claim to be We must be extremely cautious in
accepting any messages coming through mediums until the most
certain and convincing proofs of identity be forthcoming — and then
we should be cautious."
Speaking of his experiments with the well-known medium
Mrs. Piper, Mr. Carrington says : " I gained the distinct impres-
sion throughout the sittings that instead of the spirits of the person-
ages who claimed to be present, I was dealing with an exceedingly,
sly, cunning, tricky and deceitful intelligence — which threw out
chance remarks, fishing guesses, and shrewd inferences — leaving the
sitter to pick these up, and elaborate them if he would. If anything
1 Proceedings of Society for Psychical Research.
1917.] . VAGARIES OF MODERN SCIENCE 343
could make me believe in the doctrine of evil and lying spirits it
would be the sittings with Mrs. Piper. I do not for one moment
implicate the normal Mrs. Piper in this criticism."
In dealing with the problem respecting the nature of the in-
telligences manifesting in spiritistic phenomena, M. Camille Flam-
marion, the French astronomer who has devoted many years to the
study of the subject, writes : "As to beings different from ourselves
— what may their nature be? Of this we cannot form any idea.
Souls of the dead ? This is far from being demonstrated. The in-
numerable observations which I have collected, during more than
forty years, all prove to me the contrary. No satisfactory identifi-
cation has been made."
Dr. Marcel Viollet, physician to the Lunatic Asylum of Paris
who seems to have made a thoroughgoing study of the phenomena
of spiritism and whose views can scarcely be said to be due to dog-
matic pre-conceptions, writes as follows : " The idea of that con-
stant entourage is disturbing enough itself, especially the fact of its
possible and voluntary participation in terrestrial life. What is the
extent of the powers of these spirits, whose perceptible actions —
during spiritistic seances — possess such a mysterious and miracu-
lous appearance?. .... .Where does it stop, this power they have
over us, power which permits them not only to make themselves
understood to our intelligence, but, further, to penetrate into our
body until it is able to write with our hand, speak through our
mouth, and even seize so thorough a hold on our being that we
know no longer what is theirs and what is ours. What an alarm-
ing mystery is attached to these peri-spirits which have, perhaps,
without our knowing it, without our deserving it, certain grieve-
ances against us, and which are able to use against us the freedom
of these unknown and consequently unlimited powers.
"And is it not just as fascinating to think of our absolute
weakness in presence of such as they, who know everything about
us, to whom nothing is impossible, and against whom nothing can
prevail, whilst we know nothing about them and our power over
them.
" It opens up a wide field to all deductions, to all hypotheses ;
it is bounded by nothing; it is the infinite proposed as a problem
to be solved by the finite : from this point of view it constitutes a
vast culture-infusion for all errors; for all disequilibrations, for all
madnesses"
To what an extent even confirmed and leading spiritists are
344 VAGARIES OF MODERN SCIENCE [Dec.,
at times impressed with the perils attending the investigation and
have their misgivings as to the real character and aim of the mys-
terious being manifesting in seances, is apparent from incidental
statements scattered through their writings. Thus the late Dr.
Funk, of the well-known publishing firm of Funk and Wagnall,
wrote as follows: " There is danger — real danger along these lines
of investigation. I have seen psychic cobwebs — if cobwebs they
be — entangle the feet of even intellectual giants, and the shrewdest
experts — to change the simile — need to sail these mystic seas with
sharp eyes and level heads, for these seas are almost wholly un-
charted and in sailing over them, at times the ship's compasses ex-
hibit inexplicable variations"
And elsewhere Dr. Funk says : " It is a terribly dangerous
mistake to think there are no evil spirits. There are great hosts
of them. They come at times without formal invitation of the
medium or of the circle and control to the hurt of the members of
the circle and to the hurt of the medium."
The late Mr. Stainton-Moses, at one time a clergyman of the
Church of England and a master of University College, London,
and later on in life an ardent spiritist and for many years Presi-
dent of the British Association of Spiritists, confesses that the per-
sistent attacks on fundamental Christian dogma contained in the
spirit-communications received, at times created serious misgivings
in his mind. Indeed, so strong were these misgivings in the earlier
period of his researches, that he desired to terminate the experi-
ments and that he begged the spirits to leave him alone. How en-
tirely he succumbed later on to the fascination of these experiments
and abandoned his Christian belief is well known. " I could not
get rid," he wrote, " of the idea that the faith of Christendom was
practically upset by their (the spirit-teachings') issue. I believed
that, however it might be disguised, such would be their outcome
in the end. The central dogmas seemed especially attacked and it
was this that startled me Then came the doubt as to how far
all might be the work of Satan, ' transformed into an angel of
light,' laboring for the subversion cf the faith."
So far back as 1871, a member of a Committee of the London
Dialectical Society which had been formed for the purpose of in-
vestigating and reporting upon the much disputed phenomena, made
the following emphatic statement : " My opinion of these phenom-
ena is that the intelligence which is put in communication with us,
is a fallen one. It is of the devil, the prince of the power of the
I9I7-] VAGARIES OF MODERN SCIENCE 345
air. I believe that we commit the crime of necromancy when we
take part in these spiritistic seances,"
It will be seen from these references that the views expressed
by Sir Oliver Lodge in his famous Birmingham address and in his
more recent book and by Sir Conan Doyle and other well-known
psychical investigators, and now meeting with such widespread
acceptance, have not as sound a foundation as is commonly believed,
and that experimenters, quite as eminent as they, have grave mis-
givings on the subject.
And if this be so, if some of those most inclined to accept the
popular spiritistic interpretation of the phenomena and in no sense
in sympathy with the teachings of Catholic theology, if they are
constrained, by the force of the evidence, to make serious reserva-
tions and reluctantly to admit that some of these spirit-agencies at
least are evil spirits of non-human character, and coming to us
with base intent, how well founded will the attitude of the Catholic
Church be seen to be and how thoroughly justified are the warn-
ings uttered by her authorities. And I am thoroughly persuaded
that as time goes on and as the moral aspect of this movement re-
ceives more careful study and attention, many more of the truly
scientific experimenters will come to modify their views — will
themselves point out that the souls of the dead cannot in reason
be held to be associated with these modern spirit-manifestations,
but that we now are witnessing in them a recrudescence of those
magic practices which are as old as the world.
HOLLY LORE.
BY HARRIETTE WILBUR.
The holly! the holly! Oh, twine it with bay,—
Come, give the holly a song;
For it helps to drive stern winter away
With his garments so somber and long.
It peeps through the trees with its berries of red,
And its leaves of burnished green,
When the flowers and fruits have long been dead,
And not even the daisy is seen. — Eliza Cook.
HERE are the hollies in spring and summer? From
what the poets and other writers say of it, one might
believe that the tree springs up phoenix-like from the
autumnal decay, just in time for the Christmas hol-
idays. One seldom sees any mention of it in summer
apparel, as though it was non-existent except in winter. James
Thomson, in Spring, tells us that some birds " to the holly-hedge
nesting repair," and Wordsworth describes a holly bower that " all
the year is green," but in a collection of fifty-six quotations relating
to the tree which I have made, only a mere half-dozen of them are
free from some hint of winter. Southey, in his poem The Holly-
Tree, suggests a reason for this summer neglect :
And as, when all the summer trees are seen
So bright and green,
The holly-leaves their fadeless hues display
Less bright than they;
But when the bare anci wintry woods we see,
What then so cheerful as the holly-tree?
To be sure, the chief beauty of the plant is its contrast of bright
glossy leaves and blood-red berries, as its blossom, which usually
appears in May, is a small white flower nestling out of sight, with
three or four of its kind forming a cluster, at the base of the leaves
where the berries will appear later. That it seldom meets an ap-
preciative eye is undoubted, as this quaint old carol contains the
only mention of the blossom I have been able to find outside of the
botanies :
HOLLY LORE 347
The Holly and the Ivy, now both are full well-grown
Of all the trees that spring in wood, the Holly bears the crown.
The Holly bears a blossom, as white as a lily flower,
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ to be our sweet Saviour.
The Holly bears a berry, as red as any blood,
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ to do poor sinners good.
The Holly bears a prickle as sharp as any thorn,
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ on Christmas day in the
morn.
The Holly bears a bark, as bitter as any gall,
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ for to redeem us all;
The Holly and the Ivy, now both are full well-grown,
Of all the trees that spring in wood, the Holly bears the crown.
The folk-lore of the holly has been built up about the European
species, but happily we can borrow all the beautiful Old World
associations, poetical and legendary, that cluster about the lovely
Christmas plant. The name is said to be but another form for
" holy," because the tree is regarded as sacred by the simple peasant
folk in those countries where it is native. Hence, witches abhor the
plant, and to be free from their evil meddling, one has but to set
out a holly tree beside the house, or keep a twig always hung in the
room.
Among the preternatural qualities recorded by Pliny, we are
told that the holly's insignificant white flowers cause water to
freeze, that the tree repels lightning, and that if a staff of its wood
be thrown at any animal, even if it fall short of its mark, the animal
will be so subdued by its holy influence as to return and lie down
beside it. Perhaps the peace-making quality it possesses has much to
do with the general good will which prevails at Christmastide,
when it appears in such profusion.
Let sinned against, and sinning
Forget their strife beginning,
And join in friendship now,
Be links no longer broken,
Be sweet forgiveness spoken,
Under the holly bough. — Charles Mackey.
In some rural English districts, the prickly and the non-prickly
kinds are distinguished as " he " and " she " holly, and in Derby-
348 HOLLY LORE [Dec.,
shire the tradition obtains that according as the holly brought at
Christmas time into a house is rough or smooth, the husband or the
wife will be its head during the coming year. Perhaps even this
is done that peace may prevail, the holly deciding the matter and
thus doing away with all dispute regarding who shall rule. At
Roman weddings, holly wreaths were sent as tokens of congratula-
tion, though whether the prickly or the non-prickly were selected
is not stated — perhaps each giver had the right of choice.
William Browne, in Brittania's Pastorals, gives as the origin
for the evergreen nature of the leaves, that the tree, in keeping with
its peace-making character, once intervened to save a certain wood-
nymph from death:
When the nymph rose from her hapless seat,
And striving to be gone, with gaping jaws
The wolf pursues, and as his rending paws
Were like to seize, a holly bent between ;
For which good deed his leaves are ever green.
A modern poet assigns this pretty little legend to the tree :
In the summer through the forest
Came a wood-nympth fair and young,
And her crimson coral necklace
On a branch of holly hung.
* * *
And the wreath of Christmas holly
With its knots of ribbon red,
Keeps the beads of carven coral
Which she left it when she fled. — Minna Irving.
Holly was to the ancient races of the north a sign of the life
which preserved nature through the desolation of winter, and it
was therefore gathered into their temples to comfort the wood-
sprites during the general death of all other plants. Thomas Hood
refers to this old belief in the lines:
Where is the Dryad's immortality? —
Gone into mournful cypress and dark yew,
Or wearing the long gloomy winter through
In the smooth Holly's green eternity.
On Shrove Tuesday, Ash Wednesday, or early in Lent, it
I9I7-] HOLLY LORE 349
used to be customary in France and England to carry around gar-
lands of flowers, and decorate effigies called the Holly-Boy and
Ivy-Girl, which were then burned, probably to indicate that the
festivities of the Christmas and New Year tide had come to an end
for that season.
Holly is preeminently the Christmas plant. The thorny foli-
age and the red berries cannot fail to remind of the crown of thorns
and the drops of blood falling to the ground, hence the people of
Denmark and Germany call it " Christ's Thorn." One legend, not
to be credited however, even states that it was from this plant the
crown of thorns was made. In some parts of the Old World, the
holly is known as the " bush with the bleeding breast," and also as
" The Virgin Mary's Tree."
Now of all the trees by the King's highway
Which do you love the best?
O! the one that is green upon Christmas day,
The bush with the bleeding breast.
The holly, with her drops of blood for me,
For that is our dear Aunt Mary's tree.
Its leaves are sweet with our Saviour's name,
'Tis a plant that loves the poor;
Summer and winter it shines the same
Beside the cottage door.
The holly, with her drops of blood for me,
For that is our dear Aunt Mary's tree. — Old Carol.
Have you ever read or heard the tradition that on the night
when Christ was born, all the trees of the forest burst into flower
and bore fruit ? The bright leaves and berries of the holly make it
seem the one made to perpetuate this miracle. ,
Christmas holly, leaf and berry,
All be prized for His dear sake. — Archer Gurney.
This holly and this ivy wreath,
To do Him honor, Who is our King. — Robert Herrick.
A prickly branch of holly bled
Bright drop by drop — berry and thorn
Symbolic of that Christmas morn. — Robert Buchanan.
FATHER DENIS TAKES A HOLIDAY.
BY KATHARINE TYNAN.
ATHER DENIS MAcCARTHY was so tiny that
his parishioners occasionally described him as no
bigger than a thrush — or for the matter of that, " a
wran," i. e., a wren. He was the prettiest old man
imaginable, with — since bird-comparisons are in order
— a robin-like prettiness. His cheeks were like winter apples, hard
and red. He had merry, innocent, brown eyes ; and he had a stock
of sayings for all occasions, which had come to pass for proverbs in
the country. " Wirra, ' God never shut wan door but he opened
two,' as Father Denis says." " Sure, ' when the night's blackest
the dawn's nearest breakin,' as Father Denis says," and so on.
One of Father Denis' sayings was : " The best is always the
cheapest." He had said it many and many a time when he tried
to keep the people from buying shoddy things or cheap substitutes
of one kind or another. He was very conservative in his ideas and
thought the new times and ways very poor in comparison with the
old. He had hardly been ten miles from Creggeenmore since he was
at the seminary — for he was born in the parish and had come back as
a curate to the parish. Still, to hear him talk, you would think he
had traveled a lot, for he was always reading in his scant hours of
leisure, and he could tell the people the customs of other countries,
till he had come to pass for a mine of wisdom to his people.
Creggeenmore was a mountainous parish, very poor, and the
houses were so scattered that it gave Father Denis a good deal to
do. He was still only a curate, although he had been a long time
ordained. His parish priest had a fine church and a comfortable
house down on the plain. Father Denis could catch a glimpse of
them when it wasn't raining or misty, but it was seldom it wasn't
one or the other, for the clouds had a way of wrapping up the head
of Creggeenmore in their folds, and trailing ragged wisps along its
side which might have been torn off on the sharp edge of the peak.
Sometimes when he went down off the mountain and met his
fellow priests they would say to him : " It will soon be your turn
for the P. P.'s now, Father Denis, you can't dodge the Bishop much
longer."
1917.] FATHER DENIS TAKES A HOLIDAY 351
When it was said, even jocosely, Father Denis' cheerful face
would be overcast. It was well known that he did not want to be a
parish priest. His heart was in Creggeenmore, and it was said that
he prayed constantly that he might never leave the people he was
fond of, but might end his days as a humble curate of his dear
mountain parish.
He loved the people and they loved him. It was a very poor
place, although by incessant labor the people had carried cultivation
up to where the peak began. They had borne the soil on their backs
from the lower land; and it lay so thinly that in a high wind, and
there were many high winds, it was just as likely as not that the
little crops would be lifted up and blown into the next county —
which wasn't very far away.
Creggeenmore had been originally a grouse-mountain belong-
ing to Lord Cappawhite, who had nothing more of a residence there
than a small shooting lodge on the lake, at the part called the Ferry.
The shooting lodge was going to rack and ruin because no one ever
came there. Lord Cappawhite did not belong to these parts. He
was a comparatively young man and lived much in England. When
he visited Dublin or his Southern estates he never thought of com-
ing to Creggeenmore. The old Lord Cappawhite had taken some
kindly interest in the tenants up to the time of " the troubles," when
his bailiff had been shot. That was something he could not forgive,
and he had apparently handed over his resentment to his son, be-
cause beyond, presumably, receiving the rents which were collected
by a Dublin firm of solicitors, he had no touch with Creggeenmore.
Apparently he did not desire any, for when the times were hard on
the people and father Denis wrote asking for a reduction of the
rents, the cold letter of refusal came from the solicitors. As Father
Denis said : " There might be no Lord Cappawhite in it at all."
There were times when he felt as angry against the unknown
Lord Cappawhite as it was possible for him to be. Such small con-
cessions would have made all the difference in the world to the
poor people ! Not even the Congested Districts Board would touch
Creggeenmore. " Sure, it isn't to help the grouse we're for," said
one of the officials who had met Father Denis at the parish priest's.
" Creggeenmore is only fit for grouse. It would be better for the
people if you were to bid them come down from the mountain and
settle somewhere we could help them."
But that was something Father Denis could not do, perhaps
would not do if he could. The people loved the little farms they had
352 FATHER DENIS TAKES A HOLIDAY [Dec.,
made, and they were children very comforting to a poor priest's
heart. There wasn't a public house on the mountain, and the rosary
was said every night by every heart. There was no sin in it, said
Father Denis, if there was poverty itself. " Sure, maybe if they
were richer they wouldn't be as good. When riches come in at
the door the devil helps him to carry his bag."
The other priests used to say to him for a joke, for Father
Denis' charity was such that it was an impossibility to get him to
condemn anyone :
" Isn't Cappawhite a hard-hearted scoundrel ?"
" My dear," Father Denis would reply, it was a habit of his to
call everyone ' My dear/ " the devil's seldom as black as he's
painted and ignorance often has the face of sin."
Whether the things Father Denis said were proverbs or not
they always had the air of being proverbs.
Well, it was a hard winter, and Father Denis was getting so
thin that it seemed as likely as not that the next storm would blow
him off the mountain, as if he were a sheet of paper. Then the
Bishop came to give confirmation.
" The children are a credit to you, Father Denis," he said.
" They're as well up in their catechism as any I ever heard. But
look here now : if you don't take a holiday I'll never make a parish
priest of you."
He hastened to add: " Or I'll be giving you a successor in
Creggeenmore," for he knew Father Denis was set against taking
a parish.
"Is it me to take a holiday, your Lordship?" asked Father
Denis. " 'Tis often a full purse goes with a heavy heart. My heart
should be light for so is my purse."
" I know," said the Bishop; " but you've got to take a holiday
all the same, else Creggeenmore will be in mourning. Here's twenty
pounds for your holiday. I put you under obedience to spend every
penny of that on the holiday — mind, every penny! Take a fort-
night! I've a young priest just ordained will fill your place till
you come back. Start off next Monday."
"And where will I go to, your Lordship?" asked Father
Denis aghast at such hustling.
" Get right away. You were never in Dublin — go to Dublin.
Put up at a good hotel. Have a good time. Remember every penny
of the money is to go on your holiday !"
Father Denis muttered mechanically that the best was always
1917-] FATHER DENIS TAKES A HOLIDAY 353
the cheapest. He was rather stunned at such quick action. It was
now Thursday and he was to go on Monday. He would much
rather have distributed the money where it was badly wanted at
Creggeenmore, but the Bishop had bound him under pain of
obedience, and it was true that his appetite had been poor and he
had been sleeping badly, fretting over the people for some time back.
He had never had a holiday such as this. He did not know if
he was going to like it. But — if it did him good! The people
were fond of him. So he thanked God for the holiday on second
thought.
" Mind, Father Denis, you are to travel first-class," said the
parish priest to him at a "station " the next morning. A " station "
is a relic of the penal days in Ireland, when people gathered for the
services of their religion in a private house or some secret hiding-
place. " The Bishop wouldn't like it if you were to go that long
way sitting on a bare board. As you say yourself, ' the best is the
cheapest.' The Bishop spoke to me about you; he said you were
to treat yourself well."
So Father Denis, with his heart very low, set off on the Mon-
day, having handed over Creggeenmore to the young priest from
the seminary.
At first he felt terribly shy of the big world towards which
he was being carried at the terrific rate of twenty miles an hour, but,
after a time, a spirit of adventure began to make him bold. He had
said his Office during the first portion of the journey when there
was nothing to look at except the bag. At the Junction he bought
the Freeman's Journal. He had been turned out of his carriage
and into another train which he supposed was a Pullman. Things
were becoming exciting by this time.
He conquered an inclination, a temptation, to get into the
train which turned its face westward, just across the platform.
After all the Bishop had not put him under obedience to go to
Dublin. He could go down to the Island, where he'd be more at
home, and would have the sea air.
The memory of the return ticket, which had made a big hole
in the twenty pounds, restrained him. He got into the Pullman, as
he called it in his own mind. He had no idea of what an odd-look-
ing little figure he was, with his old silk hat, fretful as the porcu-
pine; his overcoat that had seen many winters, so that its clerical
black had become greenish; his very ancient valise, a relic of the
seminary days, the sides of which were rather flat, for Father
VOL. cvi.— 23
354 FATHER DENIS TAKES A HOLIDAY [Dec.,
Denis required very little in the way of personal belongings, and
the cotton umbrella most untidily rolled.
The train was already very full and the shyness came back on
Father Denis. He wandered this way and that, looking for a seat,
finally returned to one which contained three men, and began to
fumble with the handle, looking in the while as wistfully as a
robin peeps through the pane on a cold winter day into a warm,
well-plenished room.
The taller of the three men sprang to his feet and opened the
door.
" Plenty of room here," he said genially, and lifted Father
Denis' valise, placing it in the rack above the seat and depositing
the umbrella likewise.
The afternoon had turned, very cold and frost began to
befog the windows. Father Denis had no rug, and his coat, al-
though of very good material, was not as warm as it had been.
The carriage was full of all sorts of belongings, golf-sticks, rugs,
coats, books and newspapers. Father Denis only discovered the
rugs when the tall man, having settled him in the most com-
fortable corner seat and pushed a foot-warmer under his feet,
undid a bundle and laid a fine skin rug over Father Denis' chilly
knees.
" May the Lord reward you !" said Father Denis.
" That's a big prayer for so little." The tall man turned
around and flashed a most pleasant smile at him. He was very big
and brown and comely. Somehow the sight of him warmed Fa-
ther Denis' heart.
He pretended to read his Freeman's Journal, while he cov-
ertly observed. Of the other two men one was young, nearly as
big as the first man, not so good looking, but with a very pleasant
expression, part shy, part roguish. His eyes twinkled and his
lips, even when they were quiet, had a lurking smile somewhere
about them. The third man did not interest Father Denis, so he
need not interest us.
Father Denis listened to the talk with an unwonted sense of.
exhilaration. They were soldiers: he was pleased with his own
perspicacity, for he had guessed them soldiers at the first go-off.
The two he was interested in called each other " Mervyn " and
" Hugh." Mervyn was the bigger man. They seemed very fond
of each other. The third man was outside the inner intimacy of
the other two, though they were all very friendly. He did not catch
1917.] FATHER DENIS TAKES A HOLIDAY 355
the jests, for instance, which made Father Denis* face twinkle all
over behind his newspaper.
That Hugh was a comical rogue! And the other — Mervyn —
had a grand brogue and a great wholesome jolly laugh. Father
Denis began to feel better already, for just listening to them. It
was a new life into which he was looking. The two were like
schoolboys. They talked of fishing and shooting and hunting; of
regimental matters ; of places and persons foreign to Father Denis,
although now and again he caught a word or a name which he knew
already through the newspapers.
It had been five o'clock when Father Denis changed at the
Junction and darkness came; with the darkness extreme cold.
Father Denis did not know how he could have endured the cold
but for the foot- warmer and the beautiful rug. He was a little
troubled because the others did not use their rugs. Rightly he sup-
posed that it was because they were soldiers. The two in whom he
was interested glowed with life and high spirits. It seemed im-
possible that they should feel the cold.
Someone came to the door of the carriage and said : " Dinner,
gentlemen !"
The three stood up and were about to go. Mervyn whispered
to Hugh, and Hugh seemed to assent to something. Mervyn turned
to Father Denis and said in a most winning manner :
" Sir, will you do us the honor of dining with us?"
Father Denis was greatly flustered. He had not thought of
dinner. He had long passed his usual hour of dining. He had
just been thinking that he would have a good appetite by the time
he got to the hotel. He had had nothing since morning. He stam-
mered something which they took for an assent. He was one to
respond beamingly to good-will; and that these gentlemen should
be so friendly with him, made him quite giddy with a sense of
gratified pleasure which had been steadily growing.
It made him quite talkative over the dinner-table. They seemed
so interested in him. He began to be unafraid of the world, which,
at the first go-off, had proved so amazingly kind.
He had very soon told them all about himself and the
Bishop's kindness; and how much he was going to enjoy him-
self, since he was bound to use every penny of the money on his
holiday.
" The good Bishop knows me," he said, "and how money leaks
through my hands, and so he has bound me fast."
356 FATHER DENIS TAKES A HOLIDAY [Dec.,
"And what are you going to do with your holiday ? " asked
Mr. Mervyn, as Father Denis had begun to call him.
" I am going to spend a fortnight at the best hotel in Dublin.
As my old mother used to say, ' The best is always the cheapest.'
I shall have the best of everything and return to my poor flock full
of life and energy."
The third man seemed about to say something, but Mr. Mervyn
prevented him.
"And what hotel are you going to ? " he asked.
" I'm told I couldn't do better than Morrison's."
" Morrison's is very good," said Mr. Mervyn, " but very ex-
pensive."
" I've plenty of money, my dear sir," said Father Denis, pull-
ing out a little chamois bag from his pocket. " I've fifteen pounds.
Despite his Lordship's orders I shall have some money left over
for some little things I want to take home. You must let me know,
sir, the amount for which I am indebted to you, beyond yours and
these gentlemen's very pleasant society ? "
" Please put up your purse," said Mr. Mervyn. " You are our
guest — I hope not for the last time."
Mr. Hugh, who always seemed to be enjoying a joke all to
himself, looked very earnestly at Father Denis.
" They'll rook you at Morrison's," he said. " Besides, it's
full of Orangemen. None of your kind ever enters its doors. I
would recommend you a very good private hotel on St. Stephen's
Green where my friend Mervyn is staying."
Mr. Mervyn turned and stared at his merry friend ; then looked
at Father Denis.
" You might come and see what the hotel is like," he said.
Then turning to the other, he said in a low voice : " You ruffian !"
but he seemed merry, so that Father Denis was reassured.
"Is it as good as Morrison's?" asked Father Denis. "I
shouldn't mind about the Orangemen, if they didn't object to me.
I am not a man of strong prejudices."
" Well, on the whole, perhaps you'd better try my place. My
wife and children are staying there too. I think, on the whole,
it will compare not unfavorably with Morrison's; and it will
certainly be more moderate."
" Well, sir, I would do much for the pleasure of your society,"
said Father Denis, as though he gave up the idea of Morrison's
regretfully.
1917.] FATHER DENIS TAKES A HOLIDAY 357
"Ah, that is right," said the big man in his pleasant way.
" We shall do our best to make you comfortable."
Father Denis hunted in his pocket and produced a shabby little
card, which he presented to Mr. Mervyn.
" That is my name, sir," he said.
" Oh, sorry I've no card about me," said the other. " Here,
Hugh, have you got one ? "
But Hugh hadn't. Mr. Mervyn had stuck a glass in his eye
to read Father Denis' card. He said nothing when he had read it,
but passed it on to the other, who read it in equal silence. Then
Mr. Mervyn said : " We are very happy to have met you, Father
MacCarthy. And now shall we return to our carriage?"
They went back to the carriage and Father Denis smoked one
of Mr. Mervyn's cigars which had a beautiful flavor. He was cer-
tainly enjoying himself immensely. It did one good to rub off one's
country rust sometimes, he said to himself, and mentally made a
thanksgiving for such very agreeable company. He talked and
they listened. He told them about Creggeenmore and his people,
their poverty, their patience, their hard lives. He talked at length.
It was not often he had the chance of talking; and never had he
known the subtle flattery of having such listeners.
The three heads inclined towards him in the smoky atmosphere
of the carriage, their eyes upon him, their manner interested and
attentive ; when he apologized for talking so much Mr. Mervyn
begged him to go on. At last they were at the Broadstone, and the
three hours since the Junction had passed unnoted by Father Denis,
who was already feeling a different man.
" I can offer you a seat to my hotel," Mr. Mervyn said, turning
to him, and brushing aside his protests with " plenty of room,
plenty of room, I assure you."
He had picked up Father Denis' bag with his own belongings
and had handed them out to a footman in livery. Father Denis
supposed they did things very smartly at the private hotel. He had
to remind himself as he preceded Mr. Mervyn into a carriage with
a fine pair of horses, that the best was always the cheapest. Not
that he had any misgivings about his money, but that he was rather
overwhelmed by this luxury.
Mr. Hugh was with them. The other gentlemen, whom they
had called Fletcher, had gone off on an outside car from the
station.
When they entered the hall of the private hotel a very beauti-
358 FATHER DENIS TAKES A HOLIDAY [Dec.,
ful young lady, exquisitely dressed, came running out of an inner
room, to welcome Mr. Mervyn. Two children followed her, a tall
boy of a most golden fairness, and a little fairy girl in a green frock,
with red-gold hair falling about her little peaked face. The face
had some queer association to Father Denis' mind with a young
moon just peeping from clouds.
" This is Father MacCarthy, Enid," Mr. Mervyn said.
The lady looked a little surprised while she shook hands with
Father Denis, who was asking if the little girl was a fairy or a
child.
" Sure if you had met her on an Irish hillside wouldn't you
know she was a fairy ? " he said. He was a great lover of children.
Father Denis was shown to his room, which was high up and
overlooked the Green. There was a beautiful fire and an open door
showed a little bath-room beyond the bed-room.
" Well," said Father Denis to himself, " if Morrison's is better
than this, I don't know what to say."
The place was luxurious and yet had a certain old-fashioned
air of comfort. The servants were perfectly trained. None of the
hotel authorities put in an appearance. When Father Denis men-
tioned this fact to Mr. Hugh, the latter said : " Well, you see, these
private hotels aim at being as much like a well-appointed private
house as possible."
" Is there no one staying but ourselves? " Father Denis asked.
"As a matter of fact there's no season this year on account of
the Prince's death. Another year we should be crowded to the
doors."
Mr. Mervyn and Mr. Hugh were out for a great part of the
days, during which Mrs. Mervyn took charge of Father Denis.
He did not know a soul in Dublin, so she took him to see all the
sights, and he grew to be quite at home with her in a few days,
and as for the children, he adored the children. The fortnight
slipped by quickly. Father Denis had never felt more happily at
home than at the private hotel. He had begun to examine his con-
science as to whether the luxuries of the world were not laying hold
upon him, but of that he acquitted himself. He was really glad to
be going back to Creggeenmore and his poor people. Dublin was
not nearly as healthy, he was sure, as the mountain. And
he need never go away any more, for he had had enough of
experiences of travel to keep him talking for the rest of his days.
One regret he would have — he might never see Mrs. Mer-
FATHER DENIS TAKES A HOLIDAY 359
vyn and the children again. He had the greatest admiration for
the tall, proud, fair boy who looked like a prince, but the little fairy
girl had just put wee chains about his heart. As for Mrs. Mervyn,
the delicate flower-like creature, Father Denis loved her too, in the
beautiful way a priest loves, to whom a woman is a consecrated
creature, because of the Woman who was the Mother of God. He
was going to pray for them all — for Mr. Mervyn, too. Though
they were Protestants it was no harm to have a poor, old priest
praying for them. Father Denis' heart swelled with pride in Mr.
Mervyn — that gallant Irish gentleman and soldier. Sure, it was
grand, he said to himself, to belong to a fighting race, and there
was no gentleman like the fine Irish gentleman, for he had so free a
way with him. Other gentlemen of other countries might be as fine
in their way as Mr. Mervyn, but it wouldn't be his way.
Then there was that rogue, Mr. Hugh — Father Denis called
him Mr. Hugh still, though he had learnt that his name was Ayl-
mer — who was always making jokes and playing tricks. Father
Denis liked him very much, too, as he did in a more remote way the
people who came and went. He found that the noise of Dublin
bothered him a bit and he did not always catch their names nor
their talk. But, with Mrs. Mervyn it was quite different. He
could always hear what she said, in her sweet, low voice. He had
asked Mrs. Mervyn if she would not sometime come to Creggeen-
more-and bring the children, and she had replied that she would
most certainly come. It had been a most pleasant meeting ; she did
not intend to let Father Denis forget them. There was a house
there, was there not? where they could stay.
"A sort of a one," said Father Denis, " all rotting to pieces
with the damp. Lord Cappawhite never comes near us to see for
himself, else maybe he'd like us better and not be leaving us in the
hands of them that have nothing to do with us but take our rents."
"A pity," said Mrs. Mervyn, in her soft voice. " His father
brought him up to be angry against the people. It was a very
barbarous murder "
" The man that did it went before his Creator twenty years
ago," said Father Denis solemnly. " He was not one of my people.
He was foreign — a Kerry man."
They had talked a good deal, during the week, of Creggeen-
more. Father Denis had never had such good listeners, and it was
a queer thing how much they liked to hear the talk of such a poor
wild place as Creggeenmore ; but, sure, it would be novel to them.
360 FATHER DENIS TAKES A HOLIDAY [Dec.,
He had seen Mrs. Mervyn's eyes dimmed — the creature ! while he
talked.
The last evening of his holiday, when he went upstairs to tidy
himself up for dinner he found an envelope on a silver tray on his
table. He had asked Mr. Hugh during the day who was to give
him his bill, for he had never seen a sign of manager or book-
keeper or any such person.
" It will be sent to your room," said Mr. Hugh. " We don't
do things in the ordinary way in this house. You can just leave
your money on the tray and they'll bring your receipt."
Father Denis opened the envelope. There was a long list of
things on the bill, which Father Denis did not trouble to look at.
He turned to the total and his poor old heart gave a jump and
then fell like lead as though he had been shot. The bill was for
thirty pounds.
A little later Father Denis, a mist on his old eyes and fumb-
ling a bit, went down the stairs. The dinner-gong had sounded
through the house, and he had answered it mechanically. What
was he to do? What was he to do? The question kept hammer-
ing in his head. In the odd fumbling manner he entered the draw-
ing-room. The others were there already, grouped about the fire.
When they saw him Mr. and Mrs. Mervyn both came to meet him.
Mrs. Mervyn made a soft sound something like "A..h!" and
took his hand. Mr. Mervyn said in a voice that had a trace of
sternness in it:
" Sir Hugh Aylmer wishes to apologize to you, Father Mac-
Carthy. It was a stupid jest and it has gone too far. You are,
you have been, you will often be, I hope, an honored guest in
this house. Come along, Hugh, and beg Father MacCarthy's
pardon."
" Sorry," said Mr. Hugh, with a very red face. " It was only
a joke, you know."
" We were all in it," said Mr. Mervyn holding Father Denis'
other hand, " although that ruffian, Hugh, began it. This is not a
private hotel: it is my house. I am Lord Cappawhite; and, if you
don't mind, Father Denis, if you can give me a bed, I'm coming
down with you to Creggeenmore tomorrow, to look into things
for myself "
That was the beginning of the good days for Creggeenmore.
" Sure the best was always the cheapest in the long run," Father
Denis said thankfully in the good new days.
ITALIAN ART AND THE WAR.
BY J. F. SCHELTEMA.
HE acts of vandalism reported from Louvain, Ypres,
Arras and Rheims have found their counterpart in
the Southern European theatre of the War and great
damage has been done in Italy, especially to the sculp-
tural and architectural things of beauty of the coun-
try's ecclesiastical art. Not because the Italians were unprepared
in this respect when they entered the terrible contest. In Venice, for
instance, the celebrated, sole surviving example of an ancient quad-
riga, the much-traveled horses of San Marco, had been removed to
a place of safety, the roof and walls of the cathedral itself pro-
tected with a covering of sand-bags; the arcades of the Ducal
Palace and the Giants' Staircase with Sansovino's Mars and Nep-
tune, had been strengthened and closed up, in view of a possible
bombardment, the stained glass of exquisitely wrought windows,
famous paintings and other movable objects of high artistic value in
churches, palaces and museums had been sent to less exposed locali-
ties. In Bologna the colossal Neptune of Giambologna, surrounded
by the master's putti and dolphins, had been securely cased as also the
bas-reliefs of Jacopo della Quercia that embellish the principal en-
trance of San Petronio,1 and those of Nicolo Tribolo and his rivals
that frame the side doors, while visitors to the Pinacoteca of the
Accademia delle Belle Arti were disappointed of their contemplated
homage to Santa Cecilia in the Sala di Raffaello, to the Annun-
ciation and Adoration of the arduously pious Francesco in the Sala
di Francia.
In fact, all cities possessed of such priceless treasures, had
taken precautionary measures, although the authorities met here
and there with resistance, such as in Milan prevented the
gilt Madonna, pinnacled in glory on the loftiest spire of the Duomo,
from being temporarily coated with a substance of duller hue to
'San Petronio did not escape unscathed in former times. In 1511, three years
after it had been put in place, Michelangelo's bronze statue of Pope Julius II.,
fitly capping Jacopo della Quercia's life of Christ, scenes from Genesis, Madonnas,
Saints and Prophets, was hauled down by a riotous gang of the townspeople and
sold to the Duke of Ferrara, who melted it down, transforming it into a cannon,
baptized " the Giuliano," to commemorate its original shape. Nor is Bologna free
from the spirit of destruction of the present day, if we may credit rumors of
projects of modern improvement not in keeping with the respect due to the city's
ancient monuments, more in particular the leaning towers Asinelli and Garisenda,
and the Loggia dei Mercanti.
362 ITALIAN ART AND THE WAR [Dec.,
divert hostile attentions from the wonderful edifice dedicated to
her, Mariae Nascenti, shining on high among thousands of statues
representing our orb's aspirations and achievements: Napoleon, in
Csesarean attire, surveying, in the company of Apostles and Church
Fathers, the fertile plain of Lombardy, the Alps and Apennines,
with the Superga of Turin and the Certosa of Pavia rising afar
against the background of their mother cities' towers and domes.
Yet, notwithstanding the care bestowed, in anticipation of war's
misdeeds, on the marvelous monuments of Italy, some were devas-
tated and many defaced. Let us hope not with the set purpose of
causing irreparable loss to art, but as a result of the difficulty of
distinguishing at the height from which air raiders drop their
bombs, between buildings of a military character and those con-
secrated to worship and devotion.
Though the Austrian aeronauts made frequent trips to Verona,
a point of great strategic importance, they spared the Roman Am-
phitheatre as well as the city's lions of later construction, the Tombs
of the Scaligers, the Palazzo del Consiglio, not to mention San
Zeno Maggiore, Sant' Anastasia and shrines of scarcely less emi-
nence. Ancona had worse luck : the Byzantine-Romanesque cathe-
dral of San Ciriaco, built in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,
near the site of a heathen temple on the Monte Guasco, received
injuries which fortunately do not seem to have marred to any
great extent its fine Gothic portico, ascribed with the upper part of
the fagade to Margheritone of Arezzo. Still worse was the experi-
ence of Ravenna, notably with regard to the ante-portico of Sant'
Apollinare Nuovo. This old basilica, called St. Martinus in Ccelo
Aureo when converted into a Roman Catholic Church, was origi-
nally erected as an Arian Cathedral by Theodoric the Great. Even
now it preserves, despite its conversion by the Archbishop St. Ag-
nellus, a good deal of its Arian character and offers, beneath its
seventeenth century ceiling, one of the best existing specimens of
early Christian decoration. The partly Arian, partly Roman
Catholic mosaics of the sixth century, which demonstrate its rare
transitional character in the beardless Christ of the miracles and
the bearded Christ of the Passion, from the Last Supper to the
Resurrection, with the Crucifixion omitted, have suffered severely
according to the published reports.
As might be expected from its geographical situation in the
lagoons, the city married to the sea has borne the brunt of the
battle, and suffered keenly the effects of modern engines of war
I9I-7-] ITALIAN ART AND THE WAR 363
on her artistic inheritance in Italy's struggle for the redemption of
her provinces lost to Austria. The present agency was a new one,
owing to our scientific progress in the art of killing our fellow-men
and incidently depleting the world's comparatively small stock of
numan productions worth preserving, yet the Queen of the Adri-
atic had already had her full share of calamities caused by the
upheavals of nature or the hand of man. In 1849, to g° no further
back, the Austrian troops of Radetzky's Italian command had
bombarded the city, hitting nearly every monumental building it
contained : three balls, to quote a contemporary, " came into the
Scuola di San Rocco, tearing their way through the pictures of
Tintoret, of which the ragged fragments were still hanging from
the ceiling in 1851; and the shells reached to within a hundred
yards of St. Mark's Church itself at the time of the capitulation."
One of the other churches then under fire was Santa Maria
degli Scalzi, a curious example of the Venetian baroque style, built
in the later half of the sevententh century by Baldassare Longhena,
the architect of the Pesaro, Rezzonico and Battaglia palaces on the
Grand Canal, of the dome of Santa Maria della Salute and the im-
posing staircase of San Giorgio Maggiore, also known as the sculp-
tor of the heavy, showily sumptuous tomb of the Doge Giovanni
Pesaro in Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari. Restored in 1860,
Santa Maria degli Scalzi was the first of the Venetian houses of
worship to be struck in the present war. Its fagade by Giuseppe
Sardi and its high-altar, supported by strangely twisted columns,
baroque to the last degree, got off cheaply, but Giovanni Battista
Tiepolo's fresco that adorned the ceiling, representing the miracu-
lous removal of the Santa Casa to Loreto, was hopelessly ruined.
Well might his Holiness the Pope, writing to Monsignor La Fon-
taine, Patriarch of Venice, about the destruction of Tiepolo's larg-
est and most magnificent work of its kind, which preceded the out-
rages to Santa Maria Formosa and SS. Giovanni e Paolo, regret
that his efforts to prevent such offences, had failed, calling them
bitter wounds to his heart.
Although the attack on SS. Giovanni e Paolo came last, we
may be permitted to swerve from the chronological in favor of
the logical sequence, and reserve Santa Maria Formosa for the con-
clusion of these notes on account of the latter church's peculiar
historic and artistic associations demanding a somewhat lengthier
retrospective view of its calamitous case. During a raid of Aus-
trian seaplanes on September 14, 1916, the seventh undertaken
364 ITALIAN ART AND THE WAR [Dec.,
against Venice, SS. Giovanni e Paolo, familiarly known as San
Zanipolo in the sweet-flowing Venetian dialect, the burial place of
forty-six doges, was struck in the middle of the central nave by a
shell, rilled with a high explosive. It burst in the lateral nave,
making a hole three feet in diameter, but, thanks to protective
measures, only two frescoes were damaged, according to the official
report, though every window pane was shattered. The stained glass,
designed by Girolamo Moceto for the right transept, having been
removed with the many valuable paintings, this splendid piece of
fifteenth century workmanship escaped injury. On the whole less
harm was done than the fire of 1867 occasioned, but, justly indig-
nant at this new act of spoliation, following so soon upon the
wrecking of Santa Maria degli Scalzi and Santa Maria Formosa,
the Holy Father repeated, through Monsignor Valfredi Ponzo, his
request to the Emperor of Austria that, in the clash of arms,
churches and noted secular buildings, not used for military pur-
poses, might be spared.
Santa Maria Formosa had been demolished in the course of
an Austrian air raid on August 10, 1916. The foundation of this
venerable temple can be traced back to a miracle. The Bishop of
Uderzo, says the chronicle cited in Ruskin's Stones of Venice,
driven from his bishopric by the Lombards, beheld in a vision, as
he was praying, the Virgin Mother who ordered him to found
a church on a spot where he should see a white cloud rest. And
when he went out, the white cloud went before him; and on the
spot where it rested he built the church, called the Church of
Saint Mary the Beautiful, either from the loveliness of the Virgin
in the vision or, as we find it stated in the records of the churches
of Venice, from the brightness of the moving cloud. This first
church, built in 639, stood until 864 when it was rebuilt to be
enriched, fifty years later, with various relics mostly of St. Nico-
demus. These were unfortunately lost in the fire which destroyed
the building in 1105. Reconstructed magnificently in 1175 by
Paolo Barbetta on the model of San Marco, it suffered severely
from an earthquake in 1689; restored at the expense of
a wealthy merchant, Turrin Torrani, and embellished with two
facades of marble, it again came to grief during the bombardment
of 1849 already referred to.
Perhaps the fame and central position of Santa Maria For-
mosa, and its proximity to San Marco, had something to do with
its vicissitudes. They certainly had with the religious functions
1917-] ITALIAN ART AND THE WAR 365
and the local festivities in which it played a prominent part. No-
tably in the Feast of the Maries instituted to commemorate an oc-
currence connected with the legend of the Brides of Venice. It
was an annual custom among the earliest Venetians2 to put their
marriageable girls on show in order that the unmarried young men
might pick out wives from among them. After the introduction
of Christianity, the day set apart for this exhibition was the last
of January, dedicated to the memory of the translation of the
body of St. Mark. The mated maidens, each with a box contain-
ing her dowry under her arm, then went in gondolas, trimmed
with streamers and flowers to San Pietro in Castello, the cathe-
dral of the island of that name, also called Olivolo or Quintavalle,
whose bishop pronounced his benediction on the nuptials of those
who had secured a husband, the wedding fees proving a welcome ad-
dition to his scanty revenue drawn mainly from a poll-tax paid in
chickens, and a mortuary tax which gave him the nickname of
" Bishop of the Dead."
Now the Venetians of those days were much harassed by
Narentine pirates, Istrian and Dalmatian Slavs, especially by the
gang of a certain Gajolo, who often crossed the water to make
raids on the Italian coast. In 944, taking advantage of that year's
show of a fresh crop of desirable virgins, this crew landed secretly
on the island of Olivolo and, when everybody was peaceably at-
tending the ceremony of the multiple marriage, suddenly leaped out
of the brushwood that had concealed them, and penetrated into
the church, sword in hand, killing whoever offered resistance and
carrying off the brides with their dowries. But the Doge, Pietro
Candiano III. or, according to others, who put the date of the rape
of the Venetian virgins in the year 939, Pietro Candiano II., im-
mediately had the alarm bells rung and ordered the armed citizens
who responded to his call, to man their galleys and give chase.
The abductors were overtaken in a lagoon near Caorle, which has
since been known as the Harbor of the Damsels because they had
disembarked there to divide the spoils. The Venetians attacked
and defeated the robbers, rescuing the fair captives whom they
restored to their legitimate husbands and those who already had
become widows in the fray, granting another chance at the next
year's matrimonial market.
To commemorate this victory over the Narentines with its
happy result, it was decreed that henceforth on Candlemas, the
day of the Venetians' triumphant return, the Doge should repair to
*Cf, Samuele Romania, Lezioni di Storia Veneta, V.
366 ITALIAN ART AND THE WAR [Dec.,
the Church of Santa Maria Formosa, publicly to render thanks to
the Virgin who manifestly had assisted the town in the recovery
of its own. On this andata or walk thither, he was accompanied
by twelve maidens in bridal costume, belonging to the poorer
classes, and escorted by the pupils of the parochial schools and
the members of religious societies and corporations in solemn
procession. The function assuming in course of time a more and
more sumptuous character and extending over a week and longer,
it became the custom, on the thirtieth of January, after the Wake
of St. Mark, for a number of youths to betake themselves to the
Ducal Palace, where the maidens awaited them. Thence, waving
banners and flags, they marched in pairs to Santa Maria Formosa,
preceded by heralds blowing trumpets, and by servants carrying
sweetmeats and wine in vessels of silver and gold. The party was
accompanied by monks and priests in copes and stoles, praying and
singing until they arrived at the church, where crowds were col-
lected to watch the proceedings and claim a share in the wine
and sweetmeats distributed after the religious service.
On the following day the procession was repeated and cul-
minated in the representation of a Mystery, young priests or lay
brothers acting the women's parts. After the performance and an
interval for dinner, the real twelve Maries, girls belonging to noble
families, richly dressed for the occasion and chaperoned by their
mothers, aunts and married elder sisters, joined the pageant. On
the morning of Candlemas they set out in six finely decorated
boats, followed by a numerous retinue in smaller craft to San
Pietro in Castello, the Doge himself leading that fleet in his
Bucintoro. Tired out by the ceremony in the cathedral of Olivolo
and the brave display up and down the Grand Canal, the principal
actors were invited to a banquet in the Ducal Palace. The rest of
the week was devoted to regattas, dancing and all sorts of amuse-
ments which, together with the actual Festa delle Marie, always
brought many strangers to Venice and so a good deal of money into
Venetian pockets.
The ancient feast was discontinued in 1379 because of the
War of Chioggia into which the hereditary feud with the rival city of
Genoa had developed. But its memory was preserved until the
Venetian Republic ceased to exist, in the custom of presenting the
Doge on that high dignitary's official visits to Santa Maria Formosa
with two hats of gilt straw, two oranges and two bottles of malm-
sey. This practice originated, according to tradition, in a request
1917-] ITALIAN ART AND THE WAR 367
of the trunk-makers of that quarter of the town, who had greatly
distinguished themselves in getting the brides with their dowries
back from the Narentine pirates, that the Doge should come to
see them at least once a year.
" And if it rains? " asked the Doge.
" We shall give you hats to keep off the rain," they answered.
"And if it is too hot?"
" We shall take care that you do not suffer from thirst."
At the time of the revolt against the Austrian yoke, when
Radetzky ruled with an iron hand, leaving Lombardy and the
Veneto to the tender mercies of the ferocious Haynau, the Campo
or Square of Santa Maria Formosa was the scene of a disorderly
demonstration.3 A certain Girolamo Dandolo, scion of the illus-
trious house of that name, had framed, sent round for signatures
and presented to the provisional government a petition entreating
the surrender of the town which, owing to a vigorous blockade, was
on the verge of starvation. The first to sign this petition had been
Cardinal Monico, Patriarch of Venice, at the time a guest of Count
Quirini in the parish of Santa Maria Formosa, because his official
residence was under repair. His participation in Dandolo's appeal
becoming known, a mob invaded his temporary abode, committing
deplorable excesses. But they were soon checked by the stable
element of the population whom Daniele Manin, acting President
of the hastily acclaimed Republic of St. Mark, had well in hand,
the majority of Venetian men and women vying in patriotic dis-
cipline. Manin was nevertheless obliged to capitulate, August 30,
1849, and the Austrians reinstalled themselves only to leave finally
in 1866.
Built in the form of a cross with a large dome and two cupo-
las capping the transepts, Santa Maria Formosa's exterior did not
possess any extraordinary features to distinguish it from the many
other churches of Venice, except one of those " huge, inhuman and
monstrous " sculptured heads, types " of the evil spirit to which
Venice was abandoned in the fourth period of her decline,"
against which Ruskin inveighed in terms we refrain from quoting
in extenso. But Santa Maria Formosa's interior, the treasures of
art it contained, compensated for that hideous head : Madonnas by
Sassoferrato and Pietro da Messina, a Birth of the Virgin and
the Virgin as the Mater Misericordia by Bartolommeo Vivarini,
a Last Supper by Bassano, a Descent from the Cross by Palma
*Cf. Carlo Alberto Radaelli, Storia dello Assedio di Venezia negli Anni 1848-
7849.
368 ITALIAN ART AND THE WAR [Dec.,
Giovane, above all a Santa Barbara by the latter's uncle or grand-
uncle, Palma Vecchio, more correctly Giacomo d'Antonio Negretti
of Serinalta. If the sad tale of the church's total destruction be
true, the frescoes with which Paoletti adorned the dome in 1844,
must have perished, but all that was easily movable had been
packed off; with it the wonderful picture considered by many
Palmo Vecchio's chief glory. So Santa Barbara eluded, fortu-
nately, the fate of Our Lady in the Air with St. John at her
feet, one of his earlier productions, painted for the church of San
Moise and since destroyed.
The intensity of the cult of Santa Barbara in Venice sprang
doubtless from that city's Byzantine connections. Everybody
knows the Saint's life story, which accounts for her being the
Patron of artillerists and understands, therefore, why her image in
Santa Maria Formosa adorns the altar of the bombardiers. As
Palma Vecchio painted her she has to right and left St. Anthony and
St. Sebastian, above her Our Lady of Mercy between St. John and
St. Dominic. She stands serene and smiling, a lovely young woman,
with a palm branch in her hand. The white veil attached to her
golden crown, her crimson mantle, her brown robe are in splendid
harmony with the subdued tones of the background which includes a
fortified tower while the ordnance on the first plan completes her
saintly attributes. Tradition names Palma Vecchio's daughter
Violante as his model for this brilliant piece of idealized realism.
In the writer's memory Santa Barbara of the Church of Santa
Maria Formosa is associated with a characteristic observation from
the lips of the then Cardinal Giuseppe Sarto, Patriarch of Venice,
later Pope Pius X., with whom she was apparently a great favorite.
Himself a child of the people, he admired her, as he said on one of
his frequent visits to her home near the Porta del Paradiso, because
she appeared an ingenuous popolana rather than one of the haughty
though equally alert Venetian ladies depicted by Veronese. He re-
marked upon the ardent desire for something unknown, perhaps
unknowable to the artist who shaped her, which lights up her
limpid, lustrous eyes. Pointing with his finger, he went on :
" Look ! Look close ! What do you see ?"
The democratic idea — Videa democratica — ? " one of the by-
standers ventured to ask, probably alluding to a previous conversa-
tion.
His Eminence made no answer. That is, not at the time. It
may be found in the encyclicals issued during his pontificate.
THE VISION AND THE DEED.
BY EDWARD F. GARESCHE, SJ.
IT was a summer's morning, soft as Eden,
And the cool dawn wove shadows long and still,
Across the cloister's peace. There Gabriel stood
And turned his eyes to heaven and sobbed, " My God !
Ten years and I am still a weak disgrace!
Ten years of sighs, and tears and strong desires,
And agony of heart — since first I knew
Thy loveliness and swore to shape my soul
To image Thine! Alas the bitter shame.
To still be only rich in promises !
For yester eve, when sack in hand I strode,
Alms-laden, through the town, I heard a voice
Cry soft, ' There walks the Saint !' I dreamed 'twas love
And gratefulness to Thee, that bade my heart
So leap and pulse, I dreamed I humbled me
Beneath Thy gifts ! but ah ! This night in choir
The Matins ended, with a start I woke
From wandering thoughts, and knew my soul aright!
No praise to Thee had my false accents given,
But through the sacred Psalms a traitor pride
Had twined an alien strain, ' The Saint ! The Saint !'
My soul misgives me! If ten years have wrought
My heart no liker Thine, shall any toils
Of added decades carve the flinty thing
To bear Thine image ? Help me from despair !"
Scarce had he said, when on the silent air
Rang a faint clink of steel, then groaned a voice,
" Lie there thou worthless chisel — Oh my God !
Dear God ! and will it never grow like Thee ? "
Then, readier to divide another's woes
Than linger on his own, and marveling too
How matched the words his thoughts, swift Gabriel strode
And ope'd the sculptor's door. A monk was he
Of wondrous power in marble, and his cell
All snowed with tiny chips and flakes of stone
Gleamed with white Saints and Angels, through the mist
Of dusty labor. But o'er all there rose
Calm, gentle, lovely with the lights of heaven,
With that same smile that bade the fasting throng
VOL. cvi. — 24
370 THE VISION AND THE DEED [Dec.,
Feed on his glance, nor reck the desert pains —
An image of the Lord! And Gabriel, dumb,
Spake his rapt pleasure with his streaming eyes —
Then, mastering his speech : " How long !" he said,
"Hast wrought on this white miracle? How long?"
The sculptor sighed, " Ten years — ten futile years !
A novice, thou didst help to bear the block,
Bright from Carrara's depths, and as I gazed
And prayed for shaping light, I saw the Lord,
Stand in a vision, heavenly-beautiful !
My heart a-flame, I seized my tool and smote
The quivering stone, and never a day has fled
But left some new reminder of my love
On yon white image — ah ! this morn, I knew
My utmost skill was done. Then came a voice,
'Is this thy vision?' and I stood and gazed.
Oh God! The lustre of Thy beauty gleamed
Across my thought. I saw yon ill-wrought stone
Beside your heavenly vision, knew how vile
My counterfeit to Thee, and half gone mad
With fruitless longing, flung my tools away!
There let them lie, that can no more avail !"
Then Gabriel, gently : " Heavenly fair, and true
Thine image to mine eyes. 'Tis not the Christ,
For who would dream that all-entrancing Form
To mimic utterly in sullen stone?
But mine the wonder not wherein thou'st failed
But where succeeded, to have shown so true
Our Life in marble! Weep not, but give thanks.
Though still thy heart be lovelier than thy deed,
Doubt not thy deed is lovely, and be glad!"
The sculptor smiled; "Well do they say of thee
Thou art an Angel." Straight to Gabriel's brow
Leapt the hot blood, and buzzed the old refrain
In his tense mind, " There walks the Saint ! Ten years !
Despair! Despair!" Then soft angelic tones
Spake in his soul : " Canst thou not understand ?
What thou hast said to him, God saith to thee.
Strike still the sullen marble of Thy heart
To shape it like the vision thou hast seen
Of Jesus' beauty — hope not over much.
And if thy wish be lovelier than thy deed
Doubt not thy deed is lovely, and be glad !"
Then Gabriel knew, gave thanks, and walked in peace.
ALCOHOL IN MEDICINE FIFTY YEARS AGO AND NOW.
BY JAMES J. WALSH, M.D., PH.D., SC.D.
HE American Medical Association, counting some
sixty thousand of the regular physicians of the coun-
try, held, perhaps, the most important meeting in its
history, last June, in New York City. This year's
annual session was significant in the maximum at-
tendance, the interest of the members in the scientific sessions, and
the presence of leaders of the medical profession from all over the
country. The, then recent, declaration of war gave a new serious-
ness to the proceedings. And it is interesting to note that the most
significant feature of the proceedings of this year's meeting of the
Association was a definite pronouncement, made by the House of
Delegates, to the effect that the use of alcohol in medical practice
is not justified by our present medical knowledge.
The strength of the conviction of the directing legislative body
of the American Medical Association with regard to alcohol, may
be judged from the forcible terms that were used in the resolu-
tions adopted:
Whereas, We believe that the use of alcohol is detrimental to
the human economy; and whereas, its use in therapeutics as a
tonic or stimulant or for food has no scientific value ; therefore,
be it"
Resolved, That the American Medical Association is opposed
to the use of alcohol as a beverage ; and be it further
Resolved, That the use of alcohol as a therapeutic agent
should be further discouraged.
These resolutions were not adopted without considerable op-
position. It was surprising, however, how little of this opposition
came from any attempt to defend alcohol as an ingredient of bev-
erages or of medicines. The major objection was, that it was not
within the province of the House of Delegates to assume the set-
tlement of scientific questions. Some few of the older men insisted
on the value of alcohol in therapeutics, but the resolutions were
adopted by a substantial majority.
372 ALCOHOL IN MEDICINE [Dec.,
We need scarcely add that this represents a complete reversal
of medical judgment. Fifty years ago it was customary to give
large amounts of alcohol in a great many febrile and other contin-
ued or weakening affections, and to regard it as a sheet anchor in
many exhausting pathological states. It was felt to be a very val-
uable stimulant that aroused the flagging powers of vitality, enabled
nature to get a new hold, revivified resistive and immunizing forces,
and generally brought out all the individual's possible energy for
defence against disease. Indeed it is rather surprising to go over
the old text-books of medicine and to see how freely alcohol was
recommended, and, if tradition speak true, the medical lectures for
two or three decades about the middle of the nineteenth century,
were even louder in its praise as a really wonderful remedy for
human ills, some of which could not be favorably treated by any
other means.
Dr. Stephen Smith has told the story of the treatment of ty-
phus fever with alcohol, or rather with whiskey, during the fifties
of the nineteenth century. New York physicians discovered, as
they thought, that whiskey had an almost direct curative action on
typhus fever. Needless to say this was considered a very wonder-
ful discovery.
A number of out-of-town physicians, learning of it, came to
New York to see the effect of whiskey on typhus. A series of a
dozen severe cases of the disease were selected and to everyone was
given a teaspoonful of whiskey every fifteen minutes night and day,
and all of them recovered. No wonder that, as a consequence, whis-
key received a boom in therapeutics.
In spite of this apparently convincing demonstration, we do
not at present employ large, often repeated doses of whiskey for the
treatment of typhus fever. On the contrary, I am quite sure most
physicians are convinced that its free use hampers, rather than helps,
recovery, and that it was a mere chance that the dozen cases of
typhus selected and treated with whiskey, recovered. Toward the
end of an epidemic of typhus it often happens that the mortality is
much lowered. Five deaths out of a hundred cases or even less
sometimes occur under such circumstances, and it would be com-
paratively easy then to make an apparent record of cures for any
remedy. That is how whiskey made its record in typhus; when
tried in succeeding epidemics at the height of the virulence of the
disease, it proved to be utterly without good effect. In the mean-
time, however, alcohol had a great boost in medicine in America.
1917-] ALCOHOL IN MEDICINE 373
Prior to this it had been used rather plentifully and confidently
in chronic diseases. It was the custom to give alcohol, in some form
or other, very freely to consumptives. Eggnogs and various wine
preparations with eggs were prescribed for the consumptive and
considered most beneficial. There was no doubt that patients felt
better after taking alcohol than before. Often their appetite was
stimulated, they slept better, they worried less, and above all were
less anxious about the future. This benefit is now recognized as
merely fallacious and temporary, and the use of alcohol in any
form is no longer permitted, much less encouraged, in the treatment
of consumptives by those who make a special study of the disease.
Many of the severer infections, such as pyemia or septicemia
(fever conditions due to the absorption of bacteria from infected
wounds) or the products of these bacteria were treated with al-
cohol in large doses. Physicians really felt that they saved lives
by this means and while they looked upon it as a last resort, it
was considered a very valuable therapeutic measure.
A distinguished New York physician, one who, by the way,
had been mainly instrumental in giving whiskey and brandy their
vogue for febrile infections, but who was, undoubtedly, a great
clinical observer and a thoroughly sincere and progressive leader
of the medical profession, is said to have declared in a crowded
medical meeting a generation ago that if he were to be offered for
the treatment of pneumonia all the drugs of the pharmacopoeia on
the one hand without whiskey, and whiskey without the pharma-
copoeia on the other, he would choose the whiskey, confident of
saving more patients thus than in any other way. Manifestly he
felt very much with regard to pneumonia and the use of whiskey as
we do now with regard to pneumonia and the absolute necessity of
fresh air. These two therapeutic methods — whiskey and fresh air
— represent the conclusions of two very different epochs of medical
opinion. In the one they were quite sure that nature needed a
great deal of artificial aid to overcome disease. In the other they
have come to realize that the best possible treatment for disease is
to employ natural means to the best advantage and encourage na-
ture's efforts. No wonder popular medicine became full of " wise
saws and modern instances " as to the use of various alcoholic pro-
ducts. If there is one thing that is impressed on the historian of
medicine, it is that all the mistakes of popular medicine, all the
favorite family prescriptions, now regarded as absurd, were once
the accepted opinions of the medical profession. Physicians have
374 ALCOHOL IN MEDICINE [Dec,
abandoned them as the result of further observation and wider
knowledge, while popular medicine continues to recommend them.
Probably the most striking survival of the use of alcohol in
the treatment of disease is the tradition with regard to quinine and
whiskey for breaking up a cold when it first threatens, and
for curing it when it has developed. The use of this combination is
a relic of a therapeutic period when physicians felt the need of
" cures " for every affection. Quinine was an excellent remedy for
the fever of malaria, the familiar " chills and fever " of the olden
time, and therefore it was thought to control all fever. We know
now that it does not, but it is easy to understand how, a generation
ago, during the very prevalent employment of alcohol by physicians
for fever conditions, quinine and whiskey came to be used for
" colds." That old idea long since abandoned by physicians still
prevails in popular medicine.
Arctic explorers who are subjected to the severest cold, and
the worst possible exposure to wintry elements do not take alcohol.
They warm themselves at an alcohol stove, but they know better
than to put alcohol inside of them. Many people think when
going out into the cold on a blustry day, that a glass of whiskey
makes a good bracer and keeps them from " catching cold." There
is a tradition, also, that when one has been rather thoroughly
chilled, has gotten one's feet wet, a good " horn " of whiskey,
which usually means an ounce or more, is just the thing to prevent
ill effects. Experience has taught arctic explorers otherwise. They
know better, when going out into the bitter cold of a blizzard with
a temperature far below zero, than to take whiskey. When they
come in out of the bitterest cold it is not whiskey that is given them.
Hot, fresh, weak tea taken in quantities has been found to be the
best bracer for them.
Alcohol, if taken before going out into the cold, will make one
feel the cold much less, because it dulls feeling. It is most important
for a man who is going out into the cold of the arctic regions to
have none of his feeling dulled. His preservation from having
portions of his body frozen, depends on having all his feelings as
acutely sensitive as possible. When he comes in out of the cold,
whiskey would undoubtedly make him feel more comfortable, but
it would not serve to stimulate his circulation, in fact it rather
hampers the vital reaction.
Here is the secret of the action of whiskey now known to med-
ical science through the most careful investigation. It is never a
I9I7-] ALCOHOL IN MEDICINE 375
stimulant; it is always a narcotic. Because it makes the heart go
faster it was considered a stimulant for the heart muscle and the
circulation. It does not raise the blood pressure, however, and we
know now that the quickening of the heart is not due to stimulation,
but to the taking off of the brake which normally regulates heart
activity. The heart normally beats about seventy times a
minute. In order to keep it beating just at that rate there are two
sets of nerves : the accelerator which constantly tend to quicken the
heart action, and the inhibitory nerves which neutralize their ac-
tion and prevent its excess. The action of the inhibitory nerves is
hampered by alcohol, and so, when it is taken, the heart beats faster.
It is like taking the governor off an engine and letting the ma-
chinery run away. Alcohol acts everywhere in the same way. It
lifts the brake. It lessens inhibitory power.
Everyone knows how inhibition in the moral order is impaired
by alcohol, so that under its influence men are impelled to do fool-
ish things that they could readily restrain themselves from in the
normal state. This is the sort of thing that happens in the physical
order. Inhibition is lifted. Health, however, consists in having
things properly regulated. Alcohol makes a man feel better and
braver and heartier than he usually is, makes him have an artificial
appetite, produces cravings of ail kinds. It prevents him from
being scared about things, he does not feel pain so much, and,
when under the influence of liquor, may suffer a lot of physical
harm without much pain reaction. Drunken men have been known
to walk on a broken bone when it seemed almost impossible for
any human being to stand the pain that must be occasioned by it.
Broken bones in the arm or hand a drunken man will often neg-
lect utterly. Smaller amounts of alcohol have a like tendency to
produce a narcotizing or anaesthetic effect. Feeling was given us to
preserve the intactness of the tissues through the inhibitory inaction
of pain. Alcohol dulls feeling. Sometimes a narcotic or an anaes-
thetic effect is wanted. But we have better and surer anaesthetics
than alcohol, without its tendency to produce a habit or serious
after effects.
In a word, alcohol is just such a drug as opium. Opium has
its beneficent place in the world for the relief of human pain. One
may grow accustomed to it, just as one grows accustomed to
whiskey, and then more and more will be required to produce a
given effect. The Chinese used to use it very much as we use whis-
key, and for the same purpose: to make them forget the insistent
376 ALCOHOL IN MEDICINE [Dec.,
present, and lift the feeling of depression when things went wrong.
Opium, too, has its serious after effects, and the Chinese have given
up opium just as so many nations in Europe have, at least
under the stress of war conditions, given up the stronger spirituous
liquors.
What the older physicians did not realize was that the bene-
ficial effect of alcohol was not physical, but psychic. Alcohol lifts
the scare that overpowers people when they find themselves suf-
fering from serious disease which they know to be sometimes fatal,
a scare that often paralyzes energy, hampers resistive vitality and
prevents proper vital reaction toward recovery. Most of the dis-
eases for which it was used so confidently are self-limited diseases
that run a definite course. If the patient has the strength to survive
the course of the disease, he gets better. Anything that lessens this
strength and uses up energy by worry or anxiety has a definitely
unfavorable effect on him. It is important, therefore, that psychic
elements of discouragement should be eliminated just as far as
possible, for they put a brake on energies that would be curative,
if allowed to exert their influence. The pneumonia patient is spe-
cially subject to the ill effects of worry because all too familiar with
the frequently fatal course of the disease. He is almost sure to
watch himself breathe. He is breathing some thirty-five to forty
times a minute, and breathing is, for the time being, the principal
business of life. Watching it adds to its difficulty, hampers its
rhythm and introduces voluntary inhibitions into a process that
should be involuntary. It is easy to understand that, with a de-
pressed heart and " watched " respirations, the outlook is not so
favorable as it would otherwise be.
When such a patient takes sufficient alcohol it lifts the scare.
He literally does not care, after a while, what happens to him, and
this is the most favorable attitude of mind. This is not, however,
a physical, but a psychic state. The question must always be
whether some of the ulterior bad effects of alcohol may not be more
than enough to counteract its favorable psychic influence. A great
many physicians have come to think that they are, and have given up
alcohol in pneumonia, except at certain trying times or in special
cases where the element of solicitude is evidently producing an
unfavorable effect.
In the severe febrile affections — pyemia, septicemia, puerperal
fever — it is doubtful whether alcohol ever had more than this psy-
chic influence. These affections are very disheartening, and pa-
i9i 7-] ALCOHOL IN MEDICINE 377
tients worried themselves into conditions where they had little
chance for healthy reaction. Fortunately these affections are now
very rare, and the use of alcohol has been given up in them by
physicians who find other and more direct remedies much more
valuable, so that one very large field for the use of alcohol in med-
icine has disappeared completely.
There were certain classes of cases in which alcohol was of
special significance, because of its power to lift the scare and keep
the patient from worrying himself to death. Probably the most
typical of these was snake bite. The old medical rule after the
bite of a poisonous snake, especially the familiar rattlesnake, was
to give sufficient whiskey to make the patient mildly drunk. It
usually took a great deal to produce that effect, and this was often
said to be because the alcohol had to neutralize the snake poison in
the blood before it could produce any effect on the patient. Very
few now think that alcohol has any direct neutralizing effect
on any sort of snake poison. Thousands of people die from snake
bite every year, and if whiskey were an antidote it would be well
known by this time ; but it is not. Very expensive institutes for the
manufacture of various anti-venom serums have been erected for
the manufacture of remedies, and a great deal of time and money
has been spent on experiments along this line. There are now some
excellent results reported in the treatment of venomous snake
bites, but alcohol is not directly connected with them.
With the gradual modification of medical views in favor of
alcohol, curiously enough some of the psychologists have advocated
its use. A distinguished German psychologist, not long dead, who
had taught for many years in an American university, declared that
the poor should not be deprived of alcoholic drinks, because these
gave them almost their only moments of happiness or at least
lightened the burden of life and labor. He also suggested that
alcohol is the inspiring mother of art and literature, and that with-
out it men are cold, uninspired logic machines, utterly devoid of
that sympathetic cordiality and proper feeling for others which
develops under the influence of a certain amount of alcoholic
liquor.
Of course this is but a confirmation of modern medical views,
since it is a frank confession that alcohol is a narcotic and not a
stimulant. Human nature has always used narcotics to help it
forget the hard things of life, and to make trials of various kinds
less difficult to bear. There are serious students of sociology,
378 ALCOHOL IN MEDICINE [Dec,
however, who are emphatic in their declaration that this is un-
fortunately one of the most serious aspects of the alcohol problem.
Nothing makes men so readily satisfied in conditions with which
they should not be satisfied as a free indulgence in alcohol. They
get quite literally not to care how they and their families live, and
they stand an environment that no decent human being should have
to live in. Wife and children are involved in this carelessness of
their surroundings. Nothing so ties a man down to a job at which
he gets the barest sustenance for himself and his family, as turning
to the bottle whenever he feels discouraged about it, when divine
discontent might tempt him to make a definite effort to rise above
his surroundings.
There is a popular impression, confirmed by the psychology of
the preceding generation, that alcohol stimulates the imagination
and is, therefore, often a valuable aid in artistic or literary work.
It is felt that a good many men of genius have benefited from its use,
at least to the extent of having their initiative aroused and their in-
ventive faculties awakened. There is no doubt that men of genius
have worked fruitfully under the stimulus of alcohol, but the care-
ful observation of recent years does not confirm the theory that
alcohol benefits the intellectual processes. The most carefully
planned experiments on memory, for instance, make it very clear
that far from being helpful, comparatively small amounts of alcohol
bring about a distinct impairment of memory. Vogt of Christiana
demonstrated by experiments on himself that a few teaspoon fuls
of whiskey, taken on an empty stomach, reduced his power to
memorize Greek poetry by about twenty per cent.
A slight excess of alcohol, and such excess is a very individual
matter and may represent quite a small quantity, will often pro-
duce a flow of rather vivid images and an accompanying facility
of speech, but there is a lack of coherence and a tendency to con-
fusion; thoughts are not well connected and in spite of the sense
of wonderful power, the achievement proves on careful, critical
analysis not to be what it was thought to be while the mood was
in progress. It gives an illusory sense of ability and intellectual
adequacy, but fails in real production.
It is now pretty well recognized by psychologists, as well as by
physicians, that alcohol does not promote work, but play. It does
not stimulate the intellect but the imagination, and that superficially,
in what is called the sensory imagination, and without any real
benefit to the imaginative faculties of the intellect so important for
IQI7-] ALCOHOL IN MEDICINE 379
art and poetry. It does not brighten the retentive faculties of the
mind, but on the contrary dulls them. It stimulates not thought but
talk, it is a social not a mental stimulant.
Some of the older physicians still continue to believe with the
former generation that alcohol is an efficacious remedy for certain
exhausting conditions, but the younger generation who know the
careful scientific investigations that have been made in Ger-
many, France and this country on animals and the convinc-
ing observations that have been made on human beings, no
longer think of alcohol as likely to do any good through its physical
effect. Because of this widespread conviction, and in spite of the
long medical tradition in the matter, the House of Delegates of the
American Medical Association ventured to intrude on the field of
therapeutics. It was an extremely unusual procedure, and only
very complete conviction would have warranted the action. The
conditions created by the War in relation to the abuse of stimulants,
undoubtedly constituted the main reason for this unusual step. It
was felt that our country would profit by the knowledge that the
physicians of America no longer believe alcohol to be beneficial,
but rather harmful, in either health or disease.
THE GRIEVANCE OF THE SPRING WHEAT GROWERS.
BY FRANK o'HARA, PH.D.
HEREAS Robert M. La Follette made an address of
a disloyal and seditious nature at a public meeting,
before a large audience at the Nonpartisan League
Convention in St. Paul on the twentieth of Septem-
ber." Thus begins a set of resolutions adopted by
the Minnesota Commission of Public Safety praying for the expul-
sion of Mr. La Follette from the Senate. These resolutions have
already set the Senate Committee on Privileges and Elections in
motion, and it is freely predicted that they are destined to furnish
the subject matter for much discussion during the coming session
of Congress.
The meeting at which Mr. La Follette made the already
famous speech was the closing session of the " Producers' and Con-
sumers' Convention," which was held under the auspices of the
National Nonpartisan League. For the purposes of the convention
the term "producers and consumers " was defined as being practi-
cally equivalent to " farmers and organized labor." The farmers
were in control of the meeting, at least nominally, and so the official
definitions, if they had been formulated, would probably have de-
clared that the farmers were the producers and organized labor
the consumers. The secretary of the St. Paul Retail Grocers' As-
sociation was on the programme at one of the sessions of the three
days' convention, and although he tried to make it appear that the
members of his economic class belonged of right in a convention
of producers and consumers, the remarks of the other speakers
made it clear that his claim was the veriest camouflage.
The purpose of the convention as given out by its leaders,
was to assist the Government in its programme of price regulation.
Hostile newspapers had proclaimed that the meeting was called to
give the farmers an opportunity to protest against the Government's
recent action in scaling down the price of wheat. That they had
any such intention the League officials denied. They had no objec-
tion to the Government fixing the price of the main product of the
League's members, they proclaimed, if the Government would carry
out a similar policy with respect to the things which the farmer has
I9I7-] THE SPRING WHEAT GROWERS 381
to buy. The business of the convention would be to help the Gov-
ernment carry out its complete programme rather than to hinder it
in one of the details of its programme. It was to be a patriotic meet-
ing. American flags were the outstanding feature of the decora-
tions.
Three United States Senators took part in the deliberations
during the course of the convention, Senators Borah of Idaho,
Gronna of North Dakota and La Follette of Wisconsin. The two
latter spoke with bitter hostility toward the present National Ad-
ministration and its policies, and even Mr. Borah's speech was far
from friendly. Mr. Van Lear, the Socialist Mayor of Minneapolis,
a man of confessed pacifist views, was also on the programme, but
his speech might be described as wildly patriotic in comparison with
those of the three Senators. Mr. Gronna is a plain, blunt man, and
in his address he carried his language straight up to the line which
separates loyalty from treason and landed his thoughts on the other
side. The audience vigorously applauded the performance. They
knew what he was driving at. It was more difficult to get Mr. La
Follette's meaning. One was not certain whether he was trying to
throw a sprag into the wheels of the National Administration so
as to interfere with the conduct of the War or whether he was try-
ing in good faith to educate the nation in the principles of taxation.
But whatever his motives, seven thousand producers and consumers
gave him a tremendous ovation whenever he said the things which
were likely to give comfort to the enemy.
Mr. La Follette's own explanation of his presence at the
convention was that he was there to encourage the Nonpartisan
League, and to keep it from being intimidated by the Government.
" I come before you here tonight,'1" he said, " to talk to you partic-
ularly about this great movement you have adopted up here and to
give you a word of encouragement, to bid you to be brave, not to
be intimidated because there may chance to be sneaking about, here
and there, men who will pull back their coats and show a secret
service badge." The reference to the secret service badge was
made because the newspapers had announced that the convention
hall swarmed with agents of the Federal Department of Justice
who were there to arrest anyone uttering disloyal sentiments.
The animus of the convention was directed officially not
against the Government but against the " profiteers," the men who
are reaping war profits through favorable contracts with the Gov-
ernment. Moreover, Governor Frazier, the Farmer-Governor of
382 THE SPRING WHEAT GROWERS [Dec.,
North Dakota, who was chairman of the convention, declared that
he would not tolerate disloyal utterances on the part of any of the
speakers. Flags waved and patriotic airs were displayed. And
still there was a well defined feeling that the convention was not
just right. Mr. Towneley, the president and original organizer of
the National Nonpartisan League, pleaded over and over again for
a course of action that would " bring the War to a speedy and suc-
cessful close." He never explained what he meant by a " success-
ful close " of the War, and any listener who chose to do so might
assume that it meant victory for the 'Allies; but the means which
were to be employed to " bring the War to a speedy and successful
close," as indicated by Mr. Towneley, always involved our with-
drawing from the War and leaving the Allies in the lurch. In a
word, in spite of protests to the contrary on the part of the organi-
zation, it was taken for granted by the disinterested spectator that
the Nonpartisan League was disloyal. This leads us to inquire more
closely concerning the nature and workings of the League and the
reasons which led to the bringing together of so many speakers
whose patriotism has been questioned.
The National Nonpartisan League is an outgrowth of the
Farmers' Nonpartisan Political League of North Dakota which
succeeded last year in electing practically all of the state officials
who were elected in that state. As a result of the unexpected and
marvelous success of the League in North Dakota, a campaign was
undertaken to organize the farmers of the neighboring states. Al-
though the main support of the League is still to be found in North
Dakota, considerable headway has already been made in organizing
the farmers of Minnesota, South Dakota, Iowa and Montana. The
hope is entertained now, among its leaders, of making the League
a political power not only locally but in national politics as well.
The Nonpartisan League came into existence in North Dakota
as a protest against the failure of the old parties to enact into law
the wishes of the people as expressed repeatedly at the polls. North
Dakota is mainly an agricultural state, and the farmers have for
a long time been convinced that in the marketing of their products
they were at the mercy of the grain exchange in Minneapolis known
as the Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber of Com-
merce established the rules according to which the wheat coming
into the Minneapolis market was graded and the farmers of North
Dakota felt that the rules were framed to their disadvantage. They
thought that if the state would build large terminal elevators within
1917.] THE SPRING WHEAT GROWERS 383
its borders they might have something to say concerning the rules
under which their grain was sold. This conviction became so
strong that they recorded it at the polls, but the state legislators,
who for the most part were not farmers, found reasons for not
erecting the elevators.
After being rebuffed by the legislature and told, in effect, that
they did not know what was good for them, the farmers were in
an excellent state of mind to attempt to gain their ends by political
organization. Through working together in societies with educa-
tional and economic aims, they already had received valuable train-
ing of a preliminary nature, and now they were taken in hand by
a group of Socialist leaders who had the experience in organization
necessary to give the finishing touches to the farmers' social edu-
cation. It required a high degree of skill on the part of these So-
cialists to combine in the right proportions their own principles and
the individualism of the farmers, but the success of the organiza-
tion at the polls last year, demonstrated, beyond a doubt, that they
possessed the skill.
As noted above, the main grievance of the farmers against the
Chamber of Commerce had to do with the grading of grain in Min-
neapolis. The case for the farmers is admirably brought out in a
pamphlet on the milling value and market value of wheat, written
by Dr. Ladd, the President of the North Dakota Agricultural Col-
lege. Here it may be stated parenthetically that the Agricultural
College is violently in politics and that Dr. Ladd occupies his po-
sition, as its president through the grace of the Nonpartisan League.
This statement is not meant, however, to cast any reflection upon
the scientific value of Dr. Ladd's findings with regard to the milling
of wheat.
In 1916, the pamphlet informs us, there were seven Minnesota
official grades of wheat as follows : "No. i hard," which must weigh
not less than fifty-eight pounds to the bushel; " Nos. I, 2, 3 and 4
northern," which must weigh not less than fifty-seven, fifty-six,
fifty- four and forty-nine pounds respectively to the bushel; and
"Sample grade" and "No grade" for which no weights were fixed.
But the Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce gave its dealers a dif-
ferent system of grading, and it was according to this latter system
that they bought wheat from the North Dakota farmers. The
Chamber of Commerce grades, numbers I, 2 and 3, agreed with the
Minnesota official grades, but whereas the Minnesota grade " No. 4
northern " need not weigh more than forty-nine pounds to the
384 THE SPRING WHEAT GROWERS [Dec.,
bushel, the Chamber of Commerce " No. 4 northern " must weigh
fifty-two pounds. Instead of the "Sample grade" and "No grade" in
the official system, the Chamber of Commerce substituted the fol-
lowing five grades : " No. 4 Feed Spring " weighing forty-nine to
fifty-one pounds and " A Feed," " B Feed," " C Feed " and " D
Feed," weighing not less than forty-seven, forty-five, forty-three
and thirty-five pounds respectively.
The naming of these lighter grades as feed wheat was taken
to indicate that they were suitable only for feed and were not used
in the manufacture of flour for human consumption, and, accord-
ingly, this presumption was reflected in the price. The fact, how-
ever, was that the wheat which was bought as "D Feed," was used in
the manufacture of flour, and while the flour was not white, it was
more nutritous than that obtained from the " No. i northern."
Dr. Ladd found by experimenting with a small mill that one hun-
dred pounds of " No. I northern " would yield about sixty-nine
pounds of flour, while one hundred pounds of " D Feed " would
yield sixty pounds of the same class of flour. At the same time these
experiments were made, sixty pounds of " No. i northern " sold
for $1.73 while sixty pounds of " D Feed " sold at 94 cents. On the
basis of its food value, according to Dr. Ladd, " D Feed " wheat
ought to sell at $1.50 instead of 94 cents for sixty pounds when
" No. i northern " is selling at $1.73. Now the point of this discus-
sion is that in 1916, because of heat and drought, a large part of the
North Dakota wheat crop dropped to the " Feed " grades. The
farmers of the state believe, and in this belief they are supported
by the experiments of the Agricultural College, that if their wheat
had been graded according to the Minnesota official grades instead
of the Chamber of Commerce 'grades, they would have received
millions of dollars more for their produce, or in other words that
they were robbed of millions of dollars by the Chamber of Com-
merce grading. The members of the Nonpartisan League hoped to
protect themselves against this robbery by building large elevators
within their own state, and compelling the buyers to come to them
and to bid for their grain under rules which the farmers had a hand
in making.
Although the Nonpartisan League achieved a sweeping success
in the election of 1916 it has as yet been unable to carry out its pro-
gramme (which includes state owned flour mills, stock yards, pack-
ing houses, and cold storage plants as well as terminal grain ele-
vators), because of its inability to gain control of the state senate,
1917-] THE SPRING WHEAT GROWERS 385
due to the fact that only one-half of the members of that body
were up for election last year. For the present the League con-
tinues its agitation and is preparing itself for the next election,
when it hopes to gain full control of the machinery of state gov-
ernment.
The Nonpartisan League had a grievance against the Minne-
apolis Chamber of Commerce, but what had that to do with its atti-
tude towards the United States Government? Nothing directly,
but much indirectly. Because of the widespread dissatisfaction
with the prevailing grain grading, the Federal Department of Agri-
culture this year established a set of Federal grain grades, accord-
ing to which grain shipped in interstate commerce is to be bought
and sold. The Federal grain grades were the result of a careful
scientific study of the situation by the department's experts, and
no doubt the new system possesses much merit. But it is absolutely
incapable of application under the conditions under which it must
be applied by grain buyers in the wheat belt. At best it can be ap-
plied only approximately. Under the Federal system of grading
many new elements were introduced and were supposed to receive
careful attention, to which little attention had heretofore been
given, such as the amount of moisture in the wheat, the percent-
age of inseparable seeds and the percentage of admixture of wheat
of other qualities. Thus, in the laboratory the scientist can pick
the inseparable weed seeds out of a handful of wheat with a
pair of tweezers and calculate the percentage which such seeds form
of the whole weight of a bushel of wheat. But the grain buyer on
a busy day has not the time to count the foul seeds in samples of
a hundred loads of wheat, and so he guesses at the amount; and
unless he is a particularly honest guesser his guess may result in
giving the farmer a lower grade, and hence a lower price for his
wheat than the latter would otherwise receive. Under the old sys-
tem the foul seed in the wheat was estimated, and its weight was
subtracted from the weight of the load. The wheat was " docked "
in weight but its grade was not lowered.
Similarly, under the new grading system, a farmer brings to
the elevator a load of clean, plump, beautiful macaroni wheat
weighing sixty-one pounds to the bushel, and expects to have it
graded as " No. i." The grain buyer picks up a sample of the wheat
and points out the presence of a few grains of hard wheat, and ex-
plains to the farmer that he must sell his grain four or five cents
a bushel cheaper than otherwise because of the mixture of grades.
VOL. cvi.— 25
386 THE SPRING WHEAT GROWERS [Dec.,
If the wheat was all hard it would be worth more than the maca-
roni, but the few grains of hard make it a mixture, and the farmer
is unable to understand the logic which makes him lose the grade.
Considering the fact that the new Federal grades, which were
adopted ostensibly for their benefit, were being used against them,
many of the farmers concluded that the Department of Agricul-
ture had made its rulings under the influence of the millers and
grain buyers rather than in the interests of the farmer. This was
the state of mind in which many North Dakota farmers found
themselves when the agitation for fixing a price for wheat came
to a climax a couple of months ago. Wheat had been selling for
upwards of three dollars a bushel when it was announced that the
Government would fix prices. The price at once began to descend.
During the course of the descent a North Dakota Congressman
telegraphed to the farmers of the Northwest that Mr. Hoover was
in favor of fixing the price of wheat at $1.67 a bushel, and that any-
thing which they succeeded in getting above that figure could be
secured only by shaking their clenched fists in Mr. Hoover's face.
While this report of the matter was unjust to Mr. Hoover, it was
generally accepted as the truth by the farmers of the Northwest,
and they began individually and collectively to storm Washington
with telegrams showing that such a price would mean the confisca-
tion of their property.
At this point it may be worth while to note that there was a
considerable degree of merit in the contention of the farmers.
Where the wheat crop had been bountiful, a price of a dollar and
sixty-seven cents a bushel would have amply covered the cost of
producing wheat, even in the face of the high prices which the
farmer had to pay for the things which he must buy ; but in North
Dakota the wheat crop, except in the Red River Valley, was not
bountiful. On the contrary it was very scanty, and on the average
three dollars a bushel would not have been sufficient to pay the
cost of production. It may be urged against the farmer that he is
not entitled to a price high enough to cover his cost of produc-
tion under the most unfavorable circumstances. But that is of
course a matter of theory, and our theories of arbitrary price
fixation are, as yet, in a rather crude state. The farmer may well
be excused for believing that his cost-of -production theory is as
valid as any other.
The farmers agitated, and the price was finally fixed at a point
which gave the North Dakota farmers (after allowance was made
1917.] THE SPRING WHEAT GROWERS 387
for freight charges) about two dollars a bushel for No. i wheat.
The price had been three dollars when the campaign for price fix-
ing started. The Northwestern farmers had lost about a third of
the value of their product. This loss they charged up to the ac-
count of the activity of the Federal Government. They were not
unpatriotic, but they asked themselves why the Federal Government
had not fixed the price earlier, in time to catch the Southern and
Eastern wheat growers. They felt that the matter was arranged
purposely to let the Southern and Eastern wheat growers market
their grain at a high price, just as the Southern cotton growers were
being permitted to market their cotton at a high price and without
Government price fixing, and to catch the spring wheat growers of
'the Northwest whose wheat was later in getting to market.
The farmers were in an unpleasant frame of mind towards the
National Government because of the injustice which they believed
had been practiced towards them. They were willing to go to con-
siderable lengths in making a protest. Their Socialistic leaders, who
had the control of the farmers' organization well in hand, were able
to take advantage of the irritation felt by the farmers and to give it
the coloring of opposition to the War. They called a meeting of
Nonpartisans at Fargo and a later one at St. Paul. In both meet-
ings the announced objective of the attack was the profiteers, but in
both meetings there was a strong undercurrent of attack against the
Government and its participation in the War. Advantage was being
taken of the farmers' wrath against the Government to make paci-
fists of them, just as advantage was being taken in the official
newspaper of the League to poison the minds of the members to-
wards the Government. .-
The wheat farmers of the Northwest are opposed to war in
the abstract, as all right thinking people are. Moreover, many of
them have not been very enthusiastic in the support of the present
war, because they have not been rightly informed of the justice of
the nation's cause. But they are not essentially pacifists. Intrin-
sically they are sound in their patriotism.
flew
THE EASTERN QUESTON. An Historical Study in European
Diplomacy. By J. A. R. Marriott, M.A., Fellow of Worcester
College, Oxford. With Maps. New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press. $5.50.
" The primary and most essential factor in the Eastern prob-
lem," says Mr. Marriott in his introductory chapter, " is the pres-
ence in the living flesh of Europe of an alien substance.. . .the Ot-
toman Turk," and therefore he begins his book with the part played
by the Turks in the history of Europe since they first crossed the
Hellespont in the middle of the fourteenth century. Thus acquaint-
ing the reader in its first chapters with those remote but important
facts concerning the Ottoman conquests in Europe, the Ottoman
Empire at its zenith under Suleiman the Magnificent and its sub-
sequent decadence, the present work proceeds to deal with all
those subsidiary problems which go to make up the Eastern Ques-
tion, and which, in the author's opinion, have been a prime cause
of the Great War.
That particular situation known as the Balkan problem is to
the average American a rather dim and minor affair of unimpor-
tant peoples, but to Europeans it has long carried vast implications.
Hence the position of the Balkan States, which, like Greece, Serbia,
Bulgaria and Rumania, gradually emerged as the Ottoman flood
subsided ; the problem of the Black Sea, command of the Bosphorus,
and possession of Constantinople; the position of Russia in Europe
and her relation to her co-religionists under the sway of the Sultan;
the Hapsburg Empire and its anxiety for access to the ^Egean;
and finally the attitude of the European powers towards the above
questions, are all treated here clearly and at length.
The author says that if Western Europe in its dealings with
the Near East, has in the past exhibited a brutal and callous selfish-
ness — and from his book it so appears — then the Near East has
today been terribly avenged. It is the author's contention that
when peace negotiations are taken up, one factor in the problem
shall be definitely settled once and for all, namely, in the words
of the Allies' reply to President Wilson, " the turning out of Eu-
rope of the Ottoman Empire as decidedly foreign to Western civili-
1917-] NEW BOOKS 389
zation." How the Turkish Empire in Europe has shrunken in the
last one hundred years is shown in a table in the appendix. In
1917 it possessed a European area of two hundred and eighteen
thousand six hundred square miles with a population of nineteen
million six hundred and sixty thousand, which in 1914, after the
Balkan wars, had been reduced to ten million eight hundred and
eighty-two square miles with a population of only one million eight
hundred and ninety-one thousand.
THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC. By Ralph Adams Cram. Bos-
ton: Marshall Jones Co. $1.50 net.
Mr. Cram has chosen to join the small but select and fervent
band, who convinced of De Maistre's truthfulness in declaring that
history, since the Reformation," is one gigantic conspiracy against
the truth," have devoted themselves to the investigation and vindi-
cation of the Middle Ages. The impetus which, in English liter-
ature, was given to this task more or less unwittingly by Sir Walter
Scott, has, through the labors and research of men like Adams,
Walsh, Taylor, and Gasquet, not only succeeded in throwing
abundance of light on a period long and superciliously termed dark,
but has proved it capable of more than favorable comparison with
any other in the checkered annals of humanity.
Starting with the notion of substance from an uncompromis-
ing Scholastic standpoint, the author proceeds to show that the real
underlying principle and vital source of medievalism was the in-
fluence of the Catholic Church, under whose blended stimulus and
restraint there developed not only a high, pure ideal in letters and
in art, but at the same time the noblest standard and condition of
public morality and political freedom of which we have any record
or tradition.
The volume, though evidently the work of an accomplished
and enthusiastic student of architecture, is by no means a dry text-
book abounding in technicalities. Its chief appeal may be to the
specialist, nevertheless it will be perused with profit and pleasure by
every intelligent reader.
THE COMING DEMOCRACY. By Hermann Fernau. New York:
E. P. Button & Co. $2.00 net.
This book, by the author of Because I am a German, is based on
the thesis that national wars, i. e., the aggressive wars of whole
peoples, in contradistinction to civil or colonial wars or wars of
390 NEW BOOKS [Dec.,
self-defence, have always been the natural means used to perpet-
uate or increase the power of dynasties, and that the people, if free
choice be given them, have always been opposed to aggressive
wars ; hence, that dynasties, which are that form of government in-
dependent of popular control and not responsible to it, must be
eliminated and in their stead substituted a government expressing
the will of and accountable to the whole nation.
The above position, enforced by numerous historical instances,
is developed with special reference to the present debacle, and
the responsibility therefor of the Kaiser and his ministers. How
certain conciliatory proposals before the outbreak of hostilities
were suppressed by the German war party; how the German peo-
ple were hoodwinked into the belief that " this is a holy defensive
war forced upon us," are clearly explained; and the cause of
most of the trouble is traced to the obsolete Prussian constitution,
now the law of the Empire, which effectually negatives popular
influence in the Government.
The author clearly shows what indeed only a native German
could show, the very strong differences and opposition between the
German people and their rulers. " Had the spirit of the German
people been really as monarchical, slavish and imperialistic as our
enemies today allege, then it could never have come into con-
flict with its Government. But, as a matter of fact, these con-
flicts have been frequent and numerous. That the German people
never emerged from them victorious, was not their fault, but
rather a consequence of that law of the world's history which
ordains that the people only begin to gain the upper hand when the
dynasty has suffered a loss of prestige outside. But Prussia has
suffered no such loss of prestige since the period from 1806 to
1813." And he finds abundant proof in history of the fact that
" it is really not nations but only dynasties that are vanquished,
and that vanquished dynasties imply victorious nations"
Altogether the work is interesting and instructive, and throws
considerable light on the present tremendous problems, and their
eventual wise settlement.
A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS. By Maud Mortimer. Garden
City, N. Y. : Doubleday, Page & Co. $1.25 net.
Books on the War continue to pour from the presses, but of
all those we have yet seen, this is by far the most appealing because
of its fine quality of style, its restrained handling, and the intimate,
1917.] NEW BOOKS 391
sympathetic view it gives of human nature under the stress of
terrible events. A Green Tent in Flanders tells the story of an
American woman, a volunteer nurse in a French field-hospital sit-
uated five miles back of the firing-line in Belgium, and while her
experiences probably differ in nowise from those of countless others,
her instinct for the picturesque incident, the revealing trait, the
telling phrase lifts her account into the region of art.
The book abounds in fascinating little sketches of the wounded
poilus, some pathetic, some grimly terrible, and some full of de-
bonnaire humor that refuses to succumb in the presence of excru-
ciating pain or even death. Quite delightful is the chapter on
" The Quill Driver," the little man with the long moustache and the
comical pink night-cap whose first requests were for a comb to
keep his beloved moustache in trim and a small notebook.
Then, too, there are such dramatic chapters as " The Boot "
and " The Blue Face," and such sad stories as that of the aged man
dying from starvation in " The Civilian " or that of the pretty vil-
lage girl burnt to death in " Flames."
Nor does the author confine herself to tales of the patients.
True to her interest in whatever is human, she gives illuminating
glimpses of doctors, officials, inspectors and nursing staff. The
diverse personalities of these people, and clashes of authority, the
differences of national character and outlook, all the interplay of
human nature drawn from many lands and various social strata
and thrown together in a constricted field of labor, are set forth
with skilled hand.
Scattered through the book are numerous pen-and-ink sketches
of scenes and people drawn by the author, but even without this evi-
dence we should be at no loss to discover that Miss Mortimer has
the practised eye of the artist. A Green Tent in Flanders is a
distinct achievement.
GREAT FRENCH SERMONS. Edited by Rev. D. O'Mahony. St.
Louis: B. Herder. $1.90 net.
In a brief introduction the Abbot Cabrol discusses the com-
parative merits of the three greatest pulpit orators of France, Bos-
suet, Bourdaloue and Massillon. He justifies Sainte-Beuve in de-
claring Bossuet to be the most powerful, the most eloquent speaker
and writer that the French language has ever known. His ser-
mons are set forth in the rich, brilliant and varied coloring of a true
lyric poet, while his extensive knowledge of the Scriptures, of the
392 NEW BOOKS [Dec.,
Fathers and Scholastic theology made him a master of doctrinal
exposition. Bourdaloue, while not inferior to Bossuet in solidity and
profundity of doctrine, lacked that wideness of vision which ob-
tained for Bossuet the title of the Eagle of Meaux. Bourdaloue's
chief charm lay in the wealth and sureness of his psychological
studies. He was an expert in character drawing, and in setting
forth in bold relief the vices and passions of men. Massillon is in-
ferior to Bossuet in his theological grasp, and very similar to
Bourdaloue in his symmetry of development and in his taste for
psychology. Some modern French critics have called him a mere
rhetorician, but this judgment is most unfair. His preaching was
full of unction, his doctrine substantial, and his influence upon his
hearers most marked. His style is polished, chaste, smooth and
elegant.
Readers ignorant of French will welcome these twenty ser-
mons, so ably edited by Father O'Mahony. It is to be regretted
that he was obliged to abridge some of them, for every word of
Bossuet's most lengthy exordium is worth while, well thought out
and beautifully expressed. We are pleased that the editor saw fit
to include both Bossuet's and Bourdaloue's sermons on the Passion
of Our Lord.
THE MEXICAN PROBLEM. By C. W. Barren. Boston : Hough-
ton Mifflin Co. $1.00 net.
Mr. Barren, a well-known journalist and financial expert
of Boston, has just published in book form a number of articles
written this year upon his return from the Mexican oil fields. He
views the situation from a purely business standpoint, and maintains
that if American and European capital were left free to develop the
country, and if the United States intervened to stop anarchy and
injustice among the bandits that now rule there, the future of
Mexico would be assured. He speaks of the failure of the United
States to lend a helping hand : " Had we deliberately gone about a
diabolical scheme to wreck a billion of foreign capital in Mexico,
to give forty thousand foreigners to plunder, and to decree misery,
poverty and sorrow for more than fifteen million Mexicans, we
could have conceived no more effective plan than that which we have
executed toward her, without ever planning anything against her."
Professor Williams of Columbia in his preface also calls upon
the United States to do for Mexico what she has done for Cuba.
Were we for a brief space to give Mexico protection for order,
I9I7-] NEW BOOKS 393
courts, contracts, industries and sanitation, the courage, loyalty,
patient industry and quick teachableness of the Mexican could be
trusted to maintain what had been secured under tutelage.
POEMS AND PARODIES. By Thomas Kettle. New York:
Frederick A. Stokes Co. $1.00 net.
Among the many titles to remembrance which are so justly
Thomas Kettle's — professor, soldier, Irish leader, who fell on the
Western Front in 1916 — this little volume surely holds a place.
As always with poets, allowance must be made for the unevenness
of the work; but granted this, most of these few verses have a
quality which puts their writer in the honorable company of the
poets who have died in this War — Rupert Brooke, Alan Seegar
and that other Irishman, Francis Ledwidge. They are the reflec-
tion of a mind quick and free, rich in subtle ironies and tender-
nesses, but most frequently — since it was the mind of an Irish
patriot — full of a brilliant indignation:
Count me the price in blood that we have not squandered,
Spendthrifts of blood from our cradle, wastefully true,
Name me the sinister fields where the wild geese wandered,
Lille and Cremona and Landen and Waterloo.
When the white steel-foam swept on the tidal onset,
When the last wave lapsed, and the sea turned back to its sleep,
We were there in the waste and wreckage, Queen of the Sunset !
Paying the price of the dreams that cannot sleep.
One may name a dozen poems which should last, among them
A Nations Freedom, A Song of the Irish Armies, The Monks — a
translation from Verhaeren which subdues a diction of Swinbur-
nian beauty to a spirit of almost exultant reverence — Ulster, the re-
ply to Mr. Kipling, with his " bucketful of Boyne to put the sunrise
out." Reason in Rhyme, On Leaving Ireland, with its touching, pre-
science of death : " And knew that even I shall fall on sleep," and,
finally the beautiful sonnet to his little daughter, written on the
Somme field in 1916 to explain why her father went to the War:
So here, while mad guns curse overhead,
And tired men sigh, with mud for couch and floor,
Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,
Died, not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor,
But for a dream, born in a herdsman's shed,
And for the secret Scripture of the poor.
394 NEW BOOKS [Dec.,
THE REBIRTH OF RUSSIA. By Isaac F. Marcosson. New
York: John Lane Co. $1.25 net.
Events in Russia have been moving so fast since the first of
the year that it would require more than the confines of one book
or the observations of one man to record them all. Because of this
insurmountable limitation Mr. Marcosson' s account of the Revolu-
tion will seem decidely bald. It makes no attempt to record all
the events which happened prior to the abdication of Nicholas,
and it has been obliged to cease its account at the time — seemingly
far-off now — when the Root Mission was starting from the United
States. But in that short time a great many things happened, and the
most of these Mr. Marcosson has managed to jot down. "The Rev-
olution in Petrograd " might have been a more descriptive title, for
Mr. Marcosson gives the impression that the most of the action
went on in the Capital, whereas we know that it had an empire-
wide effect, and that the revolution that has been progressing ever
since, even crept into the German navy.
The actual revolt was bloodless, as revolutions go in Russia,
although Mr. Marcosson has managed to tell a vivid story of the
chaotic immediate events leading up to the abdication and of the ab-
dication itself. He had also set down clearly the beginnings of the
troubles that immediately followed. The new child of democracy
was hardly born before serious complications began to set in. The
trend of these the author traces, although subsequent events have
rather discounted his sanguine views. Frankly, this account of
the Revolution is very unsatisfactory. It is journalistic in style; it
lacks the background of scholarship and a real understanding of
the Russian people. It shows the mark of haste to meet a popular
and instant demand. When more complete records of the Revolu-
tion shall have been written this collection of reports may serve
as a framework on which to begin study. As it stands The Rebirth
of Russia neither measures up to the demands of that momentous
event nor completely records it.
THE CASE IS ALTERED. By Ben Jonson. Edited with Intro-
duction, Notes and Glossary by William Edward Selin, Ph.D.
New York: Yale University Press.
This reprint of " rare " Ben Jonson's satirical comedy, with
critical notes and glossary, was undertaken as a dissertation for the
degree of Ph.D., Yale University. In point of scholarship it is ex-
cellently done. A copious bibliography and index are appended.
1917.] NEW BOOKS 395
JEAN JAURES. Socialist and Humanitarian. By Margaret Pease.
With Introduction by J. Ramsay Macdonald. New York:
B. W. Huebsch. $1.00 net.
Jean Jaures met death by assassination in Paris, July 31, 1914,
the day before the beginning of the Great War, and since then his
name has almost passed out of memory; but in life he was one
of modern Socialism's big men, probably its greatest orator and
most magnetic personality. Jaures, however, differed from the
mass of Socialists, in that he had somewhat of the historic sense
and felt the continuity of human tradition. He was an historic
evolutionist, believing that as the Republic had grown out of the
Revolution, so Socialism would grow out of the Republic; and hence
he advocated socialistic cooperation with the men of other parties
in those things which they held in common. In other words,
Jaures had discernment enough to perceive that the Socialistic
regime could never be successfully instituted by the violent effort
of a party, but only by the will of the great body of citizens. Be-
lieving in the gradual interpenetration of Socialistic theories through
the body politic, Jaures soon saw in the Church the grand foe to
his scheme, and therefore became one of her most enthusiastic
and untiring opponents. Despite the perennial Socialistic cry of
"justice," Jaures took a prime part in what is probably the most
unjust piece of legislation in modern history: the suppression of
the French religious orders.
It is a striking reflection on Socialism that in those matters in
which Jaures approached the common judgment of mankind — his
sense of fair play, as shown in the Dreyfus case, his idea of historic
continuity, his belief in the principle of nationality, his desire for
cooperation with men of other parties, and even in the management
of his own household — he acted against the opinions of his party,
and in his family affairs especially, on the occasion of his daughter's
First Communion, aroused a storm of denunciation and revilement.
Jaures was, of course, not a great thinker, but he did invite
attention as a popular orator. Even as an orator, however, his
appeal lay principally in those very things in which the majority
of his fellow-Socialists resolutely declined to follow him.
This book is cursorily written and, though laudatory, is far
from making out the " greatness " of its hero. As is to be expected,
many hoary old calumnies are brought forward against Catholicism,
toward which " tolerance meant playing into the hands of the ever-
lasting foe of liberty." Yet in reality it is not Catholicism which
396 NEW BOOKS [Dec.,
Mrs. Pease so bitterly attacks, but something quite other, that an-
cient and fanciful monster we had long since thought deceased,
" the Romish Church." That the authoress resurrects the word is
sufficient comment on the intellectual quality of her book and the
business acumen of its publisher.
THE ENGLAND OF SHAKESPEARE. By P. H. Ditchfield, M.A.,
F.R.Hist.S. New York: E. P. Button & Co. $2.00 net.
The author of this interesting and instructive volume is well
known as an authority on the social life of mediaeval England.
A work, therefore, from his pen dealing with the manners and
customs that prevailed in England in the age of Shakespeare, is
sure to be welcomed in literary circles. In the book before us he
gives a vivid picture of life under Elizabeth and James I.
Canon Ditchfield handles his subject in a masterly manner. His
information has been acquired by years of enthusiastic research and
is on the whole wide and accurate. He aims at fairness and impar-
tiality in his criticisms. But he is certainly wide of the mark in
stating that the persecution of Protestants by Mary was particularly
intolerant and brutal, and the persecution of " papists " by Elizabeth
somewhat politic and mild. He runs the gamut of social life, de-
scribing various topics as the court, roads and travelers, mansions
and manor-houses, sports and pastimes, alchemy and astrology in
graphic detail. His easy and graceful style adds charm to the
book.
The chapter on religion is singularly interesting, and contains
some candid criticism of the " Reformers " in England at this
period. As for instance :
The Church had emerged from the Reformation pillaged,
robbed and impoverished. It had been shorn on all sides.
The fabric of the churches had been injured and mutilated.
Their furniture and sacred vessels had gone to swell the
hideous heap of spoil that a rapacious king, greedy cour-
tiers and avaricious people had amassed on the pretence of
putting down " superstition." Robbery was in the air ; no
class was exempt from blame. The highest seized the con-
fiscated lands of the monasteries, and other less exalted per-
sons, too, the opportunity of possessing themselves of a vest-
ment or an altar-cloth to serve for the adornment of their
houses, without respect either to the source whence it was
derived or the means by which it was obtained
1917-] NEW BOOKS 397
Nor did this sacrilege cease when Elizabeth came to the
throne. She herself was a church robber and so was her fav-
orite, Leicester.
Every student of Shakespeare, and, indeed, every student of
Elizabethan literature, should read this book. It contains much rare
and curious information helpful for the interpretation of the lit-
erature of the time. We hope that the author, in a second edition,
will expurge the offensive expression " papists " which constantly
disfigures the pages of his book, and substitute the true appellation
" Catholic " instead.
ENGLAND AND THE WAR. By Andre Chevrillon. With a Pref-
ace by Rudyard Kipling. Garden City, New York: Double-
day, Page & Co.
This series of articles originally published in the Revue de
Paris from November, 1915, to January, 1916, although somewhat
belated, makes interesting reading, since it deals with the funda-
mental qualities of English life and character and how these were
affected by the War, rather than with the events of the War itself.
England's delay in realizing the power and purpose of the
enemy and her own imminent peril, and her reluctance to adopt nec-
essary counter measures are matters not so familiar to us in
. America, but to the French in that first year and a half of the War,
when their country was being drained of its vital resources and
their Ally across the channel seemed to go along in her old imper-
turable way, this tardiness was a strange and dispiriting phe-
nomenon. Some murmuring against English methods was only
natural. This series of articles was an endeavor to explain to
Frenchmen the real state of English affairs.
In his examination of the English character M. Chevrillon dis-
covered two main traits — first, that the Englishmen is a tradional-
ist, strongly attached to old customs, so that he is almost impervi-
ous to new ideas and slow to adapt himself to changing conditions;
and second, that he is the most intense and absolute of individual-
ists, par excellnce the man who goes his own gait, and is deter-
mined to go his own gait, regardless. These traits in conjunction
with the fact that no British Government can go forward, or even
continue in office, without the mass of present public opinion behind
it, delayed England's full participation in the War until a year and
a half after it began.
The author gives an intimate picture of English character in its
398 NEW BOOKS [Dec.,
strength and its weakness. " His analysis of the national mind,"
Kipling says in his preface, " is nearer the root of the matter than
anything that has yet been written by any Englishman."
THE CYCLE OF SPRING. By Sir Rabindranath Tagore. New
York: The Macmillan Co. $1.25.
This newest of Tagore's dramatic poems is rather a masque
than a play, and has been performed outdoors in Calcutta by the
masters and boys of the Bolpar school. In our own country it is
likely to delight the habitues of those exotic " little theatres " spring-
ing up on all sides. The Cycle of Spring is a poetic glorification of
the spirit of youth — a wistful glorification of childhood, such as only
mature hearts dream of, since the child himself plays always at being
" grown up."
Like Tagore's other plays, the volume contains many charming
lyrics. It is pungent, too, with a growing spirit of irony; and one
notes the passionate praise of activity , which is as essential to the
Bengali poet's message to the East as contemplation and repose may
be said to sum up his message to the West.
HOW TO DEBATE. By Edwin DuBois Shurter. New York:
Harper & Brothers. $1.35 net.
Professor Shurter of the University of Texas has given us an
excellent treatise on the art of debating. In his work he aims to
meet the needs, not only of the expert in argumentation, but also of
the practical debater. He says rightly that to teach debate in a
thorough and systematic manner involves the study of argumenta-
tion generally, and this in turn involves practice in brief-writing
and argumentative composition. In ten chapters the author dis-
cusses the subject of argumentation in all its phases — analysis,
proof, evidence, constructive arguments, refutation. He then shows
the student how to utilize his training in writing, when called upon
to meet an opponent in public debate. The book contains a good
bibliography, suggests a number of questions for debate, and gives
the rules for parliamentary procedure.
THE LIFE OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU. By F. B. Sanborn.
Boston : Houghton Mifflin Co. $4.00 net.
To be in sympathy with his subject is a sine qua non of the
successful biographer; but to attract his readers to his subject is
not always achieved by the man who recounts the life story of
1917-] NEW BOOKS 399
another. This, however, F. B. Sanborn has accomplished in his
admirable biography of Thoreau. And to attract another to Tho-
reau — egoist that he undeniably was; sometimes conceited and al-
ways stubborn — is not an easy matter.
Sanborn knew Thoreau and his fellows for many years. Con-
sequently, in the nature of things, his Life is not a formal biog-
raphy. It is rather a delightful series of memoirs, with an excellent
portrait of the hero of the rambling tale sketched in between the
lines. It is this portrait, never sharply drawn nor limned with in-
sistency, but nevertheless vigorous and clear in the end, that we
grow to love. Sanborn had the gift that novelists envy, of present-
ing his hero living and real before the mind's eye of his reader with-
out blurring the figure by over-emphasis. Though one cannot find
in all the five hundred pages of the volume a single detailed descrip-
tion of Thoreau, one rises from the book, nevertheless, as if parting
from a vivid and living personality. Assuredly no historian could
ask to accomplish more.
It was said of Thoreau that he loved Mother Nature so well
that she whispered him many a secret which none other ever heard.
He was exceedingly proud of that rather " exclusive " knowledge
of his. In fact, from his close communion with the outdoor world
he drew a ruggedness of character which threatened at times to
settle into a cynical rigidity. He was often accused of hating his
fellow-men because he loved external nature so exclusively. As
Mr. Sanborn reveals him, however, he loves men so ardently that
he wishes them to be more perfect. He himself caught, as Stoddard
sings, " innumerable lessons to relate " from his contemplation of
nature : he saw his own shortcomings and the shortcomings of arti-
ficial civilization, magnified, perhaps, through the clear glass of the
out-door world; and he called to men to come and behold what his
sharp eye saw. But men resented the call ; and not without justice,
either, since, after all, what Thoreau had to show them was nothing
new, nothing beyond the finite which already left them unsatisfied.
And so Thoreau, sensitive and egoistic, withdrew more and more
into his Walden Wood, away from the haunts of men; but he did
not cease to raise his voice in the message that he felt it his destiny
to give.
It is not difficult to imagine what the philosophy of such a char-
acter would be — much common sense, much shrewdness and insight
into the ways of men, mixed with a good deal of sincere though
short-visioned, spiritual aspiration. At least, Thoreau seemed to
400 NEW BOOKS [Dec.,
reach for — and perhaps touch — the outer garment of God in his
study of nature. But alas, Christ and the beauty of Christ's Faith
he did not find. He remained a pagan as we all know — and even a
bigoted and irreverent pagan, though Sanborn's pages hardly reveal
him thus. One wonders what he would have become had he gone on
with Brownson and Hecker, ranging the further and rarer heights
of the soul, instead of tarrying by the quiet streams — where, too
often, he paused to contemplate himself ! Brownson influenced him
for a while in his precocious youth, when both were touched with
the flame of New England Transcendentalism ; and Hecker begged
him to travel to Europe with him. If he only had ! But those burn-
ing torches flamed on, while Thoreau's candle of life flickered out in
the still meadows of Concord — blown not a little by the winds of
the procession of life, troubled not a little by the exterior darkness;
but never reaching to the high altar of soul-attainment.
THE WANDERERS. By Mary Johnston. Decorations by Willy
Pogany. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. $1.75 net.
Miss Mary Johnston, the popular historical novelist, has re-
cently happened on a new and startling discovery, and now sets it
forth for the world to see, namely, that woman from the beginning
of time and throughout the ages has occupied a quite inferior po-
sition to man, and that it was chiefly by her finer intuitions that she
gradually won to that idea of equality which is her present desire
and on which alone true love can be based.
The book is built on a novel plan, that of a number of sketches
— they could scarcely be called stories — dealing with the. " love re-
lation " between man and woman from the apocryphal days of the
Tree Dwellers down to the times of the French Revolution ; but the
stretch, including, as it does, the classic Greeks and Romans,
mediaeval Christians, Germany of the Lutheran revolt and Crom-
wellian England, besides other periods more or less remote, is too
wide of Miss Johnston's grasp and the constant playing on one idea
becomes wearisome.
That the spiritual note is largely absent in The Wanderers is
hardly a matter of surprise. With regard to God and religion the
author's opinions seem to us as primitive as those of the Forest-
Dwellers and Cavemen with whom she starts out. The book voices
in fictional form feminine unrest, without a sufficient disguise for
its purpose to be successful. In other words, the artist in Miss
Johnston has been pretty thoroughly stifled here by the feminist.
1917-] NEW BOOKS 401
THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE PROPHETS AND JESUS.
By Charles Foster Kent. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
$1.50 net.
The latest work of Professor Kent is the logical culmination
of his studies during his many years of teaching and writing. The
title indicates precisely the contents of the book, which is, therefore,
very wide in its scope, but covers its ground quite completely and
with clearness and order. It is the product of a good teacher, rather
than of a thinker or a literary man : a plain resume by a good mind
that has made the Bible its life study. Dr. Kent gives us many
valuable expositions and summaries of social teachings in the Old
and in the New Testaments. He gives his reader much to think
about, but the inevitable conclusion is that he strangely mixes truths
and half truths and errors and that the whole economic teaching
by being isolated from religious teaching, is placed in a false light.
Our author has not the gift, ascribed to the ancient poet, of seeing
life steadily and seeing it whole. He has glimpses of the religious
side of the teaching of Jesus Christ and at times states it forcibly;
but the nature of his theme and his own predilections lead him to
think of Christ chiefly as a social teacher and reformer, Who
dreamed of inaugurating the reign of perfect justice on earth. His
view practically eliminates heaven as the true realization of the
kingdom of God, and no one professing to give the teaching of the
Founder of Christianity has the liberty to omit that essential and
predominant element. Not that the moral and social teachings of
Christ depend necessarily on the fact of human immortality — their
basis is the eternal, inherent righteousness of God and the depend-
ence of the creature on the Creator — but human immortality is a
fact, and cannot be left out of Christ's teaching without essentially
changing the character of the whole.
This omission, unfortunately, with the viewpoint it indicates,
vitiates all the second part of the book. There is little that can be
accepted just as it stands; and this is all the more regrettable since
many true and good ideas are found in this false setting. Endeav-
oring to rally all Christians to his view and wishing least of all to
offend any, the Professor of Biblical Literature in Yale University
speaks repeatedly like any well meaning non-Christian and on every
page deeply wounds the feelings of all who, with the Apostles, ac-
cept Jesus as 'the Lord of Glory, the only-begotten Son of God, the
Word made flesh. It is not so much his social principles that are
objectionable, which are one sided rather than false, but his im-
VOL. cvi. — 26
402 NEW BOOKS [Dec.,
plicit rejection of supernatural religion without which those prin-
ciples have little force. Traditional Christianity is the most tre-
mendous assertion ever made by man. It dominates all one's views
of life. It is worse than futile to hold, as does this writer, that it
matters little or nothing whether it is true or not. That is the one
thing that really does matter.
THE NATURE AND HISTORY OF THE BIBLE. By Rev. Wil-
liam A. Fletcher, D.D. Baltimore: J. H. Furst Co. $1.25.
The purpose of this scholarly treatise is, as the author
tells us, " to show that a substantially accurate record of the truths
once delivered to the saints exists in the world today, and that,
whatever the value attaching to other texts of the Sacred Scripture,
the Latin Vulgate represents that record." The topics discussed
make up the course ordinarily known as an introduction to the
study of the Bible. We know of no book that discusses these topics
so clearly and so well for the benefit of the average Catholic lay-
man. The various chapters treat of the definition of the Bible, its
inspiration, its canon, the various Latin versions, the revision of
the Vulgate, etc.
THE SPIRES OF OXFORD, AND OTHER POEMS. By W/M.
Letts. New York: E. P. Button & Co. $1.50 net.
This attractive volume is a reprint, with slight additions, of
Miss Letts' Hallowe'en and Poems of the War published last year.
The title poem of the present edition is one of the most beautiful
and poignant lyrics written in English under the inspiration of the
present War; and while it would be expecting, perhaps, too much
that all of the verses should be of the same high value, they possess
a fancy and a tenderness and an artistic surety which lift the whole
collection into the comparatively small group of worth-while Christ-
mas books.
EVENINGS WITH GREAT AUTHORS. Two volumes. By
Sherwin Cody. Chicago : A. C. McClurg & Co. $2.00
" The possessor of the complete works of a poet who really
reads that poet has certain poems marked which are read and read
again, while scores or hundreds of others are passed over as having
ceased to carry a living interest." It is to mark the " best " — that
is, the most interesting to the average man — in the great writers of
1917-] NEW BOOKS 403
the language, that Professor Cody has prepared these books. They
are neatly done, and will very likely have a wide appeal. Although
there are still some of us who like to read the masters without cut-
ting, there is undoubtedly a public for this sort of book. Profes-
sor Cody's eliminations and condensations are judiciously and rev-
erently made. He gives three plays from Shakespeare, Hamlet,
Romeo and Juliet and The Merchant of Venice; Scott's Ivanhoe;
Thackery's Vanity Fair; Dicken's Pickwick, and An Evening with
Lincoln, comprising anecdotes and selections from the speeches.
His condensation of Hamlet is particularly well done, and might,
with a little arrangment, serve for a school or college production of
the play. There are also biographical sketches, and an excellent
introduction to the entire work, giving a quick general survey of
literature.
STRAWS FROM THE MANGER. By Rev. James H. Cotter. Mil-
waukee, Wis. : Diederich-Schaefer Co. $1.00.
Under this title are collected twenty-five little essays or ser-
mons, upon themes relating to Christmas: what it should mean to
Christians and how they may most worthily keep the feast. The lit-
tle book would make an excellent companion for Advent ; the read-
ings are short enough to occupy only a few minutes of the busy day,
and will well repay the time given them, by helpful thoughts ex-
pressed tersely and beautifully.
THE DIVINE IMAGE. A Book of Lyrics. By Caroline Giltinan.
Boston: The Cornhill Co. $1.25.
Here is a first volume of more than common interest, and of
a quite notable vitality in feeling and expression. This passionate
sincerity has set its mark upon all the poems, whether spiritual, fan-
ciful or very human in subject, uniting and energizing things which,
save to the poet's quick imagination, seem far apart. For is it not
the poet's elect privilege to remind us that we may not : " Stir a
flower without troubling of a star," and that common clay was
created expressly to bear the imprint of the Divine Image?
Miss Giltinan's work has already appeared in THE CATHOLIC
WORLD, and its readers will welcome this opportunity to know it
better — and to know it more. In phrasing and metre it is almost
always of a most engaging simplicity. In emotion it shows an
admirable — an even primitive — directness. The religious verses
are prayer-poems, Catholic prayer-poems, and they are grippingly
404 NEW BOOKS [Dec.,
dramatic as any of the love poems — even as any of those real mem-
orable poems of mother love. Testimony, the final offering of the
volume, is a tour de force, a rhymed meditation on the fourteen
Stations of the Cross, as vivid and as concentrated as a Memling
canvas. The following lyric shows the charm as well as the
strength of Miss Giltinan's gift:
That over night a rose could come
I, one time did believe,
For when the fairies live with one,
They willfully deceive.
But now I know this perfect thing
Under the frozen sod
In cold and storm grew patiently
Obedient to God.
My wonder grows, since knowledge came
Old fancies to dismiss;
And courage comes. Was not the rose
A winter doing this?
* * *
So maybe I, who cannot see
What God wills not to show,
May, some day, bear a rose for Him
It took my life to grow!
We bespeak a cordial welcome for one of the " newest " of our
American Catholic poets!
LIFE AND LETTERS OF MAGGIE BENSON. By Arthur C.
Benson. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. $2.50 net.
' To show how life can be lived nobly by those who would live
more nobly if they could, is one of the best gifts that can be given
to the world." This is the avowed motive of Mr. Benson's biog-
raphy of his sister; and he achieves it beautifully. Without mor-
alizing or preaching, merely by recounting the simple story of
Maggie Benson's life, he does indeed succeed in showing " how
life can be lived nobly " — in spite of the handicap of ill health and
all that that can signify.
There is perhaps no family better known today to the reading
public than the Bensons, but it is not to advertise his family that
Mr. Benson writes this book. His high motive is plain enough ; and
he has, moreover, a theory concerning the art of biography which
is extremely interesting. " I have always believed," he writes,
" that there is an immense future before the art of biography. I
NEW BOOKS 405
think that we are at present only in its initial stages, and have not
passed much beyond a theory that biographies should only con-
cern themselves with great figures and people of notable perform-
ance. I hold rather the opposite view, that the real function of
biography is to deal with interesting and striking personalities. . . .
There are many people among us who live and die practically un-
known, so far as the world is concerned, whose handling of life
and thought and emotion and relationship is yet exquisitely strong
and fine. . . .These are very often the people who are best worth
recalling and hearing about."
We meet in these pages another spirit, gentler and quieter
than the dynamic Hugh, but strong and purposeful, likewise
" alert and active " and above all " full of eager sympathies."
Those sympathies cover a wide range and lead her into many
varied activities. There are school days, with glimpses of the
famous men and women of the time; travel abroad and researches
in Egypt, yielding vivid pages of Oriental coloring; social work in
London; lecturing; the writing of books; and finally the tragedy
of the breaking down of a fine, sweet mind, and at last its gentle
release.
MAIN STREET AND OTHER POEMS. By Joyce Kilmer. New
York: George H. Doran Co. $1.00.
Not long ago the Atlantic Monthly published a most sug-
gestive piece of poetic criticism by O. W. Firkins — and what it
suggested chiefly was that the English race and its poetry were
drifting apart. The charge was, of course, that modern poetry had
become too literary, too persistently and aloofly beautiful: whereas
the life of the people remained homely, strenuous and varied.
This arraignment has much to support it. Poetry lovers —
and would-be poetry lovers — have for many years been pushed to a
choice between the exotic poets who stood a little too far from nor-
mal life and the colloquial or dialect versifiers who were a little
too near it.
Perhaps one reason why our " own " Joyce Kilmer so soon
achieved his enviable recognition in contemporary literature is be-
cause he has steered a golden middle course between these two ex-
tremes. His verse seemed so human, so sane, so humorous and so
winsome that readers did not at first suspect his far vision and real
mysticism. Indeed, the volume called Trees, in spite of its perfect
titular lyric and many other soaring things, suggested to many
406 NEW BOOKS [Dec.,
critics the coming of a newer James Whitcomb Riley — an es-
sentially popular poet sworn to the service of domesticity and de-
mocracy. But those who fancied they knew Mr. Kilmer's genius be-
lieved that even these true and beautiful inspirations would prove
insufficient as time went on for his highly creative and sympathetic
muse. The volume just published brings its expected revelation of
growth. It is an advance over Trees not in quantity — for it is
still slim — but in the quality, that is to say, the variety of its verse.
And its variousness proves Mr. Kilmer not less but more a poet
of " that little, infinite thing, the human heart."
Our poet can pipe to the tune of home as charmingly as ever :
he does so in Main Street and Roofs and that tender, delectable
Snow Man in the Yard. But he gives us also ballads and carols
with the singing sweep of old Merrie England in them, such as
Gates and Bars; poems white with the stress of pain and tempta-
tion, like Gerard Hopkins or the masterful Robe of Christ; and
poems as ruddy with joy as his Singing Girl, or that fragrant lyric
of Roses. And his Blue Valentine is a free-verse tour de force,
fanciful enough to have delighted the heart of an Elizabethan son-
neteer or a Carolinian courtier.
Joyce Kilmer, as most of us know, was one of the first young
Americans to volunteer for service in the present war. And the
path which led him to the Great Adventure " over there " is reti-
cently but not any less ruthlessly indicated in the present volume.
It give us The White Ships and the Red, his memorable Lusitania
poem ; then his translation of Verhaeren's Cathedral; then the lines
to Rupert Brooke, Mid-Ocean in War Time; and finally, The New
School.
We are tempted to quote from so many of these poems that
we dare not quote at all. Instead, we commend every reader
to secure the little- volume for himself or herself, and to re-
member that no more delightsome Christmas gift could be found
for a friend. Thrice hail to the singing man turned fighting man —
and to the book he left behind him !
WILD EARTH, AND OTHER POEMS. By Padraic Colum. New
York: Henry Holt & Co. $1.25 net.
THREE PLAYS. By Padraic Colum. Boston: Little, Brown &
Co. $1.25 'net.
The fame of Padraic Colum may now be said to have passed the
experimental stage. His place in recent Irish literature is definite :
1917-] NEW BOOKS 407
a place midway between the older voices such as Rosa Mulholland's,
and the young peace-singing revolutionists who made tragic the
Easter of 1916. Mr. Colum is the dramatic interpreter of the
modern Irish peasant — a lover of primitive, simple things, a seer
of wonder in these things. Whether he writes of the immemorial
earth-worker, the " dawn man " looking up to heaven from his
roughly broken fields, or of the wistful Old Woman of the Roads,
whether he gives us the passionate defiance of Dermot Donn Mac-
Morna or the immortal masculine " bluff " of the old Irish taunt :
O woman, shapely as the swan,
On your account I shall not die!
it is all work of power and distinction. Mr. Colum's poems have
brought a note of individuality into contemporary singing.
His dramas are interesting, if not always as completely success-
ful as his verse. Those of the present volume were written during
the early days of the Irish National Theatre — of which he himself
was one of the founders — and they are rather bitter transcripts of
peasant and middle-class tragedies. The Fiddler's House shows
the conflict of the family and the artist-nature — the sacrifice of
youth to age. The Land, an " agrarian comedy " which Grace
George attempted to revise last season, gives the conflict of old
and new, of family and individual as worked out in the possession
of the soil. Thomas Muskerry, the best play and by far the cruel-
est, brings us the conflict between mercenary domestic respectabil-
ity and the personal right to live, the sacrifice of age to youth.
There is no denying that these problems do present " slices of
life," although they are not great plays in the main. Moreover,
they are slices cut with so sinister a knife that one feels glad Mr.
Colum has not completed his project of presenting an Irish com-
edie humaine in dramatic form.
DAY AND NIGHT STORIES. By Algernon Blackwood. New
York: E. P. Button & Co. $1.50 net.
If Mr. Blackwood would confine himself to such stories as The
Occupant of the Room, The Tryst and The Tradition — the three
best tales in this volume — he would succeed in being a very en-
tertaining, if not a very instructive, writer. In these stories he
shows himself a past master in the art of one of the chief ele-
ments of short story writing — the sustaining of suspense from
first word to last. Although his character drawing is scarcely
408 NEW BOOKS [Dec.,
more than negligible, his handling of plot, concentrated and cli-
macteric, is well-nigh perfect.
It is the fashion just now to " discuss " Algernon Blackwood
and his writings. He has stirred a lot of people with some very
fine, up-to-date ghost stories. (For that is what his tales really
are. ) And he has tried — with much success — mixing a few grains
of the so-called mystic (metempsychosis, reincarnation, and all
that) in his yarns, to give them a distinct flavor. But he is already
showing signs of overdosing. The present volume is not one that
can be regarded with very warm hopes for the author's perma-
nence in literature. Certainly such a tale as The Touch of Pan
is not worthy of a place in any volume. Initiation is another disap-
pointing product. Even Englishmen, who have traveled in Amer-
ica, it is quite plain, cannot grasp our vernacular : Mr. Blackwood's
attempts at American slang are wretched failures. -In By Water
he makes something of the same artistic blunder that Jack London
made in Martin Eden — recounting the inner sensations of a man
who dies alone, as if the hero had survived to relate the event in
its minutest details.
Mr. Blackwood has undoubted literary gifts; he has a gorgeous
vocabulary, he can even reach poetic heights; and he can handle a
plot dramatically and with gripping intensity. But when he at-
tempts to preach, and to preach the sort of silly pantheism which he
seems to favor, he fails. .
ENGLISH LITERATURE. By Edwin A. Miller, A.M. Philadel-
phia: J. B. Lippincott Co.
This is an excellent introduction to English literature. The
author is evidently an enthusiastic student, and has succeeded in
writing a book which is calculated to stir enthusiasm in his readers.
The book, besides containing autograph facsimiles of the various
writers, is profusely illustrated. We have nothing but praise for
this volume, and hope it may soon become a textbook in every
Catholic high school and college. No better book on the subject
has come under our notice.
SOLDIER SONGS. By Patrick MacGill. New York: E. P.
Button & Co. $1.00 net.
In their swing and smoothness, and their very vivid pictures of
battle-life, these verses recall Robert Service's Rhymes of a Red
Cross Man. They are full of careless camaraderie and the almost
1917-] NEW BOOKS 409
flippant lightness which seem to mark men banded together for any
dangerous enterprise, and which, in particular, have characterized
so much of the authentic literature of this present War; but again
and again the deeper note — of ruin, of separation, of death — is
struck. The easy dialect of the trenches predominates, but in spite
of this, literary quality is not lacking in many of the poems. March-
ing and Before the Charge are fine bits of verse, and all of the
pieces repay perusal.
UNDER FIRE. By Henri Barbusse. New York: E. P. Button
& Co. $1.50 net.
But a short time ago it would have been thought impossible
that the War's abominations could be restated with such force and
vividness as to make them appear almost new to us, yet this is
what has been accomplished here by a master hand exercising ex-
traordinary gifts of expression with unrestricted freedom. The
book is not a novel ; M. Barbusse speaks as one of the squad whose
story he tells fragmentarily. This record of experiences is dedi-
cated to the memory of the comrades who fell by his side at Croiiy
and on Hill 119, and his intimate, sympathetic interpretations of his
fellow poilus gives us a closer understanding of what war means to
the common soldier the world over.
Apparently believing that what some must endure others can
•endure to read about, the author spares us nothing. We are with
the squad in trench and dugout, where, in semi-darkness, enveloped
in degrading filth, they struggle ceaselessly against an enemy no
less persistent than the one in the trenches across No Man's Land —
discomfort in the last extreme that the term can be stretched to
cover.
The squad is of heterogeneous components, mostly artisans and
sons of the soil; they are all different, yet all the same, for all
share " the same simple nature of men who have reverted to the
state primeval." Under dehumanizing conditions, they are human
still ; conscious and ashamed of deterioration and unwonted cruelty,
capable of comradeship, of kindness given and reciprocated, cherish-
ing thoughts of those they have left, always at their best when writ-
ing home. They respond quickly to any improvement in circum-
stances ; a few hours of sunshine, a touch of physical comfort, and
their spirits revive. This resiliency surprises themselves; they com-
ment upon it to each other, naively wondering at their ability to
forget. But not all is forgotten. There is a wound that rankles
410 NEW BOOKS [Dec.,
deep and ominously, received not in the trenches or under fire, but
at the rear, when on leave of absence. It is shadowed in the greedy
extortion of villagers who rejoice in the War that enables them to
put by many a franc ; but its deadliest form is in the great city when
the poilu, upon whom rests the burden of the War, its greatest
perils with its least alleviations, sees the life of the boulevards, the
theatres and cafes, proceeding gaily without thought of him. He
meets with careless kindness and, more offensive still, with shallow
patronage ; he is called a hero, and must reply as best he can to the
inane speech of those to whom war is picturesque and glittering. A
fatal truth has been revealed to him, " the clean cut and truly un-
pardonable division that there is in a country's inhabitants between
those who gain and those who grieve." Says poilu Volpatte:
" We are divided into two foreign countries. The Front over there,
where there are too many unhappy, and the Rear, here, where
there are too many happy." The workings of this idea are shown
in the final chapter, a magnificent, though dreadful, piece of writ-
ing. While they wait to begin war again, it is of the end of war
that they talk. This one had to be : Germany and militarism must
be crushed ; but after this there must be no more. It is not of their
own will, but at the command of a few, that great bodies of men
meet to kill each other. One day their will shall prevail and war shall
end. The day breaks through the heavy black clouds, an earnest that
the sun is still there, but the gleam of light reveals no vision of
God, Whose existence some deny and almost all doubt ; no message
that " in His Will is our peace." It is the old mirage of democracy,
of brotherhood through equality.
The book is an achievement that will endure. If it reaches
the huge sales here that are recorded of it in France, much credit
will be due to the translator, who has done his work so extremely
well it has been suggested that the hitherto unknown name, Fitz-
water Wray, screens that of some eminent author.
THE INNER DOOR. By Alan Sullivan. New York: The Century
Co. $1.35 net.
The plot here is a rather original variation of the ordinary
" labor problem " novel. Sylvia Percival, through her father's
death the sole owner of the Percival Rubber Factory, departs for
her scheduled year in Europe just before her fiance, Kenneth Lan-
don, loses his entire fortune. Chance sends him to the factory to
earn his living. There he speedily begins to realize the existence
I9I7-] NEW BOOKS 411
of a section of society, with its peculiar problems, hardships and,
as he finally learns, doctrines, of which he had never dreamed. His
manliness and sense of justice gradually identify him with the men,
in the grim struggle which he perceives going on about him. His
great hope is in Sylvia, whose fineness and generosity, he believes,
will meet the test when he informs her of the real state of things
in her factory. The end of the year, however, finds the young peo-
ple hopelessly apart in aims : Kenneth burns to begin a programme
of serious social reform; whereas Sylvia, whom the year abroad
has inoculated in the delights of art, emotion, and, the more ex-
quisite things of life, is repelled by the thought of " herself as mis-
tress of a home to which he contributed nothing but a stern sense
of duty and an uncomfortable continuity of purpose." There is an
unregretted parting. Sylvia returns to Philippe Amaro, the master-
dilettante who has molded her views of life to his own. Kenneth
marries Greta, the daughter of the Danish Sohmer, " the work-
men's leader and philosopher."
The weak point in execution is the character drawing. Sylvia
is perhaps the most lifelike. Certainly, in spite of her open-eyed
selfishness, she is a much less unpleasant character than Greta, the
leading woman, whose unashamed pursuit of Kenneth, and other
qualities, leave the reader cold to the descriptions of her charm and
worth.- Sohmer, her father, is simply unreal, either as a symbol
or as a man. It is a pity such defects detract from what might have
been a novel of considerable power.
THE COMING. By J. C. Snaith. New York : D. Appleton & Co.
$1.50 net.
John Smith, the son of a poor widow and a poet of wonderful
imaginative powers, Gervaise Brandon, his patron, a wealthy gen-
tleman and scholar, home from Gallipoli paralyzed from the waist
down, and Mr. Perry-Hennington, the obstinate and narrow-
minded Anglican vicar, are the three principal characters of The
Coming, and by their means we are introduced on to rather strange
ground for the popular novel, namely, faith. For Smith believes
that only by faith can the modern war-torn world be saved, and he
persuades himself, and some few others, that he is the divine in-
strument of this truth's promulgation. And of course the vicar,
who represents the conventional, worldly, wrong-headed churchman,
considers him a blasphemer and a danger to the realm and has him
incarcerated in an insane asylum. There, however, Smith's divine
412 NEW BOOKS [Dec.,
character is more manifest than before, for by the mystic power
he possesses, he works marvelous changes in all the inmates, and by
voice and the laying on of hands even effects the complete cure of
the paralyzed Brandon.
Like The Servant in the House and The Passing of the Third
Floor Back the present novel rests on the implication that its hero
is Christ come again, and like those productions it is utterly uncon-
vincing. The incidents are forced and strained, and the characters,
who are vague throughout, seem mere lay-figures for the working
of the plot. As a novel The Coming is an unsatisfying and unim-
portant performance, but as an indication of spiritual unrest it has
significance. That in a popular novel the claims of " Science," in
the person of Murdwell, and those of intellectuality and scholar-
ship, in the person of Brandon, should be so thoroughly subjected
as they are here to what used to be called " blind faith " is some-
thing which a few years ago would have seemed incredible.
RUNNING FREE. By James B. Connolly. New York : Charles
Scribner's Sons. $1.35 net.
The wind whistles vigorously through Mr. Connolly's pages;
they drip with brine; and the threatening face of death frequently
interrupts the grim humor of the old salts. All this is well. The
author's genius lives upon wharves and decks and under bellying
canvas and atop of crashing breakers and close to rocky lee shores.
His tales attract every reader who loves to hear a skillful story of
danger and high courage and the frequent tragedies of seafaring
life. Talking of the sea Mr. Connolly is always delightful; when
he tells us about the fishermen of his native coast, he is superb.
This good, clean, virile book, like the others that preceded it, will
help to keep his fame afloat.
THE LAND OF ENOUGH. By Charles E. Jefferson. New York:
Thomas Y. Crowell Co. 50 cents net.
Under the guise of a story, the pastor of the Broadway Taber-
nacle has written an effective sermon on the Christmas spirit. His
young heroine, Madge, chafing against the narrow circumstances
that deprive those she loves of what she longs to give them, sighs
frequently for The Land of Enough. At last, on a Christmas Eve
the little town where she lives is suddenly transformed into such
a place as she has desired. No one can give because no one needs
or wishes to receive; as a result, all human warmth and sweetness
1917.] NEW BOOKS 413
are taken out of life, which is under these conditions so bleak and
lonely that Madge is thankful when she wakes with a start and
finds that her experience has been only a dream. She has had her
lesson and thereafter realizes that home, friendship, Christmas,
even our salvation itself, everything rests upon giving and receiving.
The brochure is attractive in appearance and will doubtless be
widely circulated as a Christmas remembrance, for which purpose
it was probably written.
THE WAGES OF HONOR, AND OTHER STORIES. By Kather-
ine Holland Brown. New York : Charles Scribner's Sons.
$1.35 net.
" Billy Foster and the Snew Queen " leads for interest in this
group of ten stories. American settlers in disturbed Mexico, and
the hard-worked dredgers of canals in the Mississippi country, pro-
vide subjects for half of the tales; the rest are miscellaneous. Mag-
azine readers are already well acquainted with the clean and dig-
nified style characteristic of the author. There is nothing to offend
and much to interest and provide pleasant reading in these three
hundred pages.
<
MY LITTLE TOWN. By Winifred Kirkland. New York :E. P.
Button & Co. 30 cents.
This little nugget of Christmas literature is a reprint of a
sketch that originally appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, under the
title of Christmas in Littleville. The author gives it as a reminis-
cence of her childhood, and makes of it so charming a bit of writ-
ing, graceful, tender and humorous, we can easily believe that it
was, as the publishers intimate, at the suggestion of many readers
that it is now reproduced in pocket size.
T^HE J. B. Lippincott Co. of Philadelphia have brought out three
** books of The Picture and Story Series : Tell Me a Story Picture
Book; Fairies and Goblins from Story land and Boys and Girls
From Storyland, arranged and compiled by Leila H. Cheney; and
two books: The Adventures of the Grey fur Family and The Grey-
fur's Neighbors, The Twinklctails and the Twitchets, told by
Vera Nyce, all destined for very little folk of five or six years of
age. (50 cents each.) Written simply and attractively, and pro-
vided with abundant and well-colored illustrations, they will give
the babies good exercises in reading and in listening; and will also
414 NEW BOOKS [Dec.,
serve to aid the flagging imagination of the tired story-telling
mother or big sister. The stories of the first series occupy only a
page apiece and each is faced by an illustration. Of the Grey fur
stories there are two in a volume.
THE ENCYCLOPEDIA PRESS has made a valuable and inter-
esting contribution to contemporaneous Catholic biography in
The Catholic Encyclopedia and Its Makers. The book is a
veritable " Who's Who " of Catholic special students, cleric and lay.
Nearly one thousand portraits interspersed among the sketches, add
a note of personal introduction to many of these notables. A short
history of the inception of the Encyclopedia and the methods em-
ployed in its making, introduces the biographical notices. The
price is $2.50.
A BOOK of practical usefulness for the student, the writer and
•**• the public speaker is Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases, by
Grenville Kleiser (New York: Funk & Wagnalls. $1.60 net).
The author has presented an exhaustive work in the way of sug-
gestive phrases, and outlined particular ways in which the value of
his work to the reader may be increased.
\T7E welcome again, for 1918, St. Antony's Almanac (25 cents)
' ' published annually by the Franciscan Fathers of Callicoon,
N. Y., and Paterson, N. J., for the benefit of a wide circle of read-
ers. The profit from the sale of this little book now in its fifteenth
year, goes to the support of the Franciscan students. Besides many
items of special interest to Franciscan tertiaries, the present issue
contains contributions of general interest, some of them from well-
known pens. Father Zephyrin Engelhardt gives an interesting ac-
count, well illustrated, of the famous old Mission of Santa Bar-
bara; Father Pascal Robinson tells of Bookmaking in the Middle
Ages; Dr. James J. Walsh discusses the influence of the Francis-
cans on the later life of Cervantes; Father Shuster has a sketch of
the Missions among the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico; and there
are stories and poems by other well-known writers.
IN the Catholic Home Annual for 1918 (New York: Benziger
Brothers. 25 cents), we find instructive illustrated articles on
" Pilgrimage Shrines of the Blessed Virgin ;" " Early Native Mis-
sions in North America;" "Across the Isthmus from Colon to
Panama," and " Saintly Men and Women of Our Times," as well
as lighter reading.
1917-] NEW BOOKS 415
AF spiritual manuals for our soldiers and sailors, we note a timely,
V compact little prayer-book with the inviting title, God's Armor,
published by the Central Bureau of G. R. C. Central Society, St.
Louis (12 cents). Also A Handy Companion, an excellent collec-
tion of prayers, compiled by a Vincentian Father and dedicated to
" our soldiers and sailors and to the honor and glory of the cross
and flag." (Philadelphia: H. L. Kilner & Co.)
P. BUTTON & CO., New York, has sent us a copy of an
artistic 1918 Calendar entitled Eat and Grow Thin. The
Calendar gives scientific information on food values and practical
directions as to menus written by the well-known authority, Vance
Thompson.
TN its Catholic Calendar for 1918 the Mount Carmel Guild pre-
•*- sents a compilation of real artistic and literary merit. The quo-
tations for each day are happily chosen, principally from Catholic
authors. The Calendar is sold (price 50 cents) for the benefit of
the charitable work of the Guild. We hope it will receive a warm
welcome and grace many a Catholic home.
PAMPHLET PUBLICATIONS.
Our Sunday Visitor Press, New York, has published a small pamphlet,
entitled The Reformation Condemned by the World's Best Historians. It is
particularly useful now because of the Lutheran centenary.
The Catholic Mind, Vol. XV., No. 20, contains Joan of Arc's Catholic
Persecutors, by Terence L. Connolly, S.J., and an article on the Catholic his-
torian, James Balmes, by John C. Reville, S.J. No. 21 includes The Evils of
Drunkenness, by J. Harding Fisher, S.J. ; The Reconciliationists, by Walter
Dwight, S.J. ; What Menaces the Family, by Michael I. Stritch, S.J., and
Why Catholic Schools Exist, by the Archbishop of St. Louis.
Their Crimes (London: Cassell & Co.) is a translation of a French
publication which dealt with the war methods of the German invaders. Poland
Under the Germans comes from The Complete Press, London. A Spanish
Catholic's Visit to England is published by Hodder & Stoughton, New York.
Charles Hanson Towne writes The Balfour Visit (New York: George H.
Doran & Co.).
General Von Bissing's Testament, published by T. Fisher Unwin, London,
is a study of the last documents of the former Governor General of Belgium in
the light of the peace proposals of the German Government.
The Australian Catholic Truth Society has published Religion and Modern
Fiction, by Dr. Gerald R. Baldwin; How to Help the Sick and Dying, by Rev.
J. C. S. Vas; Infallibility, by Father Stanislaus M. Hogan, O.P., and a small
pamphlet, useful in conducting the Holy Hour, Can You Not Watch One Hour
With Me?
Courtes gloscs sur les £vangiles du Dimanche (Paris: Gabriel Beauchesne),
by the Bishop of Dijon, gives helpful suggestions on the Gospel of every Sun-
day in the year.
IRecent Events.
In France a new Cabinet crisis has arisen.
France. After retaining power for some two months,
the Ministry of M. Painleve, after receiving
a vote of confidence in its military and diplomatic policy, was de-
feated on the question of its conduct on the internal affairs of the
nation, especially with reference to the way in which the pacifists
had been treated. The Chamber wished an immediate debate upon
this question, in view of what a large number of members felt to be
the want of energy and decision on the part of the Government.
The Government's proposal to postpone debate on the conduct of
internal affairs until the end of the month was defeated by a vote
of two hundred and seventy-seven to one hundred and eighty-six,
a defeat which was largely due to the abstention of the Socialists.
M. Painleve's government has had a somewhat troubled existence,
and it has never possessed the full confidence of the nation. The
resignation of M. Painleve has been accepted by the President, but
at the time these lines are being written there is no designation of
his successor, although the name of M. Clemenceau is being promi-
nently proposed.
It is evident that the Sacred Union which existed during the
first two years of the War is no longer in force, but it is to be
hoped that this does not indicate any serious dissensions in the na-
tional forces. In fact want of decision was the cause of the fall
of the last Government.
At the time these lines are being written,
Russia. Russia seems to be at the end of what prom-
ised to be a long civil war. According to
latest reports, M. Kerensky has defeated the rebel government, set
up by M. Lenine, has entered the capital and the complete over~
throw of the Bolsheviki seems to have been accomplished. Their
attempt to set up a government seems to have resulted in the failure
which it deserved. It would have been a calamitous event not only
for Russia, but for the rest of Europe, and even for the world, if
M. Lenine had been successful in his attempt, for not merely was
there danger of a separate peace being made with Germany, but
1917-] RECENT EVENTS 417
his avowed programme involved the confiscation of the lands of
rich proprietors and of the property of capitalists in general. M.
Lenine had declared that rulers of all countries were pirates, and
that the time had come for the Proletariat to take possession of all
property in every country. In fact, he was the representative of
the most extreme form of the International Association of Social-
ists, which seeks to band together the working people of the world
against their employers and to take possession of their property.
This Association exists in most countries, but since the War
began a division has arisen in their ranks. The more moderate
place country above everything else; the more extreme place the
interests, as they regard them, of the workingmen before country,
and of the latter M. Lenine has proved a most striking example.
Although Socialists of the same kind are to be found among all
the belligerents, perhaps more especially are they to be found in
France, where they have been able to destroy the Ministry of M.
Ribot and to exclude him from the Ministry of his successor.
The course of events which led up to the recent attempt of
Lenine is somewhat as follows: At the Moscow Conference, held
in August, it was learned that the Bolsheviki were about to renew
the attempt which they had made in July to obtain possession of
power at Petrograd. In view of this fact M. Kerensky made an
agreement with General Korniloff that a change in the government
was to be made, and that the General was to be, for a time at least,
a military dictator with a cabinet in which M. Kerensky was to be
Minister of Justice. This agreement having been made at Moscow,
M. Kerensky went to Petrograd to make arrangements for its being
carried into^effect, but with a weakness, which has at times char-
acterized his efforts, he made a compromise with the Bolsheviki
and broke the arrangement with General Korniloff. When the lat-
ter attempted to carry out the plan which had been made, by means
of the soldiers under his command, he failed in his attempt, was
declared a traitor and was arrested by M. Kerensky. But the lat-
ter did not succeed in bringing the Bolsheviki into a permanent
agreement with himself and the Provisional Government, the Bol-
sheviki being determined to obtain possession of supreme power.
When a few weeks ago, they demanded of the Provisional Gov-
ernment, of which M. Kerensky was the premier, complete control
of the Petrograd garrison, he refused this demand and broke with
them. Upon this, they rose up in rebellion and with very little
opposition secured possession of the capital, putting all the mem-
VOL. cvi. — 27
4i8 RECENT EVENTS [Dec.,
bers of the Provisional Government in prison. M. Kerensky, how-
ever, escaped and went to the headquarters of the army. The
latter gave in their adherence to him and marched upon the capital.
The vastness of the task laid upon the shoulders of any gov-
ernment that may be established, may be estimated by calling to
remembrance the fact that there are no fewer than one hundred
and eleven ethnological distinctions among the inhabitants of Rus-
sia. To harmonize all their differences seems something almost
impossible. The Ukraine has in fact already declared an almost
complete independence of Russia, and Finland is on the verge of
taking the same step. Reports have come to hand of similar pro-
ceedings in the more remote parts of the Empire. To make one
republic of these various nationalities may well demand construc-
tive abilities of the highest order. This is the task awaiting the
constitutent assembly which has been so long talked about and so
often deferred, but which may possibly meet in January.
Along the Western Front, stretching from
Progress of the War. the sea to Alsace, the Germans have made
no advance, nor made any seripus attempt
to do so. On the contrary, they are being steadily driven back both
along the British and French fronts. The British have now secured
all the ridges, stretching from the Somme, including the Vimy
Ridge, that of Messines and almost all of the Passchendaele Ridge.
The French have secured possession of the south bank of the Ailette
River, the enemy having voluntarily evacuated a district of some-
thing like eighteen square miles. The Germans have been forced to
change their methods of warfare in order to meet, as effectively as
possible, the onslaught of the British. In the Somme battle the Ger-
mans held their front trenches with large masses of men, but the
British artillery destroyed them in such vast numbers that they
changed their tactics, and adopted the plan of holding the front
trenches with a small number of men, having behind them large
numbers to cope with the enemy when the front trenches had been
taken. This plan, however, did not prove as successful as they
wished in saving the lives of their men, and so they adopted in the
campaign, in the neighborhood of Messines, the placing of their men
in isolated shell-holds. At the present time a third method has been
adopted by the Germans. Little round towers which the British
somewhat irreverently call " pill-boxes," have been built in which
1917-] RECENT EVENTS 419
they have placed their men for protection against the British fire.
But even these are proving to be unable to resist what the Germans
call the fire drives of the British, and the Germans are being grad-
ually driven back so that the British are within five miles of
Roulers.
But different has been the course of events on the Italian Front.
Here the Italians have suffered a grave disaster, the causes of which
still remain much of a mystery and doubtless will so remain until
the end of the War reveals the whole truth. Within ten days, the
Italians lost the ground which they had been fighting for with won-
derful skill and bravery for some two years. And what is more the
Germans are now in possession of more than two thousand square
miles of Italian territory; almost in fact the whole province of
Venice. In fact the latest reports are that the line on the Piave
has been broken in two places. It therefore becomes probable that
a further retirement will have to be made.
Many reasons have been assigned for this catastrophe. First
reports attribute it to the immense number of the enemy's forces —
as many as one million two hundred thousand Austrians being said
to have taken part in the drive, to say nothing of the Germans.
There seems reason to think, however, that this is a great
exaggeration. The first accounts given by the Italians of the events,
accused some of the units of their own army of cowardice, al-
though this was afterwards denied. But it is hard not to think that
something like it or perhaps even treachery had penetrated the
ranks. It is now known that there has been in Italy a great short-
age of food, and that riots took place in August at Turin, and it is
also known that there has been an assiduous propaganda on the
part of the Austrians, for the purpose of exciting disaffection
among the Italian soldiers. In fact to such a degree of mendacity
have the Austrian warriors fallen, that they circulated among the
Italian soldiers reports that it was the British who fired on the
bread rioters in Turin; and they had made Rome their headquar-
ters and that Italy was being swallowed by the British lion. The
Italians were asked if they were willing to continue to fight for the
glory and honor of Great Britain.
The political state of affairs behind the army has been quite
bad for some time. Dissensions have existed, and on the very eve
of the disaster the Ministry was overturned by a vote of want of
confidence. A cabinet was formed, of which the premier is Senor
Vittorio Orlando, who a fortnight before had been accused of being
420 RECENT EVENTS [Dec.,
a pacifist. But as Baron Sonnino remains Foreign Minister, the
office which he has held since the beginning of the War, the main
policy of the cabinet may be considered as unchanged, although
little is said about what has transpired in political circles in Italy, as
the censorship doubtless is fully exercised to suppress all incon-
venient facts. Declarations, however, of the determination to resist
the foe were made by all parties, after the disasters took place,
notably by what is called the Catholic party, and there is ground to
hope that the effect of the Austro-German invasion will be to weld
the country together in a much more efficient manner than ever
before, and if this is the case, it may prove a blessing in disguise.
Another effect has been the formation of a Council of War,
consisting of three members — an Italian, a French and a British
officer. General Cadorna has been relieved of his command, and
succeeded by General Diaz. General Cadorna, however, is the
Italian member of the new War Council, although it has been re-
ported that he has declined the position. Another effect of the
Italian disaster, and a very important one, is the formation of an
Inter-Allied Council, consisting of the Premiers of France, Italy and
Great Britain and, it is hoped, of a representative of the United
States, as well as of the military representatives of all these three
countries. This council is to meet every month at Versailles, for
the purpose of bringing about union between the Allied armies
from the coast of Belgium to the Adriatic, the want of which union
is considered to have been the cause of much inefficiency. Meet-
ings have repeatedly taken place, but the resolutions arrived at have
not been carried into effect and consequently many of the plans have
failed. The new Inter- Allied Council is meant to remedy this dif-
ficulty, and to secure unity of action and one front for all three
nations, not only in resolving but in acting. This Council, how-
ever, has met with the criticism that a council of this kind will be
more likely to bring about disunion and want of decision, and that
what is really wanted is absolute union in the shape of a dictator-
ship.
The state of things, however, must be considered at present
moment very uncertain, certainly from a military point of view
and possibly from a political one.
Still another council is to be held in Paris of the Allies for the
purpose of coordinating the resources of the Allies. To this coun-
cil the President, Mr. Wilson, has sent Mr. House not for the
purpose of making peace, as he expressly states, but of preparing
1917-] RECENT EVENTS 421
a more energetic method of carrying on the War as the only way
to a permanent peace.
Yet a further council is expected soon to be held by the Allies,
called at the request of Russia, for the purpose of elaborating the
peace proposals of the Allies so as to bring them to that unity which
was shattered by the Russian cry for the abandonment of all so-
called imperialistic proposals.
In the Balkans things remain almost in statu quo. The Kaiser
is said to have promised ex-King Constantine that he will restore
him to his throne in a few months, and so there is at least the possi-
bility, if this report be true, that the Germans may make another
inroad through the Balkans to attack General Sarrail's army. On
the other hand, reports have gone abroad that the Entente Allies
will have, in the spring, one million men in Greece with a view of
marching on Constantinople, and in this decisive way to cut off the
Germans from their much desired goal.
In Palestine noteworthy progress has been made by the British
after a long quiescence. On the thirty-first of October, Beersheba
was taken and a few days afterwards Gaza. Subsequent advances
had been made, so that the British are now within less than forty
miles of Jerusalem, and the Turkish army has been driven back. It
is understood, however, that an attempt will be made to defend the
Holy City which now, it is said, is very strongly fortified. Farther
east the British have made a still further advance up the Tigris, and
are now within one hundred and twenty-five miles of Mosul, which
is the base of supplies for the Turks. While from the north some
slight move has been made by the Russian army in Armenia to-
wards Mosul, coming down from the north, but no reliance can be
placed upon its further advance, considering the state of affairs in
Russia. The report has been circulated for some time that Von
Falkenheyn has been with the Turkish troops, for the purpose of
driving back the British army and retaking Bagdad, but if this be
his purpose, the attempt, so far, has resulted in utter failure. The
campaign in East Africa seems to be going on in a desultory way;
small bands of Germans are still holding out.
As to the submarines, the situation is not quite as serious, per-
haps, as it was. The First Lord of the British Admiralty declares
that greater success than ever before has attended their efforts, to
destroy this piratical craft, but that the menace is by no means at
an end, as Germany is now building more quickly than ever. It
seems to be clear thui; destroyers are the most effective agents for
422 RECENT EVENTS [Dec.,
dealing with the submarines. Our own Secretary of the Navy has
just stated that great progress has been made in discovering a
method of locating submarines, after which their destruction is
comparatively easy.
No progress has been made on the Russian Front, except that
the Germans have evacuated a district near Riga. From the Rus-
sian Front, however, it is said that the Germans and Austrians have
been able to form the army which made the attack upon Italy.
Amidst all the welter of reports, more or
Germany. less contradictory which come from Ger-
many, some little hope may be felt that the
great object of the War, as defined by this country, namely to re-
move from a small clique of men the power to throw the world
into misery and confusion, is about to be realized, even in the coun-
try in which the evil began. It is evident that the Reichstag, as
representative of the people, is more and more taking into its own
hands the destinies of the country. In the opening days of Novem-
ber the leader of the Centrist Party, Herr Mathias Erzberger, said :
" This has been the most momentous week since the founding of
the Empire. Its achievements represent a permanent political gain
for the German people.'-' Probably Herr Erzberger is a little too
sanguine, for a change of such a momentous character as the pass-
ing over from the Kaiser to the people of political control, is
scarcely to be realized in one week. Such a change, in other coun-
tries, has been the work of centuries. However, a justification of
Herr Erzberger's words is found in the manner in which the new
Chancellor has been appointed. Dr. Michaelis' chancellorship was
but brief. It began in the middle of July and terminated at the
beginning of November. The appointment of Dr. Michaelis was
due to the sole will of the Kaiser, who did not consult any one of
the representatives of the people. Count Von Hertling, on the
contrary, would not accept the offer made to him of the chancel-
lorship unless he received the approval of the people's representa-
tives, and accordingly he consulted the heads of each political party
in the Reichstag, with the possible exception of the Socialists. Only
after he had listened to their views and found himself able to act
in collaboration with them did he consent to accept the office. This
course Von Hertling pursued, although he was reported afterwards
to have said that he only listened to the views of the leaders with-
I9I7-] RECENT EVENTS 423
out promising to carry them out. He himself has contradicted this
report. The result has been the formation of a Ministry in which
the National Liberals and the Progressives are represented by their
respective heads while Von Hertling, himself, belonging to the
Centrist Party, is its representative. The Socialists who form the
largest single party in the Reichstag have refused to take any part
in the Government, but will give it their support so long as it proves
itself, in their judgment, worthy of it. Nothing is said, however,
as to whether the rest of the members of the Cabinet have been
chosen on the same lines, but the proceedings so far are according
to strict parliamentary methods.
But the Kaiser's consent to this transformation is to be
doubted. It is more likely that he holds the Chancellor solely respon-
sible to himself, the Kaiser, and does not recognize the right of the
Reichstag to interfere. Here comes in the doubt about the stability
or even the genuineness of the transformation about which Herr
Erzberger spoke so confidently.
There is, however, a further reason for the satisfaction ex-
pressed by the Centrist leader. The fact that he had lost the con-
fidence of the majority of the Reichstag was the cause of Dr. Mich-
aelis' fall, and when he realized this fact he at once gave in his resig-
nation and this the Kaiser accepted, thereby seeming to give recog-
nition to the right of the Reichstag to control.
The reason of such unprecedented recognition, is the fact that
there is undoubtedly growing up in Germany a spirit of criticism
which the Kaiser would like to control, but finds himself without
the power to do so. The Reichstag indeed possesses no power to
initiate legislation. It has only the power to reject measures pro-
posed to it by the Government, and especially it has the right to
refuse to vote the credits which are necessary for carrying on the
War. Bismarck set at naught this right in his time because he
was not afraid of the people or their representatives, and no doubt
the Kaiser would be very willing to do the same, were it not that
the German people are manifesting their determination to discuss
the situation. This shows the growth of a spirit of independence.
The new Chancellor, Von Hertling, is the second Catholic
Chancellor of the German Empire, but one of quite a different type.
Both the new Chancellor and Prince Hohenlohe came from Bava-
ria, although Count Von Hertling is not by birth a Bavarian, but
a Hessian. Before accepting the chancellorship Count Von Hert-
ling had the reputation of being a reactionary of the reactionaries.
424 RECENT EVENTS [Dec.,
It was the sacred duty, he held, of the German soldier to submit
to the utmost brutalities of his officers as a part of religion. The
reading of Goethe and Schiller was in his view to be discouraged;
of parliamentary institutions he was the foe, and if what has been
said is proved true, he has now become the leader in the first step
toward their adoption. The elasticity of German thought has found
in him a striking exponent, for he has recently declared that Ger-
many is now fighting the battle of Europe (including in Europe
Great Britain) against this country. Whether the choice of the
Bavarian Premier indicates a transferance of power to the more
Christian parts of Germany may be a question. The Bavarians,
as is well known, have long lacked sympathy, to put it mildly, with
the Prussians, although it is stated that during the present war the
Bavarian soldiers have been as brutal as the Prussians, and the
present King of Bavaria has been one of the most outspoken in
advocating extreme terms of peace.
Among the discussions which are taking place in Germany at
the present time is this very question of peace terms. The Reich-
stag resolution of July iQth, which laid down peace by negotiations
without annexations, forms the basis of these discussions. This
resolution was endorsed by the Kaiser in his reply to the Holy
Father. The Reichstag resolution and the Kaiser's reply, how-
ever, prove so unacceptable to many Germans that they have
formed an organization called the " Fatherland Party," whose pur-
pose it is to combat the peace of compromise and renunciation de-
manded by that resolution. This Fatherland Party aims at the
annexation of all territory that Germany can get, and is still un-
convinced that Germany must lose in the end all territory that she
has conquered. Leading Germans in and out of the Reichstag crit-
icize severely the aims of this party as being against the policy
solemnly adopted by the Reichstag and the Emperor himself. One
of these critics says, " The aim of those elements was to rob the
German people of one of the best fruits of their victory, namely,
constitutional progress." Friedrich Naumann, the author of Cen-
tral Europe, declares : " That a foreign policy after the pattern of
the Fatherland Party cannot bring peace." The movement of the
world in a democratic direction is recognized by one of the Pro-
gressives, and he states that the Fatherland Party would not be
able to check it. On the other hand, Admiral Von Tirpitz has re-
cently declared that to give up Belgium would be to give up the
best fruit of the War, and it is well known the Pan .Germans re-
1917-] RECENT EVENTS 425
fused to consent to the relinquishment of any of the lands conquered
by Germany. The present Foreign Secretary, however, Von Kuehl-
mann, stated that the only question at issue is Alsace-Lorraine, but
that the giving up of these provinces is a thing which cannot be
even discussed.
Another matter discussed in Germany is the formation of the
new kingdom of Poland. The provisions of a constitution have
been published for the new kingdom which Germany and Austria
are planning. This constitution seems to be in its terms quite lib-
eral. Poland is declared to be an independent constitutional state.
Inasmuch as the overwhelming majority of the people are of the
Roman Catholic Faith, the Catholic religion is declared to be the
official religion of the state, but at the same time full freedom of
religious belief is " vouchsafed." The state is to be a hereditary
monarchy, the Diet is to elect the ruler and control the dynasty's
affairs and successorship. Parliament will consist of two cham-
bers, the lower house to be elected on the basis of a general secret
ballot of one Deputy to every sixty thousand inhabitants. Half
of the Senate will be elected, the remainder appointed by the King.
Deputies will serve five years and Senators ten.
What will be the bounds and limits of Poland in this new
constitution is not yet settled. According to some reports Galicia
is to be added, and thereby that part of Poland that fell to Austria
is to be reunited to form a part of the new kingdom. But there is
no sign that Posen, Germany's share of the old Poland, will be
joined to the new kingdom. In fact, a strong opposition has arisen
among the conservatives in Germany, especially those who occupy
East Prussia, to any restitution to Poland or even to the estab-
lishment of the kingdom, because they fear that the Poles within
their own districts will at once seek to be united and carry on an
agitation towards that end. The Polish question, therefore, is
forming a serious ground of dissension.
A very important event has taken place,
Japan. one which brings to an end what promised
to be a great source of disquietude. One
of the enemy's . chief efforts has been to bring about dis-
sension and mutual distrust between this country and Japan. These
efforts have been frustrated by the conclusion of an agreement
between the recent Japanese envoy to this country and the United
States Government with reference to China. By this agreement
426 RECENT EVENTS [Dec.,
all grounds of the conflict are removed. The United States recog-
nizes the special rights of Japan in China on account of geographi-
cal position. What these special interests are is not specified in
detail, but there are those who say that the result is to give to
Japan a position in the East analogous to that which this country
holds over the two Americas. On the other hand, Japan recog-
nizes the " open door," and claims no right to interfere with the
trade or commerce of other nations. This agreement has some
bearing on the conduct of the War because Japan pledges naval
cooperation in the Pacific, and expresses an earnest desire to co-
operate with this country in waging war against the German Gov-
ernment. The conclusion of this agreement has not pleased the
Government of China, which has entered a protest at Washington
and Tokio against the action of the two Governments in settling
Chinese affairs without consulting the Chinese Government. While
China may have some grounds for complaint, on account of the
manner of the proceedings, it is not to be thought that she will
suffer by the result, but will rather benefit, for Japan, acting in union
with the United States, will be less likely to be extreme in her de-
mands on China than if she acted independently. This country, as
is well known, always acted toward China the part of a good friend
and it is not likely to change its attitude.
November 16, 1917.
With Our Readers.
WILLINGLY or unwillingly man has been forced by the World
War to recognize the need of self-regeneration. The whole world
is " out there " with the men who have stripped themselves of selfish-
ness and who face death at every moment, and the whole world is
forced to think with them upon death, or at least upon the real value of
life.
* * * *
IN the light of that thought sensual pleasure, personal indulgence
are seen to be but contemptible selfishness, and in the face of the
tragedy we are ashamed of them. We have had to remold our es-
timates ; to reestablish our values. What was once held as impossible
to abandon, is now willingly offered; sacrifices once imagined futile
and beyond our strength, are now the order of the day both for the
individual and the family. It is like the experience of a man accus-
tomed to many creature comforts, to all that money and friends may
bring, suddenly being called upon to live alone in a far distant, desert
place, forced to fit himself to narrow circumstances, to impoverished
surroundings, to endure the heat and the cold, the snow and the rain,
and to bear all these as best he can. Such an experience is a test of his
manhood. Today the manhood of the race is under test. In the
desert, forsaken places, man alone must see God or nothing. If in
life and victory he see nothing, all morale, all hope, all cause worth
fighting for cease to be, and so, perforce, stripped of its materialism,
the world again sees God.
* * * *
THE literature of today gives the first evidence of this return. Liter-
ature was steeped in sensualism. The first step in its betterment —
for the way to God is gradual and long — is a turning away from the
" fleshly " school. The new novel that now treats unblushingly of
sensualism is the exception. No doubt there has been, since the War
opened, a gross perversion of morality by a few writers who have
ever worshipped at the shrine of impurity. As an example we might
mention a recent work by the English novelist, Louis Wilkinson. The
dedication of this book to Powys reveals, at once, its character or
rather lack of character.
But the literary world passes by the authors who find sex their
principal interest in life, to find healthier and higher subjects for its
thought. The new literature gives promise of being inspired with an
428 WITH OUR READERS [Dec.,
epic spiritual greatness. So far much of it is ephemeral ; journalistic,
but even so it is a contribution, a help, a challenge to the gifted minds
and gifted pens that are to come. The new literature promises to be
a literature of the return to God, and to religion, to the spiritual and
the serious truths and values of life, and the past denial of God's will
in the world and our obligation to live up to it, that has been taken so
seriously, begins to look puerile and futile. The cult of humanity is
passing: the worship of God returns.
* * * *
IT may be alleged that " the wish is father to the thought." Yet
many recent books give reason to believe that the hope is not with-
out warrant.
As an indicative note we find in a secular journal, the New
York Sun, the following editorial on prayer. It is in answer to a
correspondent who wrote that he thought the best prayer was to fight :
" He is mistaken in thinking that since the Deity is omniscient,
knowing what is in our hearts, to say to Him prayer, spoken or un-
spoken, is a waste of time. He is mistaken in thinking a prayer for
victory illogical or impudent or ineffective.
" When we pray we do net, even the boldest of us, venture to sug-
gest that God shall accomplish our will and purpose. We ask for guid-
ance, light upon His will and purpose and strength to carry out our
part in it. And what is meant by a waste of time? We cannot waste
His time, and surely the moments of self-preparation for our duty are
not ill spent.
" We pray for victory because only through victory can we do the
right as God gives us to see the right. We are not so arrogant as to
think of the Deity as allied with ourselves. We are His servants. We
no more presume in asking Him for instruction what to do and strength
to do it than a child that turns to its father for instruction and support
is guilty of impudence "
* * * *
T*HE last annual Report of the Rockefeller Foundation speaks of the
< need of religion in every camp for soldiers : " The importance of
providing educational, recreational and religious opportunities for men
in camp has been so conclusively demonstrated in this country and in
Europe that it is hard to see how a factor bearing so directly on the
morale of the troops, and hence upon their fighting efficiency, can here-
after be omitted from any intelligent system of military 'preparedness.'"
" The War," declared the Dean of Princeton University, in an
address at Barnard College, " is waking another idea. It is the idea
of discipline and duty ; it is the idea that there is no true success for a
man unless he first succeeds in becoming a man, with his mind, heart
and conscience well trained to their highest power. If this force
1917- ] WITH OUR READERS 429
comes in to lead American life, we shall have the means of guiding,
curbing and ennobling our material prosperity, and likewise of saving
our intellectual and political freedom."
And the New York Evening Post, commenting on George Moore's
-recent article in the Fortnightly, in which he pleaded as usual for the
right to be indecent, said :
" Before the War this was a topic that would draw blood every
time it was unsheathed. Anybody had a right to spit the gross body of
Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy which insisted on a full set of clothes even for
Truth. And by Truth, intoned with a certain emphasis by intense
young ladies just out of the short skirts of 'Candida,' was indicated the
free discussion of subjects that the Anglo-Saxon spirit has clothed with
a sort of reticence. There seemed to be only one kind of Truth that
interested literary people of those remote times of three and a half years
ago. Life was on the point o'f filing a bill of divorce against literature
because literature had developed a monomania which took her from
house and home to go gadding after exotic 'furriners' — Flaubert,
Gorky, Zola, Artzibasheff, Pszbytchefsky, and others
" There are few blessings mankind has to thank this War for ;
but at least this terrible ill-wind has blown away many fogs of fads and
obsessions of which the continual cry for 'frankness/ 'for the right to
lay bare the stark, undraped passions of men,' is one. The normal re-
lation of things to each other has been regained. Not only Lucretia
Borgia and Messalina, but also Mr. and Mrs. Pendennis, and even
Tacitus, have crept back into literature. The little god, with his edged
toys, is not allowed any longer to smash all our mirrors, or stay up
with his elders to all hours monopolizing the conversation, but tucked
away in his cradle, is glad that the fate of 'Art for Art's Sake' has
not been his. Literature shows signs of returning to its traditional
functions. Writing promises to become again a vital thing in the life
of average man and woman, because people who write have again
taken up, been forced, in fact, to reassume, the mission of prophecy.
The world is living through an epic war. Those gifted with a long-
distance imagination are called on to trace the shadows of the goal for
those who fight. But also the foreground has so suddenly filled with
new interest, swarms so busily with new impressions, that the recorder
of ephemeral snapshots has no leisure to linger and bite his thumb at
the lay figure of the hypocritical Puritan.
" The stage bustles with events. Woe betide the old-school authors
who cannot adapt themselves to its kaleidoscope movement. For the
most part they have not been a shining success at a lightning change.
Some have simply gone on as if Louvain had never been sacked ;
others, like Wells, have rushed into the thick of the fray, and lost
their way down a maze of communicating trenches. Meanwhile a
430 WITH OUR READERS [Dec.,
fresh generation of warrior-writers has grown up to the occasion,
keen of eye and ear. As a young French author, who saw service at
Gallipoli said, they live in the trenches as in a monastery, apart from
life, contemplating it in its just proportions, at a distance. The bar-
rage of death is a daily invocation to thoughtfulness. The problems
of peace will not find these youngsters unready, frivolous, or myopic."
THE mission and power of the press has been demonstrated by
the literary influences that have contributed to the renaissance
of the Faith in France and its magnificent efflorescence of sacrifice and
courage now commanding the admiration of the world. It is generally
thought that this renaissance began after the outbreak of the War.
It is well for us to remember that it began before the War, that when
the War opened, it was well on its vigorous way, prepared to furnish
to that sorely afflicted land an inexhaustible spring of hope, of re-
newed purpose, of perseverance. Our readers are already familiar
with the band of young writers who were the first prophets of that
rebirth of the Faith in France.
* * * *
IN an article in the September Studies, Virginia Crawford says in
this connection : " The France that is fighting by our side is not
the outcome solely of war conditions as people have vaguely assumed.
The forces that have controlled her go back at least to the beginning
of the century, and the French themselves, with their keen analytical
faculty, had noted the advent of their new national spirit long before
the war clouds darkened the horizon."
* * * *
TO trace the genesis of this new national spirit ; to appreciate it
fully, we must realize the conditions preceding it. The loss of
Alsace-Lorraine to France had resulted in enduring melancholy mem-
ories; in a sense of national helplessness and irremediable defeat.
These begot in the young intellectuals of France " a mood of pessimism
leading to an incapacity for action and a habit of morbid introspection,
all of which, reflected in her literature, reacted in a measure on the
nation at large. It was in the generation that reached manhood to-
wards 1885 that this tendency — to put it bluntly — this decadence became
most marked." For a study of this decadence Mrs. Crawford refers
us to Paul Bourget's Essais de Psychologic; and to a volume, entitled
Les Jeunes Gens d'Aujourd hui, by "Agathon," a name covering the
work of several hands, for " the digest of an inquiry carried out very
widely in 1912 among the educated young men of the day, not into
the pessimism of the last century, but into that new spirit which since
the dawn of the twentieth, men realized had begun to permeate the
nation."
1917.] WITH OUR READERS 431
This book declares that the writers of the day were far less inter-
ested in self-analysis than their predecessors: that their whole life
was characterized by a love of action. With regard to patriotism and
religion their craving was for clear and definite principles leading
to tangible duties. This is important when we remember that, at the
great educational institutions, many students besides being anti-clerical
were at least indifferent to patriotism and frankly anti-militarist.
* * * *
A REVIVAL of patriotism in France was bound to link itself to a
religious revival. "To Frenchmen," says Mrs. Crawford, " with
any historical sense and with a conviction of the noble destiny reserved
for their country, her Catholicism is an integral part of her life. To
break with it is in great measure to break with the whole tradition
of the nation Without in any way ignoring the essential part
played by theology and philosophy in the French Renaissance of faith
of recent years, it is true to say that much of it is due to her men of
letters."
The conversion of Brunetiere, Bourget, and Huysmans echoed not
only throughout France but Europe also. Working less clamorously
but just as surely on the mind of the nation, were Claudel, Charles
Peguy, Francis Jammes, Ernest Psichari and Joseph Lotte. Peguy
and Psichari died on the battlefield. "At once they are judged by a
fresh standard ; a flood of light is directed on their lives ; and men of
all schools of thought are eager to claim fellowship with them."
* * * *
T)fiGUY, as the guide and the prophet of these young intellectuals,
-1 is especially interesting. He was of peasant stock and his earliest
years were spent at Orleans, where his widowed mother had charge of
the chairs in the cathedral. In his early years he had a great devotion
to Joan of Arc. But he abandoned his Faith and drifted into rationalist
and socialist circles. A secular marriage seems to have been the
permanent obstacle preventing his complete return to the Faith even
when he had renewed his personal belief in it. His good mother's
prayers, his devotion to the Blessed Virgin, to St. Genevieve and Joan
of Arc enabled him to say in 1908 to his friend Lotte that he had re-
covered his Faith and was a Catholic. His writings show high apprecia-
tion of the power of personal holiness in. the world. He has written
most forcibly of the Passion of Our Blessed Lord; of the Christian
Mysteries ; of the Sorrows of Mary ; of grace and of sin. He boldly
preached his religious beliefs, and never hesitated to risk his worldly
welfare in so doing. Nevertheless, he continued in the anomalous
attitude of one who was a Catholic yet never received the Sacraments.
But his influence as a literary writer was Catholic, and the sources
from which he drew his appeal to his countrymen were Catholic also.
432 BOOKS RECEIVED [Dec., 1917.]
Indeed, he believed himself an appointed instrument for the resurrec-
tion of the Faith in France.
FOR the convenience of our readers we note that the work by Harold
J. Laski, discussed by Dr. Ryan in the last issue of THE CATHOLIC
WORLD, is entitled Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty. Yale Uni-
versity Press. Price $2.50.
BOOKS RECEIVED.
LONGMANS, GREEN & Co., New York :
Horace and His Age. By J. F. d'Alton, D.D. $2.00 net. Means and Methods
in the Religions Education of the Young. By J. Davidson, Ph.D. $1.00
net. The Mystery of Gabriel. By M. Wood. $1.40 net. Through the
Dark Continent. By J. du Plessis, B.A., B.D. $4.50 net. Our Renaissance.
By H. Browne, S.J. $2.60 net. The History of the Society of Jesus in
North America. By T. Hughes, S.J. $8.00 net. The Parish Theatre. By
Rev. J. T. Smith, LL.D. $1.00 net. Sermon Notes. Edited by Rev. C. C.
Martindale. Second Series by the late Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson.
$1.25 net.
BENZIGER BROTHERS, New York :
At the Foot of the Sand-Hills. By H. S. Spalding, S.J. $1.00. The Catho-
lic's Work in the World. By Rev. J. Husslein, S.J. $1.00. The Boyhood of
a Priest. By A. O'Connor. Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. By
Rev. R. Ratcliffe, S.J. In Spite of All. By E. Staniforth. $1.00. The Ruby
Cross. By M. Wallace. $1.25 net.
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS, New York:
The Old Testament in Greek. Volume I. — The Octateuch. Part I. — Genesis.
Part II. — Exodus and Leviticus. Part III. — Numbers and Deuteronomy.
Edited by A. E. Brooke, B.D., and N. McLean, M.A.
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & Co., Garden City, N. Y. :
Children's Book of Patriotic Stories. Edited by A. D. Dickinson and H. W.
Dickinson. $1.25 net. For France. $2.50 net.
GEORGE H. DORAN Co., New York :
The Balfour Visit. Edited by C. H. Towne.
HENRY HOLT & Co., New York :
State Socialism. Edited by W. E. Walling and H. W. Laidler. $2.00 net.
BONE & LIVERIGHT, New York:
Utopia of Usurers. By G. K. Chesterton. $1.25 net.
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, New York:
The Hostage. By Paul Claudel. $1.50 net.
THE HOLY NAME BUREAU, New York:
Very Rev. Charles Hyacinth McKenna, O.P., P.G. By Very Rev. V. F. O'Daniel,
O.P., S.S.M. Luther and Lutherdom. By H. DeniHe. $3.50.
JOSEPH F. WAGNER, New York :
Various Discourses. By Rev. T. J. Campbell. S.J. $2.00 net.
GEORGE H. DORAN Co., New York :
A War of Liberation. Pamphlet.
THE DOLPHIN PRESS, Philadelphia:
Catholic Churchmen in Science. By J. J. Walsh, M.D. $1.00 net.
B. HERDER, St. Louis :
The Mediator. By Rev. P. Giermann, C.SS.R. $1.50 net.
THE QUEEN'S WORK, St. Louis:
Marian Poems. Cloth, 50 cents ; paper, 25 cents.
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, Chicago:
Moseteno Vocabulary and Treatises. By B. Bibolotte.
THE REILLY & BRITTON Co., Chicago:
Charred Wood. By Myles Muredach. $1.25 net.
STELLA PRINCE STOCKER, Duluth, Minn. :
Sieur du Lhut. Historical Play. By Stella P. Stocker.
WILLIAM HEINEMANN, London :
Is War Civilisation? By Christophe Nyrop.
GREY & Co., Cork, Ireland :
The Honan Hostel Chapel. Cork. By Sir John R. O'Connell.
THE EDUCATIONAL Co. OF IRELAND, Dublin :
The Whatf Why? How? Plan for Writing an Essay. By Rev. J. B. Murphy.
Pamphlet.
THE
VOL. CVI.
JANUARY, 1918.
No. 634.
ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA.
BY EDMUND T. SHANAHAN, S.T.D.
I.
NE of the historic seats of difficulty in the New Tes-
tament Scriptures is the doctrine of the Parousia or
" coming of the Son of Man." From the early por-
tions of St. Matthew's Gospel to the last verse but
one of the Apocalypse, this event is repeatedly por-
trayed as if on the verge of happening, as if the entire body of
writers actually believed it nigh. Was it under this foreshortened
view of history that the Lord's reporters wrote? Did they think
of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, which the Son of Man came
to found, as a brief evangelizing process destined to no greater
length of days than the Kingdom of Israel? A question of no less
interest to science than to piety; and the object of investigation in
these pages.
Most readers, be they critical or plain, forget to discount the
effect of language on the creation of this problem. They overlook
the fact that the texts of the New Testament, concerned with the
Lord's coming, are not by nature such that he who runs may read
them with his hurrying sight. Mental refocussing is necessary.
This Western mind of ours, unaccustomed to the crowded character
of prophetic speech, its lack of perspective, and disregard of time,
is prone to imagine that events were thought to occur as crowdedly
as their manner of narration; and with this impressionistic infer-
Copyright. 1917. THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY OF ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE
IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK.
VOL. cvi. — 28
434 ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA [Jan.,
ence the mote in our own eye easily becomes the beam in another's.
Because perspective is lacking in the language, we hastily infer that
it is wanting also to the thought, and start at once wondering or
explaining how it was that the Lord's reporters could have been
the victims of such glaring error, before first assuring ourselves,
through painstaking objective study, that they actually were. The
result is an unconscious prejudgment that settles the whole question
in advance of proof; that turns aside to apology or condemnation;
that does everything conceivable but pound its first impressions
diligently in the crucible of criticism.
Take St. Matthew, for instance, when runningly read, after
the manner described. He is a stone of stumbling and a rock of
offence almost at every turn. We are scarcely well into the pages
of his Gospel before we find the Saviour solemnly assuring His
disciples that " they shall not have gone through the cities of Israel,
till the Son of Man come;"1 nay, that " some of those standing by
shall not taste death, till they see the Son of Man coming in His
Kingdom."2 In explaining the Parable of the Cockle, Jesus an-
nounces that the angels shall go forth for the final harvest " at the
end of the age"3 — a phrase associated with the last days of Israel,
in the Jewish literature of the times. Towards the end of His public
ministry, the Saviour is reported as saying, apparently in connec-
tion with the fall of Jerusalem, that " immediately after the tribula-
tion of those days . . . they shall see the Son of Man coming
on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory,"4 to gather
the elect. In still another verse we come upon the promise made
the Twelve, that " in the regeneration, when the Son of Man shall
sit on the throne of His glory, they also shall sit on twelve thrones,
judging the twelve tribes of Israel."5 And who that does not
remember the text, over which scholarship has immemorially stumb-
led— the parting remark of Jesus to the Pharisees : " You shall not
see Me henceforth, until you say: 'Blessed is He that cometh in
the name of the Lord?' "6 Finally, when Jesus stands before His
judges, and is asked if He be in very truth " the Christ, the Son of
God," He not only answers impliedly in the affirmative, He even
supplements the answer with the prediction : " Besides, I say to you,
Henceforth you shall see the Son of Man seated on the right hand
of power, and coming on the clouds of heaven."7 Difficulties enough,
1 Matt. x. 23. a Matt. xvi. 28.
* Matt. xiii. 40, 39, 49 ; xxviii. 20. * Matt. xxiv. 30
• Matt. xix. 28. ° Matt, xxiii. 39. T Matt. xxvi. 64.
1918.] ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA 435
assuredly, to tax the wits of the wisest. Difficulties, too, that have
many more of like tenor to keep them company, in this, as in almost
every other book of the New Testament Scriptures.
Difficulties, be it noted, but not "proofs," not "evidence."
Investigation alone can invest them with the latter character;
they do not possess it of themselves. There is a prior problem to
be considered, before the meaning of this group of phrases can be
put in a proper light for judgment; and until this prior problem
is carefully weighed, we are not in a position to make pronounce-
ments, one way or the other, in settlement of their meaning. The
problem which has this priority over all others is St. Matthew's
conception of the length of earthly life allotted to the "Kingdom
of Heaven" — how long, in other words, he thought it was going
to last, before the consummation came.
If he understood the " Kingdom of Heaven" in a purely
eschatological sense, associated, that is, with the end of Israel and
the world, then the " end of the age," the " regeneration," and what
not else of difficulty above recited from his pages will have to be
accepted in this contracted significance and light, however after-
wards explained. But if investigation should disclose that " the
Kingdom of Heaven," as St. Matthew conceived it, was to have a
history — a history to which no definite limits were set, save in one
dark and trying spot, in all his pages — then the distinct scientific
possibility opens up, that some of the texts above enumerated may
refer to the beginnings of this historical Kingdom, quite as likely
as to its end; and with the emergence of this possibility, the whole
list of phrases quoted at the outset of our theme cease to constitute
reliable " evidence" of belief in the nearness of the Advent, and
become open problems for investigation, instead. Even the adverb
" immediately"8 of the twenty-fourth chapter, and the famous near
future verb9 which St. Matthew was so fond of employing all
through his writings — even these two apparently reliable " sources "
lose their evidential character in the light of the possibility men-
tioned, and pass from the certain to the problematic stage. And
yet all these disputable texts — disputable because their time-refer-
ence may as likely be to the public opening of the Kingdom as to
its convulsive close — have been carried over in a body to the former
period, on the supposition that St. Matthew thought the end of the
world impending, and composed his gospel under the spell of this
false impression.
•Matt. xxiv. 29.
436 ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA [Jan.,
This supposition, though commonly sor regarded, is far from
being in the established stage. The evidence to the contrary makes
an impressive sum when gathered, and offers difficulty to the critic
who would explain its worth away. When the Roman captain at
Capharnaum asked Jesus to heal his orderly who had begun to show
signs of sickening for his end, the Saviour declared that such faith
as this pagan officer professed, He had not found in the length and
breadth of Israel. And then He added : " I say to you that many
shall come from the East and the West, and shall sit down with
Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob in the Kingdom of Heaven ; but the
sons of the Kingdom shall be cast forth into the outer darkness:
there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth."10
Several things are of interest in this statement of Jesus — the
unfavorable contrast of the faith of Israel with that of the outlying
world, as represented in the person of the Centurion; the compar-
ing of the " Kingdom of Heaven " to a feast or banquet — a current
way of referring to the Messianic Era and the joy of its blest be-
holders; the express prediction that a multitude would come from
the East and the West, and pass through the earthly portals of the
Kingdom into eternal life — a statement manifestly implying his-
tory ; and finally, the reverse application of the phrase, " there shall
be weeping and gnashing of teeth," which the Jews were wont
to quote of the rejected Gentiles, little recking that its point would
be turned against themselves.11 The admission of the nations and
the rejection of the Jews could not be more plainly intimated, and,
in fact, nowhere else is, in the New Testament pages. Assuredly,
the writer who incorporated this material into his account could not
have been of those who looked to the Kingdom's sudden perishing
— a movement no sooner begun than ended in the crashing of the
world.
It is not the only time in St. Matthew's pages that the peopling
of the inaugurated Kingdom is described under the figure of a feast
or banquet to which the bidden guests refused to come. The same
figure recurs in the Parable of the Marriage Feast, and the thought
is clearly of a new historical process about to begin, not of one soon
to compass its allotted span. " When the King had heard that His
invitations had been slighted, He was angered, and sending His
armies, He destroyed those murderers, and burnt their city. Then
He saith to His servants: the wedding is indeed ready, but those
invited were not worthy. Go ye, therefore, into the by-ways, and
"Matt. viii. 10, 12. "Matt. viii. 12.
1918.] ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA 437
as many as ye shall find, bid to the marriage feast. And His serv-
ants going forth into the highways gathered together all that they
found, both bad and good, and the wedding was filled with guests.
And the King went in to see the guests : and He saw there a man
who had not on a wedding garment. And He saith to him : Friend,
how earnest thou in hither not having on a wedding garment ? But
he was silent. Then the King said to the servants : Bind his hands
and feet and cast him into the outer darkness : there shall be weep-
ing and gnashing of teeth. For many are called but few are
chosen."12
The reader will observe that the ordering of the servants to
recruit the Kingdom from peoples other than the chosen takes place
after the destruction of the city, not before;13 a recorded circum-
stance that leaves three luminous shafts in its trail. First of all, it
throws doubt upon the supposition that St. Matthew looked for the
consummation of the Kingdom soon after the city fell. In the sec-
ond place, it enables us to understand why the earliest instructions
of the Lord were to avoid going at once with His word into the
lands of the Gentiles.14 Last, but not least, it explains the main-
tenance of the law of Moses until " all things are accomplished,"15
all things, that is, which concerned Israel, not, necessarily, all that
concern the world.
Is the mention of " the man without a wedding garment,"1'
out of place in this parable? There are those who take this view.
Some stray ending of another story, they tell us, has here crept in
from a nodding compiler's pen; people invited in from the ways
could not be expected to provide themselves with festal attire. But
is that the point? Does the incident refer to the motley group
brought into the Kingdom from the cross-roads, or to those of
Israel previously mentioned, who slighted the invitation and were
declared " unworthy?"17 Nay, have we not proof that these were
the subject of reference, in the anti- Jewish application of the say-
ing : " there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth ?" The point in-
tended is worthiness of disposition, not opportunity for change of
raiment; exactly what we should expect to hear from the Master's
lips. A study of the context is a safer guide to meaning than
Shabbath or Midrash parallels, which, when compared to the new
teaching of Jesus, are " as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water
unto wine."
"Matt. xxii. i, 14. "Matt. xxii. 8. "Then He saith to His servants." "Matt. x. 5, 6.
"Matt, v. 17, 19; xxiii. 2, 3, 23. "Matt. xxii. n. "Matt. xxii. 5, 8.
438 ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA [Jan.,
Taking everything into consideration, therefore — who can
read this suggestive Parable of the Marriage Feast — Logian hy-
pothesis or no Logian hypothesis in mind — without gathering the
assurance that the " Kingdom of Heaven " on earth is to have more
willing and more worthy servitors, after the slayers of the prophets
shall themselves be slain in turn and their city burnt to ashes by
the King? There is not the slightest intimation that the author of
the First Gospel links the fate of the " Kingdom of Heaven " on
earth with the impending doom of Israel. On the contrary, there
is every indication that he regarded the world-wide career of the
new Kingdom as properly beginning when Israel's power was a
thing of the past. " One greater than the Temple is here." 18 Nor
should we forget another significant feature about this Parable of
the Marriage Feast: St. Matthew, alone of all, inserts it in his ac-
count, and this selective interest on his part occasions legitimate
matter for surprise. Critics are wont to say that the anti-Pharisa-
ism of the author governed his choice of documents. This is hardly
to the point. How explain the mental processes of a writer — sup-
posedly a believer in the nearness of the end — who incorporates
into his text a mass of material at odds with his supposed personal
belief, and so clearly out of keeping with the theology of the Syna-
gogue? It is a problem for scholarship, which, in the interest of the
mechanics and psychology of the literary profession, it cannot af-
ford to decline. A distinctly new Kingdom — not a purified Juda-
ism, drawing proselytes from all the nations — will eventually prove
itself the sole adequate explanation.
There is still further evidence that St. Matthew never con-
nected the end of the " Kingdom of Heaven " with the burning of
the City and the clank of heathen arms in the sanctuary of the
Temple. Let us assemble its scattered threads, to weigh their
worth. " The Kingdom of Heaven " is like a man who sowed good
seed in his field,19 the Sower being none other than the Son of
Man,20 and the field of His sowing — the world, the wide Cosmos21
itself. " The Kingdom of Heaven is like a grain of mustard seed,
which is the least indeed of all seeds, but whe.n it is grown up, it is
greater than all herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of
heaven come, and lodge in its branches22 — a familiar Old Testa-
18 Matt. xii. 6. M Matt. xiii. 24. 20 Matt. xiii. 37.
" Matt. xiii. 24. *° Matt. xiii. 37.
n Matt. xiii. 38. Compare v. 14. " Yoq are the light of the world," not of
Israel merely.
" Matt. xiii. 31, 32.
1918.] ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA 439
ment figure for a mighty Kingdom, " under whose shelter all great
nations dwelt."23 " The Kingdom of Heaven is like a net that
gathereth of every kind, and one not to be drawn forth from the
sea until filled."24 " The Kingdom of Heaven is like a house-
holder hiring laborers for his vineyard25 — a vineyard that is to be
let out to other husbandmen who will bring forth its fruits in due
season,26 and receive the same reward of eternal life whether they
enter the Kingdom in its morning, noon, or evening hours, in its old
age or in its prime27 — a statement which may even be set down for
" editorial comment," without diminishing its historical value in the
slightest. Surely a Kingdom that was likened to so many growing,
living, gradual, dynamic and biological things could not have been
regarded as having within its infant self, from the first moments
of its cradling, the seeds of sudden death and dissolution !
Nor is the evidence confined to parabolic utterance, thence to
be distilled, drop by drop, through a process of analysis. Three
statements in direct discourse plainly reveal the Kingdom as an
historic world-movement, in which the sceptre has passed from
Judah to the nations of the earth. " Therefore I say to you, the
Kingdom of God shall be taken away from you, and given to a
nation bringing forth its fruits."28 " Going, therefore, teach ye
all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the
Son and- of the Holy Ghost."29 More pointed still is a sentence
in the eschatological discourse : " And this the Gospel of the King-
dom shall be preached in the whole inhabited earth as a testimony
unto all the nations; and then shall the end come."80
Is it possible that a writer, who, to all appearances, at least,
began his account with Jewish particularism, and ended it with the
assertion of such a world-wide universality set like a gem in the
midst of the eschatological discourse — is it possible that one so
writing could have built up this progressive climax, and at the same
time subscribe to the belief that the end of things was fast ap-
proaching? Is it not far more likely that we have misunderstood
some of his utterances, than that he should have composed his
gospel in the manner thought? Let us fill our minds for the mo-
ment with the current theory of scholarship, that the nearness of
the "Kingdom of Heaven," in the eschatological sense of the Final
* Ezek. xxxi. 6, 12; Dan. iv. 12, 14, 21, 22.
** Matt. xiii. 47, 48. M Matt. xx. i ; xxi. 33. " Matt. xxi. 41.
" Matt. xx. i, 3, 5, 1 2- 1 6.
* Matt. xxi. 43. The conception of the Christian society as a " nation " occurs
nowhere else in the Gospel. "Matt, xxviii. 19. "Matt. xxiv. 14.
440 ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA [Jan.,
Return, is the burden of the teaching of Jesus, as reported by St.
Matthew. This fairness of spirit will put us in a still better posi-
tion to see and judge, whether the evidence of an historic world-
process, which flashes forth so repeatedly in his pages, is substance
or shadow.
It is Professor Allen who is writing, and the subject is the
" Kingdom of Heaven," in the first canonical Gospel. Says Pro-
fessor Allen: "He (the Saviour) proclaimed its near advent. It
was at hand (iv. 17), and He bade His disciples make the same
proclamation (x. 7). This preaching was an evangel, i. e., good
news (iv. 23; ix. 35). The disciples were to pray for the coming
of the Kingdom (vi. 10). It would, however, not come in the
lifetime of the Messiah, but after His death, when He would come
as Son of Man (xvi. 28, cf. 21). This coming would usher in the
end of this dispensation (xxiv. 3). It would take place immedi-
ately after the great tribulation (xxiv. 29) which would accompany
the fall of Jerusalem (xxiv. 15, 16), i. e., within the lifetime of
that generation (xxiv. 34, cf. xvi. 28; x. 28). But God alone knew
the exact day and hour (xxiv. 36), and the good news must be
preached first to all nations (xxiv. 14, cf. xxviii. 19). It seems
clear that the Evangelist saw no obstacle to this preaching being
effected within a very short period (x. 28). The inauguration of
the kingdom is called the new birth (xix. 28). Then the Apos-
tles would sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel
(xix. 28). "81
Is this appraisal true to the facts recorded, and with no flaw
in the scientific process of its forming? Does the thought of the
First Gospel all refund into an eschatology, a sense of finality, so
close and narrow? If so, the history which St. Matthew assigned
to the career of the Kingdom is the veriest patch for brevity — a
century's half at the outset, if indeed of such length as that; and
we have had our labor for our pains in collecting evidence to the
contrary. It would certainly be a vain performance to attempt to
prove the existence of an historical current of thought in the pages
of the First Gospel, if we had editorial and personal assurances
from its author, that the Kingdom which Jesus came to establish
was to perish in a sudden world-disaster, sometime within the cen-
tury of its founding — at what precise moment God only knew.
But what critical warrant have we, that assurances to this effect are
nSt. Matthew. W. C. Allen, 1907, pref. Ixix. Cf. Cursus Script. Sacra, Knaben-
bauer ; Lexicon Gracum, Zordli ; Comment, in Matthamm. Cornelius a Lapide ;
Introductio in S. Script., Comely; Christl. Eschatologie, Atzberger.
1918.] ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA 441
actually to be found in the letter of the text ? That is the deciding
factor; and in what follows, the supposed existence of such testi-
mony will be made the object of criticism, in order to open up the
whole problem afresh for investigation and review.
When Jesus is twice said to have gone about the land, " preach-
ing the Gospel of the Kingdom ;"32 and when He is quoted by St.
Matthew as saying that " this Gospel of the Kingdom shall be
preached to the whole world, before the end comes " — was it in the
eschatological sense of consummation, or in the historical sense of
establishment, that He proclaimed it near ? Was its " good news,"
its " glad tidings " the approach of the Final Judgment and the
speedy Return of the Lord in the glory of His Father, or some-
thing of quite different import to humanity and history?
St. Matthew defines what he understood by this " Gospel of the
Kingdom," but in a verse that has provoked no end of discussion
among grammarians and critics. It is the well-known text : " He
that endureth unto the end, the same shall be saved."88 What
meaning is to be attached to it — how is it to be read ? Those who
hold that St. Matthew expected no lengthy historical career for the
Kingdom look to this verse for proof of their contention. They
claim that it has the sense of " physically surviving unto the end of
the world," and point to the fact that verses somewhat similar,
found in Esdras and in Daniel,34 are plainly of this drift. This
would make the verse eschatological in meaning, and settle the
whole controversy at a stroke in favor of the accepted view of
scholarship. It would also take every element of spirituality out of
the Lord's discourse on Mount Olivet, and leave it filled from be-
ginning to end with an erroneous reply to a still more erroneous
question, unless we suppose that He spoke of the end of the world
under the figure and type of Jerusalem's overthrow — which we are
not going to do in the pages that follow.
We have direct evidence, nay personal assurance from St. Mat-
thew himself, that he distinctly repudiates the view which scholar-
ship thus credits him with entertaining. He thrice cautions the reader
of Daniel not to take this prophet's words in the sense of the end of
all: "Let him who readeth understand."88 Nor was this caution
inserted because he expected that the Return of the Lord would be
somewhat delayed after the burning of the City. There is positive
evidence that deprives this view of standing. If St. Matthew be-
w Matt. iv. 23 ; ix. 35.
** o Si &TCO(JL£(va<; e(?T^Xo?. Notice omission of the definite article. Matt. xxiv. 13.
** 2 Es. vi. 25; ix. 7, 8. Dan. xii. 12. * Matt. xxiv. 15, 23, 25, 26.
442 ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA [Jan.,
lieved that the " Kingdom of Heaven " was not to be an historical
movement of any great length after the fall of Jerusalem, why did
he' insert three additional verses when speaking of the Gospel of the
Kingdom " in a world-wide relation,36 which are conspicuously
omitted when he makes mention of this same Gospel with particular
reference to the Jews?37
The three verses in question38 are peculiar to the author of the
First Gospel, and occur in no other account. They are transferred
prophetical quotations, which describe a general falling-away from
the Christian faith within the bosom of the Kingdom itself, and
their import, nay, their position in the text is such that it is im-
possible to understand them as said of the near future, despite the
crowded, " telescoping " manner of their relating. It will not avail
us in the least, either, to suppose these three verses " Logian." The
question is not so much their source as the literary purpose which
led to their insertion at this particular point in the OlivetaTi Dis-
course. Manifestly intended as prophetic descriptions of the future
history of the Kingdom — these verses are a standing challenge to
the view that St. Matthew thought the Christian movement of
short duration, and the essence of its gospel, that the end of things
is nigh.
It is, therefore, an open question, far from being scientifically
closed or settled, what " the gospel of the Kingdom" was here said
to be. When St. Matthew declares that " he who endureth unto
the (?) end, the same shall be saved," the word " end " is without
the definite article in both cases — something that does not happen
in the First Gospel, when the thought is of the Cosmos and its final
days. We are consequently free, both from a grammatical and crit-
ical standpoint, to see in the verse in question a denationalized doc-
trine of salvation, not concerned at all with the end of the world,
but with the end of the individual in death." " He that persevereth
unto the end of life, of tribulations, the same shall be saved " —
a gospel of the Kingdom, which required of its beneficiaries no
purity of descent from Abraham ; which substituted the triumph of
the individual for the triumph of a special race or people; which
replaced the Jewish conception of an earthly immortality by the
nobler doctrine of eternal life,39 and thus became of undying in-
terest to the sons of men the wide-world over and the ages through
— sons of a common Father, Who manifested no invidious pref-
" Matt. xxiv. 14. w Matt. x. 22. M Matt. xxiv. 10-12.
" Matt. xvi. 25, 26 ; xix. 29.
1918.] ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA 443
erence for the first-born, but invited all alike, late comer no less
than early, to the long-prepared and ever-ready Wedding Feast of
the King. The eschatological character of the verse about " per-
severing " has not been scientifically established; it is still in the
state of a thing unproven, strong as may seem to some the reasons
of assurance to the contrary.
What, for instance, could compel us to take this verse as said
of the last days and the consummation of the Kingdom? The ex-
pression " end of the age " so redolent of the thought of Jewry, -
and five times recurrent in St. Matthew's pages? Investigation
does not bear the suspicion out. The near-future verb so fre-
quently employed by St. Matthew? The ten instances of its use,
when searchingly examined, correct this uncriticized impression.
The phrase: "Kingdom of Heaven." We have already shown
in the earlier portions of the present study — though only tentatively,
and not with a view to substituting presumption for research — that
some, at least, of the thirty or more instances in which this expres-
sion finds employment, plainly contemplate the historical continu-
ance of the Kingdom rather than its sudden consummation. The
promise to the Twelve that they would " sit on thrones ?" It can
positively be shown, from cross-references and other sources, that
this promise refers to the consummated, not to the inaugurated
Kingdom ; and, consequently, that it is a begging of the question to
quote it as a proof of nearness. The various mentions of the
" coming " as an event to be expected within the generation then
living? Perhaps the solution of this most baffling exegetical prob-
lem is locked up in St. Matthew's peculiar use of a prophetical ex-
pression, the scientific clue to which, when a study of the phrase-
ology of the First Gospel brings it forth, would uncover nearly all
the mystery of his pages and at the same time leave the text un-
touched. We feel confident that what follows in this series of stud-
ies will confirm the wisdom of the Biblical Commission in its de-
cision of June 18, 1915, concerning the question of the Parousia.40
As matters tentatively stand at the end of this threshold study,
there is positive evidence that the author of the First Gospel con-
ceived of the Kingdom as an historical world-process, which was
about to have a beginning, net about to have an end; and the
strange thing about this historical undercurrent of thought is that
most of the material which has been here assembled to prove its
existence is found in no other writer — a fact that makes it all the
*• Ada S. Sedis, vol. vii., pp. 357, 358.
444 PAX [Jan.,
more difficult to suppose that it was introduced without a special
didactic purpose. Against the positive testimony gathered, there
is a strong array of texts that seem of another strain. These were
summarized for the reader at the opening of the theme and incom-
pletely criticized toward the close, to secure right of way for their
reconsidering. In a series of studies to follow, we shall take up
these several phrases singly, to test the truth or to betray the hardi-
hood of the claim — that St. Matthew's presentation of " the gospel
of the Kingdom " is not the restricted Palestinian world-view which
it seems to be to many, under the microscope of scholarship.
PAX.
BY HELEN HAINES.
ROCK gently, world tonight —
A Little Child lies sleeping —
Sing, sphere to sphere, majestic lullabies
Sweet to His ear.
Cease moaning, deep to deep —
A Little Child lies sleeping —
Praise, wave on wave, in rolling psalmodies
His dreams to lave.
Strew brightly, skies, thy stars —
A Little Child lies sleeping —
Dim suns with one, a beacon beckoning
To Him alone.
Ope briefly, paradise —
A Little Child lies sleeping —
Chaunt, hosts, and men, that great antiphonal —
His benison.
ASPECTS OF RECENT DRAMA IN ENGLISH.
BY KATHERINE BREGY.
I.
THE LITERARY PIONEERS.
HE word recent is one of a little group which seems
to have been particularly designed to express ideas of
a variable and elastic significance : like new as applied
to buildings, for instance — or young as applied to
ladies. In the present series of articles it must be
stretched to comprehend equally the play of yesterday and the play
of perhaps three decades back. That is to say, it must cover in a
fragmentary and impressionistic way the making of what we call
contemporary English drama on both sides of the Atlantic. One
grows accustomed in these days to punctuating one's thoughts by
battles : and there is a curious and striking war- fact in connection
with this story of the modern theatre. It is simply this — not one
drama of the first or even second class, scarcely even one play
worth seriously considering from any literary viewpoint, was writ-
ten in the English language between the Revolution and the Civil
War; that is to say, between Sheridan's School for Scandal (1777)
or his Critic (1779), and the inauguration of that new dramatic
movement which was perceptible in Henry Arthur Jones' Saints
and Sinners (1888), but did not flower with any luxuriance until
the perilous and " wonderful 'go's."
There was, then, at least a century of sterility for dramatic art
— as indeed, for most of the other arts ! — among English-speaking
peoples. To be sure, the theatres were open during all this long ad-
vent. There were even such native actors as Mrs. Kemble, Macready,
the elder Booth and Edwin Forrest, to name but a few. But what
did they play? On the one hand, Shakespeare; and even poor
Shakespeare very much adapted and garbled by the various mana-
gers. On the other hand, they did just what all progressive actors do
today — they experimented with " contemporary offerings." There
were the classical melodramas such as Virginius — had not Macready
the hardihood to sandwich Virginius between Hamlet and the Mer-
chant of Venice in his repertoire? Then there were romantic and
sentimental melodramas such as Bulwer's Richelieu or The Lady of
446 ASPECTS OF RECENT DRAMA IN ENGLISH [Jan.,
Lyons. After that came a dark night for the theatre — the " dread-
ful night " of the early Victorians! — the reign of what M. Filon in
his admirable volume1 calls the hippodrama or pantomime.
As the night wore on, there were innumerable translations
from French drama, artificial productions enough but capable of
teaching something to the playwright if not to the audience. Then
there were the pleasant pseudo-Irish fancies of Dion Boucicault;
and the pioneer work of Robertson, really a vast improvement upon
its predecessors, although the critical dubbed it " cup and saucer
comedy " because of its persistent domesticity. The English thea-
tre was evidently reaching out once more toward a literary drama —
by which somewhat ambitious title one describes a very simple
thing, a play good enough to stand the test of reading as well as
acting. Its first fruits erred, indeed, on the side of being more
fundamentally literary than dramatic, for the first fruits were the
poet's. Such arrived and established geniuses as Swinburne, Ten-
nyson and Browning turned suddenly to the drama for expression!
In fact they produced superlatively beautiful work in dramatic form
— but not all the art of Sir Henry Irving or Ellen Terry could carry
it to permanent dramatic success. Mary Stuart, The Blot on the
'Scutcheon, even Becket, are forgotten today except by the readers.
They have not stood the acid test of revival for the simple reason
that, in spite of all their fine qualities, they were not good acting
plays. And as one master of words has reminded us, it is of the
essence of art that it shall be articulate!
Then came the dawn of the iSgo's: the renaissance of English
drama which was to include Sidney Grundy, Oscar Wilde, Henry
Arthur Jones and Sir Arthur Wing Pinero among its pioneers;
Granville Barker, W. S. Houghton, Galsworthy, the Irish school
and more than one American on its realistic side ; Stephen Phillips,
Wm. Butler Yeats, the inimitable Barrie, Laurence Housman,
Percy Mackaye and a host of " newer " voices on its imaginative
side; and, hovering like a dragonfly between realism and imagina-
tion, Mr. George Bernard Shaw!
The renaissance of English drama : it was not merely a dream,
but a great, concerted movement to bring the English stage at last,
and after more than a hundred years, into competition with the
European theatre. The men who were its pioneers had studied the
technique, the finish, the brillancy of the French dramatists. They
were steeped in the still recent and radical probing of human life
1 See The English Stage. By Auguste Filon.
1918.] ASPECTS OF RECENT DRAMA IN ENGLISH 447
which Ibsen had revealed. And they had — perhaps best of all! —
the enthusiasm of Crusaders. No one has written more valu-
ably about this literary drama, and very few more valuably for it,
than Mr. Henry Arthur Jones. His summary of its makers' aims
and the measure of their achievement is worth quoting :
If I were asked what was the distinguishing mark of that
movement, I should say that during the years when it was in
progress there was a steadfast and growing attempt to treat the
great realities of our modern life upon the stage, to bring our
drama into relation with our literature, our religion, our art and
our science, and to make it reflect the main movements of our
national thought and character. That anything great or per-
manent was accomplished, I am the last to claim ; all was crude,
confused, tentative, aspiring. But there was life in it.
That is, indeed, the main point: there was life in it — along
with life, the germ also of disease and death, as must appear later
—but at least a literary reality. The century of lean and sterile
years was done.
A mere catalogue of Mr. Jones' own plays is both illuminating
and astonishing, while the arresting nature of his titles saves the
catalogue from tedium. Saints and Sinners, his satire upon British
middle-class hypocrisy, was written as early as 1884; so also was
Breaking a Butterfly, an adaptation of The Doll's House for which
he later apologized. The Middleman came in 1 889 ; and after that,
to run over only a part of his work, Judah, 1890; The Dancing Girl,
1891; The Bauble Shop, 1893; The Masquer aders, and The Case
of Rebellious Susan, 1894; The Triumph of the Philistines, 1895;
Michael and His Lost Angel, 1896; The Liars, 1897. One may well
pause for a moment here, for the last two plays undoubtedly regis-
ter Jones' high-water mark, the first in tragedy, the second in
comedy. Then came The Manoeuvres of Jane, 1898; The Lackey's
Carnival and Mrs. Dane's Defense, 1900; Whitewashing Julia,
1903 ; Joseph Entangled, The Hypocrites, Dolly Reforming Herself,
We Can't Be as Bad as All That, 1910; Mary Goes First, 1913;
the delightful comedy which Mr. Skinner gave us during the
Shakespeare tercentenary, Cock O' the Walk, etc., etc.
Today, both Henry Arthur Jones and Sir Arthur Wing Pinero
have assumed the nature of household gods to people familiar with
drama: they have been first worshipped, then taken for granted,
and finally a little bit superseded. It is difficult to realize that both
men produced much of their best work with very little public appre-
448 ASPECTS OF RECENT DRAMA IN ENGLISH [Jan.,
ciation — often amid storms of abuse. Conventional British play-
goers resented the boldness of some of their themes, the natural-
ness of their treatment, and the stinging truth of their satire. As
Mr. Jones himself declared, not without bitterness, they were
branded as a set of " gloomy corrupters of the youth of the nation "
— and his own greatest play, Michael and His Lost Angel, was
suppressed by the English censor after less than two weeks upon
the stage. Such an act might well prove incomprehensible, had not
the stupidity and perversity of the officer in question — Barrie's
"headsman" — become a classic. In the case of Michael, the damning
fact was probably the hero's rather spectacular submission to the
Catholic Church ; for there is nothing in the theme or in Mr. Jones'
treatment of it which could prove offensive to adult audiences.
Briefly, the play is a retelling of the Scarlet Letter story; the
scene shifted to a modern English village, the protagonists be-
coming an ascetic young Anglican clergyman and a willful but
much-loving mondaine. The subject is thoroughly, throbbingly
painful, but it is not morbid ; and in spite of some frank theatrical-
ism, the theme is worked out with such tact and delicacy and so
masterful a humanity that one must needs recognize in Michael and
His Lost Angel one of the greatest achievements of all this recent
drama. And its fundamental viewpoint is amazingly sane. There
is no attempt, as in so many modern plays and novels on the same
subject, to shift responsibility off upon accident, or human nature,
or the Life Force — or something equally nebulous and impersonal.
In that haunting scene where Mr. Jones' unhappy lovers are trac-
ing the thousand seeming accidents which led to their tragic fault,
the little unforseen chances which conspired to bring them to each
other, Audrey the woman, declares :
" We couldn't have missed each other in this world. It's no
use blaming chance or fate, or whatever it is."
And Michael, looking fearlessly back into the past and for-
ward to his long penance of the future, says simply :
"I blame nothing. Chance, fate? I had the mastery of all
these things. They couldn't have conquered me if my own heart
hadn't first yielded !"
There is the soundness which produces drama true to art and
true, also, to nature: a new confirmation of Patmore's searching
dictum that bad morality is bad art.
It seems today that nothing can any longer " shock " our decent
and blase American audiences: season after season the debutante
1918.] ASPECTS OF RECENT DRAMA IN ENGLISH 449
and her mother have sat with equal tranquillity through scenes of
half -world revels and under- world rioting. A few years ago The
Catholic Theatre Movement was founded for the express purpose
of stirring up Catholics to some sort of criticism, some sort of
conscience, concerning the amusements they patronized. And al-
though laxity and stupidity are still with us, there is reason to be-
lieve that some progress has been made in lifting the standard of
popular taste. A definite sentiment in the form of worthy plays is
everywhere gaining the press and the public. So the campaign of
education must go on .... and that other gigantic campaign of blood
goes also on .... and who can doubt that from out the slaughter and
the heartbreak and the sacrifice humanity will come forth a little
more clean, a little more illumined, a little more steadfast?
But always there is the other possibility of being scandalized
too easily, of making prudery rather than virtue the canon of criti-
cism. This was the situation of the British public in the early 'QO'S.
Victorian " reticence " had done its work ; and while almost any-
thing was tolerated in the music hall or comic opera, the respectable
citizen fell into a panic whenever his drama attempted to deal with
real life instead of what one of the dramatists described as " wax
doll morality." It is true that the playwrights of this dramatic
renaissance were — or became — perhaps too greatly obsessed with
problems of sex. The unhappy marriage, the unlawful love, the
" triangle " and the Magdalen theme received more than their share
of stress. A more Catholic ideal of art, while in nowise ignoring
these unhappy realities, would have accentuated the beautiful rather
than the ugly, would have urged a major note of aspiration rather
than the minor of despair.
Yet there is scarcely one of the plays of these literary pioneers
that is not intensely moral at root. Take, for instance, the brilliant
dramas of Oscar Wilde, which fall well within this period although
their rhetorical quality suggests an earlier one. Decadence is the
worst charge which can be brought against Salome — a very super-
ficial, epigrammatic cynicism, against his more satirical modern
plays. They are all " on the side of the angels ;" and the most
human and popular of them, Lady Windermcre's Fan, is distinctly
(if perversely) edifying.
Then there is Sir Arthur Wing Pinero, perhaps the greatest of
his group — great in grasp of character, in charm and vitality of dia-
logue, and in practical knowledge of play-writing. His masterpiece,
The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, is one of the most tragic arraignments
VOL. CVL— 29
450 ASPECTS OF RECENT DRAMA IN ENGLISH [Jan.,
of immorality in all English drama. As everyone knows, it is the
story of an elderly idealist who marries a lady of doubtful reputa-
tion for the purpose of giving her a fresh chance. They both mean
well; but they are not heroic enough to cope with their situation.
The conventions of society, the demoralizing memories of the past,
the jealousy of Tanqueray's young daughter, are all against them.
" I believe the future is only the past again, entered through
another gate," says Paula in her hopeless philosophy. " You'll do
your best — oh, I know that — you're a good fellow. But circum-
stances will be too strong for you in the end." And so it is her own
death which pays the price of what her circle had lightly called " the
man's life."
Pinero, assuredly, was not spared the attacks of the Philistines,
but he seems to have been quite insensible to them. He followed-
The Second Mrs. Tanqueray with The Notorious Mrs. Elizabeth, a
title calculated to arouse suspicion in the hearts of the very elect.
By the time Letty and Iris came (1901 and 1903) his publit was
conquered, for better or worse, and one suspects late plays such as
the Mind-the-Paint Girl of winning success a little too easily. But
Pinero's name is one to remember, in drama and literature, too. He
has been an artist of high seriousness; one who, in his new-found
dramatic freedom, has dwelt often with unsavory themes without
ever falling into the " easy " and demoralizing philosophies which
pervade many later plays. It is not to be forgotten that his Mid-
Channel had courage to strike one of the first dramatic blows at the
growing evil of birth-control. And while he is remembered per-
haps most vividly as the author of what one might call social trag-
edies, his touch in such comedies as Trelawney of the Wells is al-
ways a fresh delight.
In all their best work, these pioneers of our recent drama were
literary realists. Their profession of faith, as found in Mr. Jones'
delightful preface to M. Filon's History, was as follows :
It is in the seizure and presentation of the essential and dis-
tinguishing marks of a character, of a scene, of a passion, of a
society, of a phase of life it is in the seizure and vivid
treatment of some of these, to the exclusion or falsification of
non-essentials, that the dramatist must lay his claim to sincerity
and being true to nature.
How these principles of a large and fundamental realism were
developed by more recent dramatists will be the subject of our next
discussion.
RE-EDUCATION BY WAR.
BY WILLIAM J. KERBY, PH.D.
T is fortunate that we are unable to realize the
fundamental changes that the War has forced upon
the world. Immediate insight into them would over-
whelm us. By a law akin to that of gravitation we
drift away from fundamentals and organize the de-
tails of every day around the accidentals of life. We worry and talk
about Governor or President or income, but we rarely busy our-
selves with the fundamentals of property or of government. It is
only by assuming that the foundations of our dwellings are intact
that we can find comfort in an armchair near the fireplace. All of
the experience that we have had with life led us heretofore to as-
sume that institutions are rigid, ponderous and slow-moving, while
thought and philosophy are fleet of foot and unhampered in all of
their movements. The War has changed this. It has driven every
one of us close to fundamentals. It compels us to engage our minds
upon the foundations of government, of morality, of law. We are
weary and confused. When fundamentals become intimate and
vital to us we lose our peace, forget our gayety and confound the
proportions in which we deal with life. The thousands who are
sick at heart over the world catastrophe are weary because every
detail or strategy reported daily is judged in the light of its bearing
on the reorganization of the world. We can no longer admire a
clever stroke in battle or rest in indifferent admiration of the subtle
foresight that wins a contest. We cannot forget fundamentals.
Our judgments are all awry because institutions are doing the very
things of which we thought them incapable without disaster. Vast
power is concentrated in few hands, although we have lived and
written and spoken of the dangers of it. We have seen government
take hold of the regulation of prices and we have felt a sense of
thankful relief. Yet our thinking and writing and talking have
advised of the supposed danger of this. Social philosophy is in
abeyance. Formerly it was a delight to think, to discuss, to predict.
Now thinking seems vain, without excuse. All impulses lead to
action, not thought. We must have standards in order to think.
Many standards have crumbled in our fingers. The assumptions that
452 RE-EDUCATION BY WAR [Jan.,
seemed encrusted in the foundations of the earth have become airy
nothings. We had climbed weary hills toward the plains where
kindly feeling and instinct for justice promised to make life pleas-
ant, but we have fallen back into the crude valleys where physical
force is law. This reversal is staggering. We understand neither it
nor its implications. Yet war is the only vision of duty or hope that
remains to us. There is no alternative. We make every source of
the nation's energy converge toward one institution, the army,
organ of final physical power in the world. Court, jury, legisla-
ture, diplomacy, public opinion, persuasion, appeal step aside mourn-
fully and see battle usurp their thrones. The scholarship of the
nations has been diverted from the service of intellectualism to the
service of the nation's physical might. Streams of wealth which
flowed as they would through peaceful valleys carry on their bosoms
now only cargoes of food and ammunition. Motives around which
life had been organized are outlawed, and one collective national
impulse to defend the majesty of the flag replaces them. Attitudes
toward things, persons and places which constituted the settled ad-
justments of life have lost both support and purpose, and we grope
in an atmosphere of bewilderment in search of a footing for life
itself.
Thoughtful men have lost their habitual certainties on which
all mental peace depends. Personal ideals which were yesterday
fountains of reverence, assurance of refinement, ambition and dis-
cipline have lost their authority because we have been thrown into
the world of larger purpose and deeper relationship to which they
are unfitted. ' Solicitudes and affections that were honorable and
adequate yesterday take on the color of treason today unless they
serve well the nation and those who fight its battles. The blood of
that American soldier, champion of each of us, who was the first
to die overseas, is the Itasca from which a Mississippi of blood will
yet flow before we shall again know peace. An imperative call
sends us forward through a wilderness of hovering uncertainties
toward a future that is less understood, less accurately anticipated
than any other with which the mind of the world has been en-
gaged. This is the time of all times when a docile mind is proof
of wisdom and a humble heart is one's only certain guide. Ob-
stinate holding to the standards of yesterday hinders one from
all understanding of the newer day which the mysteries of God's
providence have set before us. Narrow definitions of duty that
satisfied conscience and moral aspiration must be set aside. Larger
1918.] RE-EDUCATION BY WAR 453
duty that comes carrying proof of its Divine origin in the out-
stretched hand which indicates appeal as much as mandate, waits
to be recognized and accepted. Just as the work of educa-
tion prepares the young for their place in the world to which
they come, the re-education which is forced upon us by war must
prepare us for the new time upon which we now enter. Just as we
ask children to be docile, trustful, willing, we too must be as chil-
dren, and must accept the teaching forced upon us by facts, pro-
cesses and relations which are now readjusting the world. Just as
we ask children to surrender gradually the world of fancy to the
discipline of fact, we too must be prepared to revise standards, to
surrender preferences, to deal with facts and accept them in the
process of our re-education.
There are some among us who appear to believe that the
standards and definitions they deemed adequate in the past, are still
sufficient to guide them in this new era. Some there are who rebel
against the necessity of sacrifice and service now imperatively
demanded. They little understand that we must rewrite the defi-
nitions of sacrifice and duty if we are to avoid being moral pygmies
in a civilization to be builded upon gigantic concepts of the world's
relations. There are some who sense the changes that are inevit-
able, but endeavor to coerce the trend of facts to suit their own fancy
instead of accepting as fundamental the salient elements in the
present situation of the world. Nature is not tender toward in-
dividuals. Her processes lacerate human hearts under the action
of a law higher than human affection. Hence, although sacrifice,
renunciation, anguish are involved in the prodigious changes now
under way, we are called upon to recognize them, to adjust our lives
and accept the consequences of that adjustment in hope that the
blessing of God will make them mean much in our ennobling and in
the service of the country.
This is not a task for individuals alone. Our states and the
nation itself feel the strain that this readjustment is causing
throughout the whole range of our institutional life. Art is strug-
gling to understand and express new symbols, to anticipate the
philosophy which will interpret the new era, to anticipate and fore-
shadow in color, form and line new emotions, new appreciations,
new insight into the collective soul of the world that has been born
out of the world's travail. Poetry and prose, each in its own way,
each under the limitations of form and traditional imagination, are
attempting to interpret emotions and ideals that are new to our
454 RE-EDUCATION BY WAR [Jan.,
wondering souls. Philosophy as an ultimate interpretation of life
alone is silent because it best of all knows that the world in turmoil
cannot be read. We must scan the heavens for a fulcrum that is
stable. Since it lives close to eternities and is their exponent, reli-
gion is best prepared, with concept, vocabulary and definition, to in-
terpret principles, to anticipate at least the doctrinal, if not the emo-
tional phases of changes through which the world is going. Per-
haps it is worth while to endeavor to hint at certain features of
this process as they may effect our political and social emotions in
the future.
I.
The first basic fact of which we must take account in our re-
education is the colossal good- will latent in the nation, in a civiliza-
tion which has been frankly builded on an appeal to selfishness. We
have had revelations of goodness, of an impulse to service and of
a readiness to make sacrifice, new in quality no less than in quantity,
in the history of the world. It is a marvel that will challenge artist,
poet, philosopher for all times. Hundreds of millions of dollars
have been poured forth in impersonal sympathy with peoples and
persons with whom we had never been in close daily relation. Per-
sonal renunciations, personal service, the surrender of leisure to
serve purposes remote from us in race, country and sympathy, are
unprecedented. The enlistment of children, of men and of women;
of the frivolous and of the serious in service shows us that a world
emotion touched us as a nation and we responded. There has been
such a quickness of understanding of this appeal, such unanimity in
the spirit of the response, such joy in doing, such satisfaction with
the intangible compensations of life, that we cannot but find here
proof of latent goodness in human nature which may be counted on
for all time henceforth as a political and spiritual asset of the
nation. Cynics, pessimists, scholars, public leaders, religious teach-
ers, must revise their understanding of humanity and its ways to
make room in their philosophy for this new vision of goodness in
the world.
Paradoxically enough we discover also new quality and quan-
tity of evil, weakness and sin. We have witnessed hatred, plunder,
cruelty, calculated and wanton selfishness which defied understand-
ing or description. We lack imagination to picture, words to ex-
press, comparisons to explain the callousness that we would fain
deny if we but dared. The time awaits a new type of cynic who
will record this awful truth as cynics alone can.
1918.] RE-EDUCATION BY WAR 455
We have had reason to fear the power of evil in undermining
our own army, but the nation arose to the danger with a promptness
and power to which no note of moral grandeur may be denied. We
have seen cities, schools, professions, churches, the nation itself
and organizations of every kind aroused as by a common instinct
to safeguard the morality of our soldiers as no other nation in the
history of civilization had ever done. Out of this experience has
arisen a new sense of responsibility toward morality as a national
and social interest. Differences on which the factors in our na-
tional life may have been prone to insist too much, have been set
aside in obedience to a common impulse to keep American manhood
pure, and to make sure that the personal righteousness of those who
wear the uniform will bring the blessing of God upon our armies.
It would be vain to attempt to measure the place of these fun-
damentals in our new understanding of life. It would be vain to
predict how they are to affect our institutions or the fine moral
passion that makes institutions noble. In the process of our re-
education we must take them into account, however that be done.
II.
We stand in presence of a new alignment in the world. Minor
unlikenesses receive diminished importance when they do not vanish
in the presence of larger identities by force of which a score of
nations are made as one. Beneath differences of form we find unity
of spirit, identity of impulse and ideals in which democracy is en-
shrined. The continental isolation to which we in the United States
have been consecrated is now but a memory. Foreign alliances, upon
which we looked and against which we spoke with nervous fear
have been endorsed by our intimate and commanding position in this
new world. The virtues and obligations of Americanism must be
defined again. Our preferences and our principles as they affect
international relations must be restated in the new political science
where we shall find our guidance. At every point where interna-
tional policies touch us or we touch them, words, emotions, policies,
sentiment must be changed in consonance with the new position
which the United States now takes in that larger world. We may
not forget that a single enveloping purpose binds these allied na-
tions together, that their resources in ability and treasure are now
pooled, that provincial and national views must be for the moment
suspended, if not altogether set aside. There is no longer any
456 RE-EDUCATION BY- WAR [Jan.,
dream of a nation at peace. There is vision now only of the world
at peace. This dream is the crutch upon which hope bravely leans as
it leads us through the darkness of today toward the morning of
tomorrow. The world has moved a century away from its moor-
ings of four years ago. It will move another century toward the
unknown before this War is ended, although that day need not be
far distant as the calendar measures time. We are dizzy because of
the speed with which our institutions wing their unimpeded flight
through changes for which philosophy and experience would have
asked one hundred years.
The nation has entered into a new relationship with each one
of us. Here again is a task in our re-education. In as far as right
and obligation fix our immunities and duties in the stable adjust-
ment of national life, new relations with the nation at large call for
restatement of both rights and obligations. Perhaps it were more
accurate to say what was latent comes now to expression, what was
potential is now real. All of the traditions of statesmanship and her-
oism, all of the teachings of political science and of moral philoso-
phy have declared the supremacy of national interest in the life of
the individual except in the direct and immediate relations of the in-
dividual with God. Heretofore the nation has not had occasion to
make these truths real and vital to us. The present War has forced
the nation to assert its claim in a most direct and compelling man-
ner. We are asked to accept this judgment and obey. Today
the nation is a condition in every plan and a partner in every am-
bition that stirs the soul or guides one's steps. We had always
known this, but we had not experienced it. We had known that
the state is the organized sovereign will of society, but we had not
found that theory in conflict with the preferences and ambitions
that develop out of opportunity or with the aspirations that guide
all life. It is at this point that our re-education is most trying. It
is here that imagination lingers after brave decisions have been
made. It is here that we meet the supreme challenge and find our
manhood tested as never before.
We have taken it to be fundamental that we have the right to
dispose of our lives practically as we wish. The state has, however,
asserted a claim upon the flower of our young manhood that sets
that right aside. The Draft Law was nothing other than the as-
sertion of the nation's prior claim upon life. Ten million young
men have been called to arms. We must revise our moral philoso-
phy and moral sentiment in the face of this supreme fact. The
1918.] RE-EDUCATION BY WAR 457
young men who have been thus called must recast their thinking,
learn their code of rights and obligations and accept without re-
bellion the fate toward which the footsteps of the soldier lead.
Parents must revise their affections. Citizens must recast imagina-
tion. Those who go to serve their country in exacting soldierly labor
and those who remain at home in lonely resignation or in the proud
consciousness of surrender bravely made, must be of one mind be-
cause what is done is duty. Being duty, it is religion. Being religion,
it is of God. Being of God, it is destiny. All of this must be seen in
the glow of supernatural sanction. There will be neither peace nor
happiness until the compensating sense of duty is established as
though it were in the order of creation from the beginning.
Our re-education must enable us to understand the changing
functions which our emergency has forced upon the Government
itself. Those who are familiar with the political thought of the last
century and a half are in position to estimate the abrupt departure
from supposedly filial principles which the Government has taken
almost without thinking. We who twenty years ago disliked state
intervention, lamented the increasing intervention of Government
in the field of industrial liberty, predicted every kind of fatality to
follow upon this tendency. Today we are so familiar with con-
centration of power, with the thought of Governmental control of
industry, the fixing of retail prices, the determination of the rate
of interest on capital that we wonder at ourselves. It is beside the
point to say that these are emergency measures and that they are of
but transitory application. No one who thinks, believes for a mo-
ment that the state will ever return to the narrow sphere with which
it had been content. Immediate experience is much stronger in
shaping political thought than any abstract principle can be. Com-
petition as a supreme philosophy of industry has undoubtedly re-
ceived a deadly blow. Furthermore, a nation faces the greater
problems of war after the War is over. There will be motive in
abundance long after peace is declared for maintaining the ex-
panded functions that the state has lately assumed. Text-books in
political science have been antiquated in the last four years, perhaps
most of all in the last year. Our re-education must lead us to
the understanding of this wider concept of state functions. It must
interpret all of the implications of these changes and prepare us for
parties and party thinking which will be entirely unlike the parties
and party thought with which we have been familiar in the past.
458 RE-EDUCATION BY W AR [Jan.,
III.
We have had heretofore easy going impressions concerning
the right of private property. We had believed in an individualistic
philosophy. We had organized life frankly on the basis of selfish-
ness. The nation's interference in our industrial and social plans
was at a minimum. Opportunity abounded. The spirit of enter-
prise was alert. Opportunity called out every type of ability. For-
tunes and competencies had been accumulated, and the accumulation
had been but little interfered with by the states. We had defined
our property rights in the terms of opportunity rather than in the
terms of nature. We drifted into set notions of property, its func-
tions and sanctions that had little foundation beneath the crust of
custom and of law. The process of our re-education compels us to
surrender that older view of property and to accept a new one quite
unlike it. The nation asserts its prior claim to what we had accumu-
lated by laying on unprecedented taxes. It asserts its prior claim to
current income by collecting heavy taxes. It asserts its claim over
accumulation and income for decades of years in the future in order
to carry the War to a successful issue. We are asked to revise our
philosophy of property, the sentiments and motives associated with
accumulation and to learn and accept the new philosophy which
places us in a secondary position and gives the national Government
a practical supremacy over what we own and what we earn. It
it, of course, true that all of these are' emergency measures. But
it is supremely important tfiat we take a right attitude and under-
stand the implications involved. Our vision must control our wills,
embrace the future growth inherent in the notion of commonwealth.
Complaint, rebellion, evasion to which reluctant citizens might
make resort will be largely the outcome of feelings, preferences and
standards which are permitted unwisely to survive from former
days. Of course, there are precautions which the Government must
take, laws of business and of motive which it must respect, dangers
of mistake, deception and fraud against which it must protect it-
self. But these limitations are inherent in all state action at all
times. The essential point is that we are called upon now in the
course of our re-education to surrender one attitude and adopt an-
other which is in keeping with the national emergency that we face.
Perhaps this experience will enable us to distinguish more clearly
between our attitudes and our rights in respect of property. We
feel keenly about the former and think awkwardly about the latter.
I9i8.] RE-EDUCATION BY WAR 459
The best assurance of wisdom and care on the part of the state will
be found in the wholesome acceptance by the nation of the changed
philosophy of property, and the enlightenment of a public opinion
which will protect the state against the excesses of which there is
always danger.
No property system is final, but every property system must
claim to be final. There is no stability without the sense of finality
for the time being. There could be no stable system of property or
settled imagination and organized sentiment in regard to it unless
individuals who are its beneficiaries assume that its forms are
final. As a result of this experience and practical necessity we are
disposed to attach the fundamental and compelling sanctions of na-
ture to what is transitory as well as to what is essential. At this
moment the process of governmental intervention in the property
system introduces new forms. We judge these forms in the light
of accustomed attitudes which we confound with rights. The pro-
cess of our re-education must enable us to discriminate between es-
sentials and accidentals, and hold our emotional protests safely
within the lines of common sense and patriotism.
IV.
We are called upon to revise our motives of conduct and to
project into our patriotism certain virtues and habits which were
heretofore seemingly reserved to the privacy of religion. It was
remarked on an earlier page that the habit of interpreting each in-
cident in the present War, not in its dramatic setting, but in its di-
rect bearing upon the peace of the world, has made our thinking
cumbersome and sad. In an analogous way we have heretofore in-
dulged a gentle spiritual waywardness which permitted us to judge
our conduct in its bearing on eternity and on our own personal
character. We are called upon now to judge our motives, virtues
and practices in their bearing on the nation's welfare. We have
interfered with the freedom of childhood and asked our boys to be-
come agents of the United States Treasury in selling bonds. We
ask our little girls to surrender much of the time that would be given
to their dolls in order to do work for army and navy. We ask mil-
lions of women to consecrate their leisure by making garments for
those who defend the flag. We have sent representatives of the
nation's majesty and power to mingle their message of patriotism
with the easeful mirth of comedy under the influence of which we
try to keep our attitude toward life wholesome and right. Into
460 RE-EDUCATION BY WAR [Jan.,
homes, into schools, into churches, into theatre, into factory the
spirit of the nation enters asking men and women and children to
be mindful of the nation and its welfare in thought, in word and in
action, day and night. The family may not sit at table without
consciousness that the spirit of the nation hovers over it, asking
temperance, renunciation, thrift, in order that the nation may be
valiant in its battle for righteousness. The most commonplace
terms shine now in the glow of patriotic devotion. The gospel of
the clean plate, a homely and repellant phrase, has taken on a dig-
nity and power of appeal that symbolizes well the transformation
through which all life is passing. Out of all this we gradually draw
the lesson that they are no longer trifles in life; that everything is
important in fact and in symbol; that words and actions take on
an enriching significance of which we had not thought them capable.
And yet the Christian had been well prepared for all of this. The
mottoes with which Catholic life is enriched; the supernatural sig-
nificance of thought, word and act in their bearing on eternity ; the
conviction that renunciation, self-discipline, abstinence are measur-
able factors in working out our destiny gave us a preparation for
this new experience which serves us well. If we who have had the
privilege of this spiritual experience will but obey the constant
teaching of the Church that patriotism is of God, we should stand
forth in these troubled days first among the patriots because of the
spiritual training for patriotism that our Faith has given us. This
portion of our re-education should not be difficult.
V.
The re-education now held in mind consists in the recognition
of new facts and new relations ; in the surrender of certain concepts
of personal rights and the acceptance of new definitions that imply
graver responsibility and far-reaching renunciation; in the sympa-
thetic subjection of our narrow personal outlook on life to a na-
tional outlook that must rest upon faith more perhaps than upon
demonstration ; in the fostering of certain habits heretofore looked
upon as purely spiritual, but now to be practised as acts of specific
patriotism as well as of spiritual import. These grave duties will
not be performed well and these fundamental changes will not bring
us peace unless we bring cordial good-will, abiding faith and spir-
itual conviction to the task. Those who complain, who are reluc-
tant, who minimize will find themselves out of touch with the final
I9i8.] RE-EDUCATION BY WAR 461
harmonies of the days to come. They who permit memory to linger
among the exemptions that had made life pleasant will feel strangely
out of place in the new time which is being ushered in under the
spirit of ennobling sacrifice and impersonal devotion to great ideals.
Perhaps the most severe experience through which we shall go is
that of postponed compensation for surrender. The American habit
of mind seeks immediate results, direct compensation, visible en-
joyment. We are now asked to give life, treasure and effort; to
practise self-denial, to serve, to suspend ambitions and break the
bonds that affection had held sacred. But we are told that per-
haps not in our day shall we see the compensation. We are asked
to suffer and serve that Democracy may be safe in the future; that
another generation may be happy ; that other races and nations may
be protected in their dire distress. This is the supreme challenge
in our re-education. Here again our Christian experience serves us
well. The deepest instinct of Christian faith leads us to suffer and
to serve and to wait for eternity for compensation and peace. The
spiritual habit of mind is the best preparation that the world has
known for this supreme task of our re-education. Mention might
be made of one American, eminent and noble, who said with rever-
ence and joy that he gladly surrendered his only son, the single link
that had reconciled him to life, if by even his death peace and kind-
liness and righteousness might be made secure in the world, and the
pagan ideal of brute strength be forever outlawed among men.
We are asked, finally, to meet these staggering national and
personal emergencies, and organize life about them, without the
help of understanding what they presently mean. Thus we face the
trial of postponed interpretation. Some day, the meaning of this
anguish and turmoil will be understood, but not today. We who
pay the price must see country back of duty and God back of coun-
try. We must find contentment and strength in obedience, renun-
ciation and Faith. Our entire experience in supernatural life ac-
customs us to postponed compensations and postponed interpreta-
tions in spiritual life. This ought to prove to be in these troubled
days, a happy preparation for that patriotism which the nation de-
mands. This is our opportunity to show to the world the harmony
between love of country and love of God which our traditions de-
clare and our hearts accept. Our re-education will set forth that
truth with new force, now that a weary and mystified world turns
its dulled eyes to God for direction in the pathway to peace.
FRENCH PRIESTS IN LITERATURE.
BY WILLIAM P. H. KITCHIN, PH.D.
HEY are not rare in France, those priests who to
their competence in technical and professional mat-
ters add precious and unusual literary gifts so that
over the most arid and unpromising themes they
can throw a robe of grace, of fantasy, of idealism
and of charm which absolutely rivets attention. In their quiet vil-
lage presbyteries, in their humble chairs in some provincial college,
or in their convent chaplaincies they devote themselves to the ac-
quisition of that wisdom which does not age with time; and their
humdrum surroundings become (so to speak) the groves of Aca-
deme or the colonnades of the Porch, from which light and learn-
ing and culture radiate over their co-religionists. It seems to me it
is the interest and even the duty of the Catholic public at large to
know something about them. For have we not reason to be proud
of those whose splendid achievements, carried out at the price of
countless vigils and self-denials, need no meretricious advertise-
ment?
Abbe Klein, professor at the Institut Catholique of Paris, has
been before the reading public for the past twenty years. He has
tried his hand at biography, literary criticism, essays, travels, spir-
ituality; and in all these different genres he has said something
worth saying and said it well. The lives of two great bishops have
been told by him — Bishop Dupont des Loges and Cardinal Lavi-
gerie. The former work reached four editions and was crowned
by the French Academy. The abbe's judgments and impressions
of the New World are contained in two volumes : The Land of the
Intensive Life; The Discovery of the Old World by a Chicago
Student. The former volume has obtained no less than eight edi-
tions and the laurels of the Academy as well. In the matter of spir-
ituality he has published a volume of Nuptial Discourses, which has
attained nine editions. Seventeen sermons are contained in the
book ; and each is as fresh, as novel and as interesting as though it
stood alone. In each the austere teachings of our Faith are ex-
pressed with consummate literary art and in the manner suitable
for the newly-wed. For instance, take this paragraph from the
discourse entitled E Ccelo Mater:
I9i8.] FRENCH PRIESTS IN LITERATURE 463
" If such is the grand and lasting mission of the family, if the
links which bind all its members from generation to generation pre-
sent this immortal and sacred character, do not be surprised, dear
friends, that religion intervenes. . . .at each decisive phase of such
a glorious destiny. Do not wonder that she blesses the cradles and
the graves; that on the threshold of youth she has placed confirma-
tion and Holy Communion ; that all along the route she has placed,
if I may so speak, in relays, her Sundays, her festivals, her confes-
sions, and Holy Communions to recreate, strengthen, heal the wear-
ied or wounded travelers. But especially admire her and thank her
when she comes, like the grave and tender and smiling mother she is,
to bless the nuptial chamber of the young spouses. She knows what
heartfelt joys await you and she wants to sanctify them ; she knows
also what important duties are laid upon you, what trials life may
bring you as it has brought others, and she wants to safeguard by
the grace- of a sacrament instituted for that very purpose, the fidel-
ity of your love, the perseverance of your courage, and the sin-
cerity of your happiness."1
It is a far cry from the joy of wedding bells and from all
the conventional decorum of a safe and easy and well-ordered ex-
istence to the nightmare horrors of the present War. What tongue
can console those mothers and sisters and wives whose dear ones
have been ravished from them? And these horribly maimed sol-
diers with members and faculties lopped off, these mere butt-ends
of humanity still thinking and still remembering, who can nerve
them to support their darkness, their pain, their terrible deforma-
tion? Yes, this War has put out the very lights in heaven for
countless lives. Abbe Klein, as chaplain to the American ambu-
lance in Paris, was brought into close contact with all these physi-
cal and mental and moral suffer ings. He employed his rare leisure
moments in writing such episodes and considerations as might act
as a soothing balm on all these cruelly stricken beings. One may say
without any exaggeration that he has produced one of the few really
good books begotten by the War. Hopeful Sorrows deserves and
has obtained a tremendous success. From the eighth chapter, enti-
tled " Those Who Suffer for Just Causes," I extract the following:
" In this chaos of miseries, in this avalanche of trials let loose
by sin, the sin of covetousness, of envy, and particularly of pride;
amidst so many tortures that the Christian world might have es-
caped if it had not rejected the laws of the Gospel, I find consola-
1 Discours de Mortage, pp. 165, 166.
464 FRENCH PRIESTS IN LITERATURE [Jan.,
tion in that Gospel only, and especially in the beatitude promised
by Christ to those who suffer for a just cause. But in such a con-
flict of contending ambitions and savageries how many are they,
the servants of justice? Where are those who have the right to look
for the kingdom of God as an alleviation to their woes? There
need be no doubt about it ; such persons are everywhere, they form
the greater number, in fact the immense majority. I see them first
in these victims dear to God, sacred to His justice and pity — those
throngs of old men, women and children who weep and suffer and
die without having any share in this awful war, except being
crushed by it. I see them then in those soldiers of the Allies, who
amidst privations struggle, pour out their blood, offer their lives
to resist evil, to uphold liberty, to save their country and the human
race. But — let our minds be broad enough and our souls generous
enough to hear those truths — I see them also the victims of duty
among our very enemies — in those soldiers and their families, who
deceived by inextricable machinations believe themselves suffer-
ing for a righteous cause and sacrifice themselves to it with a cour-
age equal to our own. Shame and malediction according to the
measure of their knowledge — known to God alone — on the authors
of the War. Mercy and reward in eternity for all its victims —
yes, for all its victims. To all of them has been spoken the word
of Christ, ' Come to Me all ye who labor and are burdened and I
will refresh you !' '
The episodes chronicled in the first part of Abbe Klein's
book Contain some extraordinarily pathethic sketches, for instance,
My Blind Priest; The Death of My Friend; The Widow Who
Lost Her Only Son. These pages remind one strongly of Ian
MacClaren; but Abbe Klein with a literary skill just as deft, has
a deeper spiritual insight and a firmer grasp of the realities of the
other world than the pastor of Drumtochty 'could claim.
Quite another style and method are those of the priest, who
hides his identity under the pen-name of Pierre L'Ermite. He is
preeminently a preacher, and at once his pulpit and his sermon is
the short story. He states his aims and his ambitions unmistak-
ably in his preface to Le Soc: " I am a priest, and, because I am
a priest I sow in every wind and always and everywhere. I sow
in the pulpit, and I sow in my little stories. That humble tale may
perhaps evoke a smile of pity among the scornful, who know
nothing of the toiling millions; but I fancy it is read oftentimes
with joy by the evening fireside in numerous homesteads of my
1918.] FRENCH PRIESTS IN LITERATURE 465
France." But do not imagine the Hermit's stories are of the goody-
goody type ; they are anything but that. Rather are they living, pal-
pitating sketches taken straight from life. They are full of verve,
reality, wit and a very considerable spice of sarcasm and mischief.
They remind me of the one sinuous black line by which an artist can
convey an infinity of expression. His stories are extremely short,
true thumb-nail sketches. They rarely exceed a thousand words;
frequently they are contained in five or six hundred. They always
unfold in the telling a moral lesson; they always give the mise-en-
scene of some folly or weakness that ruins careers and lives and
souls; and they are always brimming over with that fizz and effer-
vescence peculiar to the born Parisian.
An excellent specimen of the Hermit's canvas is the little tale
called Indeed I Will Not Recommend Philippard for a Decoration!2
M. Philippard after prodigious efforts has been named for the Le-
gion of Honor. His good wife and himself give a gala dinner to the
prefect to whom they are indebted. They are not society people at
all and everyone is embarrassed and ill at ease. But after the wines
have gone around His Excellency thaws out, and eulogizes his host
so enthusiastically that the latter weeps without restraint. After
dinner the gentlemen retire to their host's study to smoke. The pre-
fect notices, hung in the place of honor, the picture of a priest, the
old uncle of Philippard, who had reared him. The prefect at once
hints the advisability of removing the picture; then practically or-
ders its removal, and Philippard humiliated, shamefaced but ter-
rified complies before all the politely sneering guests. At midnight
the gathering breaks up. The prefect on the way home tells the
story to his secretary adding : " I have changed my mind ; there's
no decoration for Philippard." "Why so, Excellency?" "Oh,
don't you see why? The fellow simply makes me sick!" A few
pages further on the story By Morphine to Eternity, scores the
foolish parents who refuse to get a priest for their dying son on the
plea that it might upset him; but they gladly allow him to be
drugged and drugged until he loses all consciousness, and fares
forth into eternity all unknown to himself. Bed No. 17 shows
the utter callousness of lay irreligious nurses whom the government
has caused to take the place of the Sisters. At Old Patrouillard's is
a political sketch showing how the candidates profit by the stupidity
and prejudices of an ignorant electorate.3
In these brief and brilliant pencillings — veritable snapshots
*Lisez-moi cal, pp. 50, 52; pp. 83, 85. (Bonne Presse.)
VOL. cvi. — 30
466 FRENCH PRIESTS IN LITERATURE [Jan.,
from the street and the marketplace — slang terms constantly crop
up. Consequently they would be extremely difficult to translate
adequately into another language; and unless a foreigner has lived
some time in Paris their point and sting will often be lost on him.
But they must be invaluable in their proper sphere and medium ; and
thousands whom a formal sermon would never reach, will be in-
structed and exhorted by these stories.
Twenty years ago I was initiated into the writings of Abbe
Vacandard, by hearing his life of St. Bernard read in the refectory
of St. Sulpice. In those distant, vanished days — gemens et erubes-
cens dico — a most ravenous youthful hunger used to obsess me; but
not even this primitive animal passion, nor the clattering of hun-
dreds of plates and knives could divert my attention from the thrill-
ing story ;and I used to drink in the splendid vivid paragraphs, which
described the deeds of the Thaumaturgus, as greedily as ever con-
firmed epicure sipped old and exquisite wine. No wonder that this
work reached four editions, was crowned by the Academy and hon-
ored by a commendatory brief from Leo XIII. Recently I have been
reading Father Vacandard's Studies in Criticism and Religious His-
tory, three volumes, each of which has had several editions. But in
them the literary flavor seems to me much fainter ; literature is, so
to speak, pushed aside to make way for erudition. Still these stud-
ies are extremely interesting, actual and up to date. For instance,
the condemnation of Galileo — always fascinating, always tantaliz-
ing— is treated in a masterly essay of a hundred pages.4 Another
fine essay, which present circumstances have brought into promi-
nence, is the attitude of the first Christians to military service.5
Abbe Henri Bremond's specialty is religious psychology. His
magnum opus now in the course of preparation and publication is
entitled The Literary History of Religious Sentiment in France
from the Wars of Religion to the Present Time. But this great
work is only the fine flower of half a lifetime of study and analy-
sis. He seems to have a particular talent and skill for dissecting
and describing the mental states of converts. Thus his first volume
of Religious Unrest merited to be crowned by the French Academy.
Two further volumes are largely occupied with the lives of English
converts and High Churchmen. Father Bremond's life of Newman,
his translations of the Cardinal's sermons, Apologia, and some of his
essays have also been crowned by the French Academy. He is a fre-
quent contributor to the Correspondant on literary and psychologi-
4 Vol. i., pp. 296, 393. §Vol. ii., pp. 129, 1 68.
1918.] FRENCH PRIESTS IN LITERATURE 467
cal themes; and all his papers are full of novel and striking views
on whatever subjects they treat. •
Abbe Ernest Dimnet works along similar lines with a more de-
cided leaning to the purely literary. What strikes me most in him
is his keen, critical faculty; his almost uncanny power of penetrat-
ing a writing, a mood or a soul and expressing its underlying es-
sence and tendency in a few pregnant sentences, clear-cut as a
cameo. As an example of his style and methods I would point out
his very suggestive essay, The Monks of Shakespeare. Q Another
more striking example still is his short volume on the Brontes, The
Bronte Sisters. I am acquainted with two English works on that
theme: Mrs. Gaskell's Life and Clement Shorter's weighty tomes.
Father Dimnet's book will probably make one-fourth of the first
and no more than one-tenth of the second. But if his canvas is
small, his portrait is absolutely clear and independent; he endeavors
especially to bring out the peculiar character and temperament of
the sisters. The verdict of such an admirable critic, alien in race,
creed and ideals to his subjects, cannot fail to have a piquancy and
freshness all its own. Of late he has begun to write in English, and
his name may be seen from time to time in the London reviews.
Abbe Mourret's department is Church history. He occupies
the Chair of History at St. Sulpice ; his lectures have been in course
of publication since 1910, and now extend to eight volumes. These
volumes have been welcomed with a chorus of praise by all the
Catholic reviews of France. Quite recently he has published a
splendid series of articles detailing the story of the Church in
France from 1830 to 1850. The portion dealing with De Lamen-
nais, describing his misfortunes, the provocation he received from
over-heated opponents, the physical disabilities under which he
labored, the untoward events which estranged him from his saintly
brother are of fascinating interest. Abbe Mourret has had access
to some unpublished documents preserved in the archives of St.
Sulpice, and he has told his story supremely well.7
Pathological mental states and particularly scruples are not
subjects that one would fancy could lend themselves to beauty of
exposition. Still Father A. Eymieu's books on these themes are as
interesting as any sensational novel ; and the proof is that they have
reached the prodigious number of twenty-five editions. His style
is the swinging oratorical one, that stirs the heart like a trumpet.
'Figures de Moines, pp. 157. 209.
T La Question du liberalisme Catholique au XIX. Sitcle. _
468 FRENCH PRIESTS IN LITERATURE [Jan.,
The following paragraph taken from his most recent book Provi-
dence and the War, on the Church and its enemies shows him at
his best :
" Many times have the enemies celebrated their victory over
Christ, or written epitaphs for Him and for His Church. The first
fashioned by Pontius Pilate was of heroic mold and nailed to a
Cross. The Jews placed the seals of the Sanhedrim on the tomb.
But the Murdered One issued from Hrs grave and made His pro-
gress through the ages. Diocletian thought he had overcome Him,
and he caused medals to be struck to commemorate the unforget-
able event : Nomine christianorum deleto. Voltaire, who met Him
some fifteen centures later, thought He might possibly linger on
perhaps twenty years more. Eighty years later Michelet judged
He had but a few days to live. Frere-Orban some years after
boasted that he had brought His Corpse to the very edge of the
grave, and the slightest effort, (so. he said), would be enough to
fling Him into it. And since then a hundred times over His enemies
in Germany, in France and everywhere else have announced His
death and prepared for His funeral with mad shouts of triumph;
but on the morrow they had to renew their fury and their plots to
kill afresh this Murdered One so inexplicably living." So he con-
tinues page after page with a readiness, a resource and a vigor that
never seem to tire.
The conclusion that seems suggested by the foregoing is, that
the Catholic clergy more than any other body of professional men
prize learning, and cultivate it with untiring assiduity. Not one of
the writers cited has the pursuit of letters for his exclusive occupa-
tion. Some of them are busy pastors, others professors, others
preachers and lecturers. In every case their literary achievements
have been accomplished as an aside to other more pressing and
more imperative duties. Rare are the lawyers, who while not for-
saking professional duties, have made a name for themselves in
literature. At the present moment I can recall only that glorious
gossip, Mr. Birrell. And even he has invariably kept to the broad
and beaten tracks, and " bir relied " pleasantly about people and
things that every person of culture knows something of. ' Rarer
still are the doctors; and as to the literary engineers, electricians,
architects, mining experts, I doubt if any such exist. Does it not
seem, then, that today as in the past the clergy strive after 1earnin°-.
and are prepared to impose many sacrifices of personal ease and
comfort on themselves for its attainment?
THE DISTRIBUTIVE STATE.
BY HILAIRE BELLOC.
II.
OW in the attempt to transform some scheme of pos-
session attaching to the means of production, men
think too commonly of the problem as a static one. It
has, of course, a static aspect; that is, you can con-
ceive it, as you can conceive any other economic
problem — arrested, as it were, for inspection at one moment in
its process. It is such a view which makes men especially con-
sider the transformation of possession by confiscation or by pur-
chase. But as a matter of fact the problem, like all economic prol>
lems, is, in its truest and widest aspect, not static but dynamic.
Wealth is not a thing permanently existing or distributed perma-
nently in a certain proportion between possessors and non-pos-
sessors— at least there is only one form of wealth of which this is
even partially true, and that is land. Wealth, in the sense of con-
sumable and enjoyable things, is in a perpetual state of flux, coming
into existence, being consumed and dispersed. Wealth is, of its
nature, a succession of ephemeral economic values.
Now the great point to seize in any political experiment one
may attempt with a particular economic situation is that, accord-
ing to the laws and arrangements of a particular society, this cease-
less river of production and consumption will assume one particular
form. Change the laws and arrangements of a society and that
form changes. Mold them to a reasoned object of any economic
kind, and that object, if your reasons are clear and deliberate, will
be attained. To put it in a metaphor: we can canalize the course
of the streams of production and consumption so that a lesser and
a lesser number shall become the possessors of capital in the state.
Bflt we may also canalize the course so that a larger and larger
number may become possessors.
The problem is most emphatically not one of material condi-
tions as the materialist generation just past imagined it to be. It
is not a problem concerned with the type of instruments used in
production, the means of communication, the diffusion of commer-
cial knowledge, the interdependence of markets, or any other such
470 THE DISTRIBUTIVE STATE [Jan.,
material factor. It is essentially a problem concerning the moral
conditions of a society, its philosophy, its social arrangements and
its laws. It is true that new material conditions falling upon a par-
ticular legal system, constructed long ago for other and older ma-
terial conditions, may cause disturbances in the economic arrange-
ment desired by citizens of the state. Of this we have an excellent
example today in the so-called " property " of men like Mr. Car-
negie, or the late Beit. The laws of property and its defence were
framed for maintaining that institution under such conditions
as would have made it impossible for either of these men to
have disturbed us with their really ridiculous accumulations. But
if the economic object of a society be carefully kept in view, if its
philosophy be clear and if its general will has access to legislative
power, no material condition whatsoever can compel a distribution
of wealth which that society believes to be unjust.
Let us suppose then j(it is unfortunately a risky hypothesis)
that there remains in the diseased industrial society of our time
a surviving residue of healthy desire for possession, a determina-
tion to demand, and if possible to effect, a better distribution in
the ownership of the means of production. By what regulations
and by what new institutions could the process of production and
consumption be affected so as to canalize its stream into the de-
sired form?
In order to answer that prime question we must first note
that the problem hinges upon the power of accumulation, and upon
the habit of using that power. We shall not solve the problem until
we have recognized under what stimulus men do, as a matter of
fact, accumulate in our society today; under what conditions they
lose the habit and under what conditions they feel it not worth
while to acquire it.
There are three main motives under which men accumulate
today :
(1) To enter a sort of lottery, the entrance fee to which is
small and the prizes of which under the conditions of rapid in-
dustrial change are large.
(2) To become richer by the normal process of accumulating
capital out of income, which accumulated capital applied to the
forces of nature shall produce an increment of wealth of which
that new capital can take its toll.
(3) To replace capital consumed in the process of produc-
tion.
I9i8.] THE DISTRIBUTIVE STATE 471
To these three main motives of accumulation in modern
America or modern England might be added the capital (such as
current accounts at banks) which is not accumulated for the pur-
poses of production, but which is none the less used for those
purposes; but this sum is small compared with the great mass of
capital produced every year in these countries. Now it is remark-
able that with the exception of the first (which applies only to a
few men, and the capital accumulated by whom almost yearly falls
into one of the other two categories) these motives are felt today
only by the wealthier portion of the community. The vast pro-
letarian bulk whose presence in society is our ruin, has not felt
and cannot feel such motives, while laws and institutions stand as
they do.
As to the first motive: a man needs but very little capital to
enter the lottery. In the majority of cases perhaps he needs none,
but he borrows that of someone else. Many of the conditions upon
which prizes can be won in the lottery are so offensive to common
morals that the great bulk of men do not enter for it at all. But
the small number who do enter is still enormously larger than the
number of those who draw a prize. Under the continually chang-
ing processes of modern production many start some small affair,
not with the desire to conduct it honorably, and at a slow and nor-
mally expanding rate — as a man in old days would start a small
shop or invest in a small farm, but in the hope that at the end
of a short effort the door will open upon unexpected possibilities.
That a boom will permit them to dupe great numbers of investors
and that, even if a genuine production of wealth is the result of
their effort, they may trick into their own hands the accumulations
of others, who had come in hoping to participate in the benefits.
I speak here strictly of personal accumulation. The late
Barnato may, or may not, have started with a few pounds. The
argument does not concern the millions he ultimately acquired, for
he did not acquire these in this fashion. This first category only
deals with the few pounds upon which he began his exceedingly
unpleasant career. The total amount of such accumulations is
very small. As an example of the motives which play upon the
modern world in the accumulation of its capital, this first motive
is instructive. Compared with the whole mass of capital, the
original accumulation of swindlers like old Hirsch, or lucky adven-
turers like the late Beit, are negligible. The practical part of the
problem turns upon the second and third categories.
472 THE DISTRIBUTIVE STATE {Jan.,
The second motive, that which moves the propertied middle
classes to accumulate, is the normal one under which capital has
always been accumulated since the beginning of economic effort in
this world. They accumulate in order to enrich themselves and
their connections. They accumulate for a fairly calculable increase
as their reward. But what is abnormal is the delegation of this
economic function to so small a class. In the mass of the artisan
world no one accumulates. In the professional world active and
important accumulation is hardly found in the incomes under five
thousand dollars a year. There is indeed one form of it, the form
of insurance when that insurance is used by the beneficiaries as
capital and not as income; but in proportion to the whole amount
accumulated this is small and one may say, with general truth,
(testamentary statistics bear one out) that the great bulk of so-
called " new " capital is created by the well-to-do in what arc
called the " upper middle classes " — a tiny fraction of the state.
There remains that motive for accumulation which people do
not think of as new capital, but only as the maintenance of " exist-
ing capital."
This is by far the most important category of all. It is not, of
course, in economic fact, the maintenance of " existing capital." It
is the perpetual creation of new Capital ; the building of new instru-
ments to take the place of those worn out, the getting together of
new stocks of clothing and house material and food to support
during the coming period of production those consumed by labor
in the past. This function is mainly undertaken in our present so-
ciety by the great industrial companies. They do not declare a
dividend until what is called " depreciation " has been met. They
count as part of their costs, the up-keep of the plant and of course
the fund which provides the wages of laborers.
Now whether this form of capital (which is the most impor-
tant of all) is a function of the well-to-do or of the mass of citizens,
simply depends upon who owns the shares in those great concerns.
They might perfectly well be owned by the great mass of the people.
There is no reason why the thousand million pounds represented by
railway stock in England alone, for instance, should be in a few
hands rather than in many, save that the arrangements of society
make it easy for the larger man to acquire the property of the
smaller man.
What we have to do in canalizing the stream of wealth pro-
duction, if we desire to multiply the number of possessors not of
I9i8.] THE DISTRIBUTIVE STATE 473
income but of capital, is to make it more difficult for accumula-
tion to take place on a large scale and easier for it to take place on
a small scale. And this we may do in three ways. ( I ) By the legal
guarantee of small accumulation; (2) by cheapening the process
of attack upon large accumulation and enhancing the difficulty of
attack upon small ones; (3) by compelling or inducing popular
forms of share-price, of allotment and of transfer.
We are living at the end of a period and in a society which
has for three hundred years consistently favored the growth of
large at the expense of small property. If we are to reverse this
process, it is evident that we shall only be able to do so by an aban-
donment of many principles that seem to us, from long habit, fun-
damental, and that our success would depend very much more upon
the establishment of a current of opinion than upon mere formal
law.
I have just stated the three necessary points. Let us take these
three points in the reverse order, which is also the order of their
importance, and consider the first last.
The Joint Stock Company, the Municipal and National Loan,
in fact, almost any appeal made to capital in a public form today,
is made upon a model devised by the rich and mainly usable by the
rich alone. If no public company could legally be formed that did
not offer shares at a small price, a first step in the right direction
would have been taken. If next, whether by a system of stamp
duty, or whether by direct legislation, allotment in a public appeal
should go preferentially to the smaller applicants, so that these
were served before the larger applicants were considered, that
would be another step. If the transfer of shares were taxed not
in proportion to the amount sold at one time, but in proportion to
the amount passing from one hand to another at one time, or if the
tax rose very rapidly against large accumulation and fell as rap-
idly in favor of dispersion, that would be a third step — and the most
effective of the three.
Now to all such democratic legislation when it is proposed, the
general answer is a technical one: that it is impracticable and
shows ignorance of the actual conditions of flotation, allotment,
and transfer. Like most obscurantist answers of the sort, this an-
swer is quackery. It is merely a vicious circle (when it is genuine)
which presupposes the presence of undemocratic conditions in any
department of life, and then tells you triumphantly that the whole
department cannot be democratic. Any department of national
474 THE DISTRIBUTIVE STATE [Jan.,
life, economic or political, can be "made democratic by positive
enactment if a democratic feeling is present in the people to work
the institutions created.
You may make it an illegal act to allot shares in a public loan
or in a public appeal for capital, save in a fashion which gives pref-
erence to the smaller applicant. You can perfectly well so arrange
your taxation that the existing middleman and all future devisers of
flotation will find it pays them to make the holders of their stock
many rather than a few. Finally you can with equal certainty, by
positive enactment and especially by a new system of taxation, tax
large transfers of shares from one large holder to another in so in-
creasingly heavy fashion, as to give the strongest preference to the
division of large blocks, and by further heavy taxation upon the
gathering into hand of many small blocks you can dam the re-
verse current.
There is one department and one only where a true, practical
inconvenience will arise, and that will be in the case of the pur-
chase of one company by another, or of many shares in one com-
pany by another. Thus a company democratically organized with
a large number of small shareholders might have an opportunity
for buying all or many of the shares in some company owned so
far by a few rich men. It will obviously be to the advantage of a
democratic programme to allow that transfer to take place unham-
pered. There are two ways in which this might be effected. Pur-
chases of this sort might be submitted to commissions appointed,
who should satisfy themselves of the nature of the selling and of
the purchase company or — much simpler — groups of the smaller
shareholders might be formed to buy up the large blocks of the
selling company in small, divided lots, and thus obtain the advan-
tages of the preferential laws.
As things are, of course, the exact opposite of all this takes
place. It does not " pay " to angle for the subscription of any class
below the fairly well-to-do. Big deals by large holders are enor-
mously the more favored by the state of our laws. The denomina-
tion of shares, the taxation of transfers, the middleman customs that
have consequently arisen, the more ordinary rules of allotment — all
these run directly counter to the dispersion of wealth and di-
rectly in favor of its accumulation in the hands of a few. There
is, of course, another argument against such legislation. It is the
argument that you cannot prevent such laws being broken : that the
big man will put up small men of straw, purchases will be f raudu-
I9i8.] THE DISTRIBUTIVE STATE 475
lently made against the spirit of the legislation in question, and so
forth.
The answer to this type of argument is very simple. The laws
must punish with a special severity frauds of this kind on the part
of the rich, which are neither more nor less than a conspiracy
against the poorer men of the community.
Any law is breakable, the sanctions of which are weak. All
laws are observed, the sanctions of which are strong. And when a
" practical " man tells you that such laws would " in practice " fail,
all he means is that the lawyers would be afraid to punish the
rich. Of course if a state has arrived at that pitch of degradation —
in which a rich man cannot be punished — it is useless to discuss any
reform whatsoever in that state. It has become a plutocracy and
must go to the devil by the shortest road a state can take : the road
of military conquest. For plutocracies have been, throughout his-
tory, the natural prey of their military rivals. So much for the
first of the three points : laws affecting industrial shares. Aided by
their parallel in the case of land they would form the first of the
three supports for a new society in which property should be well
divided.
There remains one further thing to be said in this connection.
Such laws, whether they regard land or industrial shares, would
do well to provide for and encourage a considerable proportion of
common ownership. Companies which owned a proportion of
stock in a general and undivided form would possess a nucleus of
interest, a sort of individual vitality, and a cementing power within
their corporation such as no other institutions can afford. Such,
in the case of land, was the function of the forest and the heath,
the waste of the manor, the common pasture land, the common mill,
the mountain, and so forth, which had existed from immemorial
time among the English, for instance, until they were stolen in the
process of the last two centuries and which are still vested in pop-
ular hands among the happier communities of the European con-
tinent to the present day.
Now if a redistribution of property is to be effected we have
seen that three avenues will lead to it. First, a drastic reformation
of company law, on some points of which I have already touched;
secondly and thirdly, by the cheapening of the process of attack
upon large accumulations (coupled with an enhancement of the dif-
ficulty of an attack upon small ones) and the erection of legal
guarantees for such small accumulations.
476 THE DISTRIBUTIVE STATE [Jan.,
The attack upon large accumulation — the economic attack, that
is — does not now exist. It has no basis from which to start. The
only enemy of a large accumulation in one hand, as things are
today, is a yet larger accumulation in some other hand; and the
very first thing to be done if we are to initiate an economic, that is
a spontaneous, attack upon large accumulations, is to give a basis
to small accumulations from which such an attack can proceed.
Once that basis existed, we can understand how the attack can be
fostered and developed by watching in what fashion it conducts it-
self in those societies where it is already successful.
There are not a few societies in Europe today where the small
man buys out the great, and the instrument whereby he succeeds in
doing this is simply that of offering a higher price in proportion
for the small lot than his great competitor will offer for many lots
combined. You can see the process at work under normal condi-
tions of life in almost any peasant proprietary upon the Continent.
Why is it that you do not see it at work under industrial conditions ?
It is because the great competitor can offer a false price ; in a word,
because he can with impunity over-capitalize. He can over-capitalize
securely from two considerations: first, that every great purchase
brings him nearer to a monopoly with a control of future prices;
secondly, that he can unload his over-capitalizations upon the pub-
lic who are duped. How is he to be met in these two attempts?
Only by imposing taxation upon a rapidly increasing scale, in in-
verse proportion to the distribution of ownership within the com-
pany or firm.
It is never a body of small owners, a cooperative society, or
any democratically organized joint enterprise which effects these
deals. It is nearly always one man, or at the best a small group in
which one man is predominant. Burden such transactions with a
really heavy and rising scale of taxation and they would be impos-
sible. A financier sees his opportunity, being himself the con-
troller of a certain merchant fleet, let us say, to " amalgamate "
with another line; that is, to establish a partial monopoly at the
public expense by buying out the shareholders in the second line, or,
more commonly (what comes to exactly the same thing) by guar-
anteeing them a superior dividend if they will " come in." If that
financier knew that it would cost him so many thousands more to
effect the deal with poorly distributed capital than it would to effect
it with well distributed capital, he would preface the transaction
by a period of attempted distribution. It would pay him to mul-
1918.] THE DISTRIBUTIVE STATE 477
tiply to as great an extent as possible the number of holders who
were the genuine possessors of stock above a certain minimum, but
below a certain maximum of money the scale would have to be a
drastic one.
As for the guaranteeing of small accumulations once they have
come into existence upon a large scale, that is another matter. The
very first legislative basis for such a guarantee 'is an incidence of
taxation which would make it less and less worth while for the
larger man to buy out the smaller individually ; and the next neces-
sity would be some set of courts in which small property should be
jealously Safeguarded. It was a matter of principle in mediaeval
legislation, before the stable texture of that society was deliberately
torn to shreds to the profit of the rich, that the means of livelihood
of a family (or, as we should call it under our more complex condi-
tions, a certain minimum of capital and land) should be free from
distraint. Such a principle would seem to us revolutionary. Until
we adopt it, no effective guarantee can be erected to protect a mass
of small owners.
But there remains one capital criticism of any system of well-
distributed and well-divided property. It is the criticism which will
immediately occur to every man trained in the modern materialistic
and fatalistic conception of economics. It is self-evident that a
society sufficiently determined could establish redistribution vio-
lently or methodically. But unless the very essentials of property
are to be destroyed in such a system, you cannot but leave the indi-
vidual owner free to sell. You may, by legislation, make it impos-
sible for him to imperil his patrimony by anticipation or loan, for
you may make it impossible for the usurer to recover. You may set
up a legal fence around him, which guarantees him even against the
distraint of the Fisc, while making it peculiarly easy for the Fisc to
confiscate and to raid large accumulations. You may even so devise
your fiscal system that what the Fisc takes from the few, it can in-
directly distribute among the many; for instance, you could ear-
mark death duties in aid of small accumulations and of coopera-
tive work. But you cannot, unless you are willing to destroy the
whole ethos of a proprietarial society, prevent small property from
effecting its private exchanges.
Now there it is that we come to the one really strong argument
against reversing that dreadful stream which has led us into our
present misery. Here it is that the Collectivist feels himself on sure
ground when he tells you that you might establish a well-propertied
4?8 THE DISTRIBUTIVE STATE [Jan.,
society tomorrow, and inevitably by process of purchase it would
become a capitalistic society again unless his second-best be adopted
and a political control be established over all capital and land. The
reply to that argument is not an economic reply. It cannot be met
by any proposed set of legal enactments or by any machinery for
defending by positive law the accumulations of the many. The re-
ply to that argument is discovered in quite another field. It consists
in the observation that property, once well distributed, creates an
atmosphere of its own, utterly different from that of the anarchic-
ally competitive capitalistic society which is all that most modern
observers conceive as possible.
Upon the soundness and reality of that reply depends the
whole value of an attempt to restore the balance of ownership in
the modern world. If it be a dream and an illusion, if as a fact no
such social atmosphere is created in a society of small proprietors,
then the attempt to establish property in any permanent form is
vain. If it be not an illusion but the truth, it is a truth of the ut-
most moment. If a state in which property is well divided, con-
tains in its nature an instinctive and automatic self-righting power,
if a society blessed with wide distribution of wealth is a society in
stable equilibrium, then the restoration of such a state is not only
desirable — nearly all men desire it in their hearts — but it is prac-
ticable as well. Whether that stability can be achieved, I shall now
inquire.
I have said that the fundamental criticism against the Distrib-
utive State— as one may call that society in which the mass of fam-
ilies are possessed severally of a share in the means of production —
is also the only valid argument against it, and at the same time the
root of all our modern economic quarrel. No one with a good ele-
mentary grounding in history but knows that this type of state in
which families own, is normal to our race, and existed happily for
generations undisturbed. No one, however ignorant of history,
but knows, if he is a sane human being, that men do desire this in-
dependent life for their posterity, a life which property protects
from inquisition as from dishonor, from tyranny as from license,
whether these evils threaten from governments or from fellow-
subjects.
No one can be so muddle-headed that upon a clear exposition
of all that property connotes — of how it is only property at its
fullest when it is the common experience of citizens, of how it safe-
guards the family as well as the person, the corporation as well as
1918.] THE DISTRIBUTIVE STATE 479 .
the family, the honor as well as the dignity of sub-units within the
state — no one can be so thin on having that explained to him as not
to seize its large human meaning. He may be a nomad for whom
tradition in concrete things, and particularly in a plot of ground, is
not an inherited experience. He may come of ancestors so long
dispossessed and economically enslaved as to have forgotten the in-
stinct of the thing, but he cannot be (short of imbecility) so empty
of human savor as to think property no more than an opportunity
of enjoyment, or, as to fail to seize (when it is clearly expounded
to him) why that fundamental human institution runs through all
the story of mankind.
And here it is that the strong Collectivist argument arises and
for that matter the strong Servile argument too. For, like so many
opposites, the evil but most realizable theory of slavery and the mad-
cap theory of Collectivism, each being opposed to plain manhood,
have a common argument for definite ends. And that common
argument is this : you cannot have property distributed today among
a number of free families. The thing is today physically impos-
sible. I may like it or dislike it; I may seek it or fly from it; but
the important practical point is that property will not work under
modern conditions. In other words, the Collectivist (such as
Robert Blatchford or Wells in England, or the late Jaures in France
and a host. of Germans in Germany) talks to the man who desires
to restore property much as he would talk to a man who desired to
restore, let us say, sea-bathing at Ravenna.
What would one say to a man who proposed to become rich by
establishing bathing-machines and other pleasures of the seashore
at Ravenna? He would very properly point out the natural and
human and even lovable attractions of the sea, and he could easily
prove from history how much men loved to pass their leisure by its
shores. But you would say to him : " It will not work. The sea has
left Ravenna, and you might as well try to establish your scheme
in Birmingham." This answer to an enthusiast who should make
such a mistake about Ravenna would be a just answer, and the Col-
lectivist (and his much less honest and less human opponent who
defends modern capitalism) speaks in the same way.
" You could have had property once," he says in effect, " but
you cannot now because the material circumstances of the modern
world forbid it. The instruments of production have changed,
and the means of communication have changed. Between them it
is impossible for small property to survive." That is not only
480 THE DISTRIBUTIVE STATE [Jan^j
Blatchford's answer; it would also be Mr. Carnegie's or Harms-
worth's; it would not only be the view of Wells but also, one may
presume, of the late Lord Armstrong, or the proprietor, whoever
he may be, of the Kalamazoo railroad system.
It is false. It entirely depends upon the conception that in a
society where wealth was properly distributed the same families
we now tolerate would be tolerated, the same novel poisons dis-
covered, the same perversions of human nature continued, as in this
vile industrial society where property is unknown. The whole of his-
tory is there to prove the complete falsity of such a thesis. Once
property is well distributed there arises among men ( for whom this
is the normal condition demanded by their whole social nature)
what may be called an economic public opinion, destructive to the
evils of capitalism. Conversely, the evils which are fundamentally
the evils of modern capitalism have arisen again and again under
conditions which knew nothing of expense of instruments, or of
rapidity of communication. Property well distributed balances the
state, regulates competition, restores a right proportion in human
life. Property ill distributed, and rather forgotten as a normal
human thing, has been the disease of states, the most primitive and
the most coarse.
Let us consider one of the chief phenomena of modern capital-
ism. The larger man squeezes " out " the small man. How is
this done? To hear Collectivists talk one would imagine it was
a process at once mysterious and inevitable, something like the pro-
cess whereby a good economic thinker can attack a pedantic and in-
sufficient one in front with logic and at the same time in flank with
irony; something as inevitable as the superiority of a poet to a
huckster, or of an athlete to a cripple. But get away from the
jargon and look at life, and what do you observe in fact?
Lord Bighor is at a particular moment possessed of an eco-
nomic power of demand (guaranteed to him by particular and often
unpopular laws) of six million pounds. For the moment we
will not examine how he got it. Let us suppose he found under a
hedge some article so much desired by men today that it gave him
this effective power of demand. Now then; Lord Bighor uses this
effective power of demand to buy up six sources of brine. There
is a seventh source of brine in the country, and only a seventh. He
has not got the million to buy it up with, so what does he do? He
approaches the owners of the seventh and tells them that unless
they will " come into a combine " which shall control the production
1918.] THE DISTRIBUTIVE STATE 481
of brine, they will be " frozen out." If the owners of the seventh
mine do not give way, Lord Bighor sells his brine in their district
at less than the cost of production, until they are ruined. This pro-
cess is certainly an infallible one and its results inevitable — if you
allow it to take place. It is allowed to take place in our society be-
cause there are really no laws, effective laws, against it, because there
is no cooperative examination of the market, and no cooperative
regulation of it; and ultimately because people do not mind that
kind of a thing being done. The rich do not mind it, of course,
because it produces those great prizes which they think to be the end
of life. The poor do not mind it because, owning no property and
having forgotten what the ownership of property may be, the horror
and abomination of the whole thing escape them. In a society
where wealth is properly distributed, action of this kind is punished
precisely as any other sort of theft. In the past, as being more
dangerous than common theft, it was, in many places, punished by
death. Where it was punished by death it was extremely rare.
Note, for the tenth time, that the tendency of capital under
rapid conditions of communication to accumulate, has nothing
whatsoever to do with the tendency of a few men to get that capi-
tal into their hands. The two things are totally disconnected, pro-
ceed from totally different causes, and discover their effect in totally
different ways. We are speaking here of the evil of few owners in
the state, and its remedy. The concentration of capital is not an
evil, or, if an evil, it is an evil with results rather aesthetic than
moral. Conversely that evil — the evil of few owners — has ap-
peared in its worse form in societies where the instruments of pro-
duction were extremely simple, and the means of communication
slow. Pagan antiquity suffered it in a higher degree even than our-
selves. The pagan future may develop it, although that future de-
cline (as it will if it be pagan) in the arts and the material satis-
factions of men. The safeguard of well-divided property resides in
the corporate instincts which that state of society at once develops.
Those instincts are present in all men. A false philosophy or a false
religion may warp them and may almost destroy them. Where
they are so warped, when they are so almost destroyed, then the
control of the means of production falls into the hands of a few,
whether under modern conditions which we call industrial capital-
ism, or under the old conditions of the Ergastulum and the slave
market.
It is true that mechanical redistribution of property could in
VOL. on.— 31
482 THE DISTRIBUTIVE STATE [Jan..
no way replace a sound traditional philosophy, and that the safe-
guarding of mankind depends much more on its religion than on
its social arrangement; for the second is the product of the first.
But those of us who desire to restore property even in those
unhappy patches of society where social disease has all but destroyed
it, depend for our success upon that permanent inner power which
medicine depends upon. No doctor yet made a man whole. It is
man's nature which does this ; but it is the function of the healer to
remove the impediment and the abnormal thing. His mechanical ac-
tion does but release a living spring of normal action which re-
stores the wasted part.
Certainly the reestablishment of property by law would not
effect its stability. If, once established, and for due time artificially
guaranteed, property took no root but failed and withered, then one
might justly conclude that not only this one institution had grown
impossible in the psychology of our people, but likewise all its de-
pendent institutions of civic liberty : the power of the family to re-
act against the state; of national sense; the expression of the free
man who will defend and enjoy his society; and of all that goes
with citizenship.
The last stage of a society which fails to conserve the institu-
tion of property and has lost the power of maintaining it distrib-
uted among its citizens, is not Collectivism — never was there a more
mechanical absurdity — the last stage of that society is a condition
in which the rich few shall be the political masters also, and the
mass of what were once free men shall be — not in heated metaphor
nor in pamphleteering jargon — but in sober, legal enactment — their
slaves.
[THE END.]
A SAINT FOR SOLDIERS.
BY CHARLES PHILLIPS.
N the lovely valley of the Indre, within a day's ride of
the walls and turrets of the ancient chateau of
Chinon, which rises above the river like an island of
rock, lies the village of Fierbois, nestled in the
wooded country of southwestern France. In this
year of 1918 this beautiful spot still remains far removed from
the grinding heel of the World War that rages to the north of it,
however the bloody long-reaching hand of battle may touch its
homes and hearths — as it touches our own, thousands, instead of
scores, of miles away. Peace still breathes upon these Touranian
fields which Clovis, first King of France, once trod and loved. The
forests of fir and oak hereabout have not yet been riddled by shells
or cut down by the shrapnel's scythe. At evening the lancet win-
dows of old Chinon still reflect the glories of a sunset which for
miles and miles bathes with prodigal loveliness a fair, wide-spread-
ing land of tranquillity and plenty. Yet this whole peaceful scene
was once trodden flat in the pathway of Mars. That was in the
late Middle Ages, when France was suffering the agony of the
Hundred Years' War, and when armed conflict, instead of peace,
so like our own terrible and momentous times, became almost the
normal state of the civilized world.
In those days, as once more in our own, every man was a sol-
dier, and there were few left at home to till the fields and grind the
corn — and pray to the saints. But between those days and our own
there was a difference, too, as well as a likeness. Only a small
percentage of the twentieth century soldiers know anything about
the saints; whereas the fighting men of five hundred years ago not
only knew the saints, but they had a saint of their very own — one
whom they actually carried off to the wars with them, instead of
leaving her behind to find votaries among the stay-at-homes; one
whose name was forever on their lips, called upon for succor wher-
ever and whenever danger threatened them or death or misfortune
wrung a prayer from their hearts. This Saint was the blessed mar-
tyr-virgin of Egypt, Katherine of Alexandria, patron of men-at-
arms, and worker of innumerable wonders among the soldier-boys
484 A SAINT FOR SOLDIERS [Jan.,
of the fifteenth century. And it is at Fierbois, near Chinon, in
lovely Touraine, that her most famous shrine is situated. Here her
relics are still preserved; and hither the faithful still come on pil-
grimages, though not so much now out of fealty to Madame
Sainte Katherine herself as for love of the greatest and holiest
of all her devotees, that one glorious soldier above all others whom
she succored and guided in time of war, the Blessed Joan of Arc.
For this Saint- for-soldiers of ours, this Katherine of Alexandria, is
the same Katherine who became one of the three Voices inspiring
and directing the Maid of Domremy to rise up and save France.
There is much more than the story of Joan clustered around
St. Katherine's shrine at Fierbois, however; there is, in fact, a
whole history of soldiering written in its ancient records — such a
story of war-time escapes and escapades, of miracles and deliver-
ances and wonder-workings, as one will find only in the chronicles
of the days of faith and chivalry; days long lost, but coming back
to us, it seems, on the red tide of war again. For adventure and
heroism, for faith unshaken by fire or sword, stock or gibbet, com-
mend us to these antique records of the Chapel of Fierbois ! It is
a chronicle of wonders, this yellowed manuscript, Les Miracles de
Madame Sainte Katherine, reposing now in the Bibliotheque Na-
tionale at Paris. Only once has it seen the light of an English day
— back in the nineties of the last century, when the late Andrew
Lang published a translation of some of its pages, taken from a
transcript made at Tours in 1858 by the Abbe Bourasse; and this
slender little book is now out of print. A chronicle of wonders —
and most of them wrought for soldiers gone to war.
Supposedly it was a soldier who first brought St. Katherine
to France — some Crusader, gone to the East to rid the Holy Land
of the curse of the Moslem, and returned safe home, after many
perils through all of which his chosen patroness had protected him.
No wonder that the story of the martyred maid of Alexandria had
appealed to the heart of that fighting man of France, that champion
of the Cross, whoever he was, valiant fighter that she herself was,
a mere girl of eighteen facing her pagan emperor and challenging
him with the Faith of Christ ! Such an intrepid saint was just the
patron to inspire the warrior who must face the fire and hatred of
the heathen desecrator of the Holy Land. Long known as " one
of the fourteen most helpful saints in heaven," it is not strange that
the man of arms, cast in pagan lands far from all that was Christian
and familiar, should appeal to her for protection. And, his prayers
I9i8.] A SAINT FOR SOLDIERS 485
answered, what more could he do than spread her holy fame
among his fellow-soldiers, and bring back to France the story of
her power in heaven ? Her relics were enshrined on Mount Sinai.
He made his pilgrimage to that holy spot; but he did more. When
he sailed home to France he brought with him some of those sacred
remains, to be set up in his own country for veneration.
That was the beginning of the reign of St. Katherine in
France. It was at Fierbois that the relics were deposited and a
fitting shrine erected over them. The Church of St. Katherine at
Fierbois became the centre of the world's devotion to the martyred
virgin, and the cult grew rapidly to vast proportions.
Three centuries passed. Evil days fell upon Fierbois. War
swept over Europe; and by the year 1375, as the chronicles show,
the shrine, once a Mecca of the devout, was completely abandoned,
the chapel , fallen into ruin, overgrown with weeds, forgotten even
by the soldiers whom the saint had loved to shelter and protect.
But not altogether forgotten. There was one Jehan Godefroy
who remembered. Like the rest of us, he may not have given much
thought to heaven and the saints when all went well with him ; but
when trouble and pain came, he remembered. In the year 1368 this
Jehan was stricken with blindness and paralysis. Was it a visita-
tion of God? Marvelous fruits were to come out of this misfor-
tune of Godefroy's. After the Scriptural seven lean years of suf-
fering he suddenly bethought himself of the long neglected shrine
of St. Katherine near the village of Fierbois. Seven years of
blindness and paralysis give a man plenty of time to think! Per-
haps in a happier day Jehan had visited the shrine ; perhaps Madame
Sainte Katherine had succored him in other troubles. At any rate,
he recalled the deserted chapel, to approach which, as the record
tells us, one had to pass " through tangled wood and undergrowth
no man might reach." He begged that he might be carried there,
to make a novena for his cure ; and thither his friends bore him on
his litter, though they were obliged to hew a path with axes through
the wild wood that had grown up around the deserted and dese-
crated place. But the difficult journey was made, and the crippled
soldier was reverently laid within the once-consecrated walls. And
there, before his novena was ended, the desired miracle was indeed
wrought for him, and Jehan rose from his bed sound of limb and
with his sight restored. " He could see well and clear and was
whole and healed in all his members, as he yet continues to be."
This was the signal for St. Katherine to come once more into
486 A SAINT FOR SOLDIERS [Jan.,
her own in France. The fame of Jehan's miraculous cure spread
like fire, and that same year the ruined shrine was restored and the
chapel rebuilt. It was one Hylaire Habert who, enthused over the
wonder wrought for his friend Jehan, undertook this restoration.
And in Hylaire's story we find not only the heavenly and miracu-
lous, but a glint of common everyday humor as well. The charac-
ters in the comedy are Goodman Habert himself and his practical
minded wife — evidently a long-tongued and short-tempered dame,
who had a poor opinion of the religious enthusiasm of her pious
spouse. Hylaire, however, possibly a soldier at one time, and one
who owed some great indebtedness to St. Katherine, took very
seriously the obligations of able-bodied men to the Egyptian virgin.
Rebuild her shrine at Fierbois he would, no matter what the cost;
and forth he set to do it, much to the neglect of his wife and
his work at home. Dame Habert rebelled. " The thing that he
did sorely displeased his wife," reads the quaint Chronicle. In fact,
she became so terribly incensed at her husband, because " he left his
business to do the same," that, in one of their rows over the matter,
she made a prayer to God " that he might never return nor come
again to his own house!" We can see the angry lady driving him
off! — we can imagine the state of mind she was in, to let go like
that!
But for once Dame Habert had permitted her feelings to get
too much the best of her. On the making of that wicked prayer,
there came a condign, swift punishment on her head. " She
dropped down, as one dead, her eyes and mouth shut, sans speech
or movement, nor ever returned to herself till her lord came from
the said chapel." What Hylaire first thought that evening, on com-
ing home to find his stormy helpmate " sans speech " and " with her
mouth shut," is not recorded. But, dutiful husband that he was,
he instantly repaid good for evil. Where she had prayed a curse
for him he made a prayer of charity for her — albeit there may have
been just a touch of coals-of-fire in it; for it was to St. Katherine
he turned for help. " He took a vow .... and promised to bring his
wife to that Saint, if madame would restore her." She was re-
stored, and " she made her oblation " — a good resolution against
sins of the tongue, perhaps, poor fretted lady ! — and Hylaire rebuilt
the chapel of Fierbois.
It was in 1375 that Jehan Godefroy was cured — and Dame
Habert silenced. From that time the shrine flourished. A prisoner
of war, a French soldier, taken by the English and held in chains
I9i8.] A SAINT FOR SOLDIERS 487
for " a whole month," is the next witness to the powers of St.
Katherine's intercession. This soldier is Perrot Chapon, whom the
saint miraculously delivered out of his irons. Lying captive in prison,
he made a vow that "if he might escape without paying ransom,
verily he would go on pilgrimage to her chapel." At home, his wife
— like many a soldier's wife today — was pouring her life out in
prayer for her man's deliverance and return ; and, as heaven would
have it, she too, at the same hour, " made her vow." Instantly the
miracle was worked ! Perrot in his prison fell asleep ; " and on his
waking, lo, he was in the hall of his own house, all in chains of iron
as he was." " And so hath he come to the chapel to give thanks to
Our Lord, and to the Virgin, and hath sworn that this is true."
In every case the depositions of pilgrims who came to Fierbois
to the wonder-workings of St. Katherine were duly sworn to under
oath. There can be no question of the veracity of these records.
With the devotees who journeyed thither to make public acknowl-
edgment of the help of heaven, this pilgrimaging and attesting
was a very solemn business. Often they came great distances, and
at great expense and grave peril, to pay this debt to God. Even the
most skeptical, then, can hardly question them or claim that such
journeyings were undertaken merely for the fun of telling gorgeous
lies. No ; these wonders had been wrought ; these devotees — mostly
soldiers, rough men of little subtility but of mighty faith — had ac-
tually experienced these miraculous happenings, and nothing could
hinder their publishing them to the world, for the grace and bene-
fit of those who should come after them, even to the generation of
the twentieth century !
The armies fighting in Europe in those days were like those of
today, made up of men from many countries. In the Fierbois
Chronicle we find, alongside our Frenchman and Englishman, the
sturdy, canny Guillaume Oade, a Welshman — we can just see him !
— " declaring and affirming by his faith and oath " how he was
saved from the perils of war through the aid of St. Katherine.
And the Welshman's story brings us into the very heart of the
World War of today — into Flanders, and up to the very " Wipers "
whose name the Tommies of the twentieth century (some of them
Welshmen, too!) have written in heroic blood on the pages of
history. " At Poperique in Flanders," we read, " two leagues and
a half from Ipre," "between All Saints and Christmas," in 1382,
Welshman Oade " was lodged with great company of men at
arms." On a certain Saturday night, about midnight, the English
A SAINT FOR SOLDIERS [Jan.,
suddenly decided to abandon the place, after setting fire to it; but
our friend Guillaume " and his varlet " — Oade was evidently an
officer — were apparently not apprised of the movement, or else sim-
ply overslept, for they were left behind " sleeping in the house
whereas they were lodged," and were quickly surrounded by the
Flemish soldiers who " ran in on them from every quarter." What
followed is enough to make any romancer sit up and look to his
laurels. Fiction could not devise more breathless suspense. And
through it all, St. Katherine leads our soldier hero scatheless.
Taken by surprise, Oade and his man fled in terror from the
house, fighting to escape ; Oade, in his extremity, " calling on
Madame Sainte Katherine of Fierboys " for help, and vowing a
pilgrimage to her shrine if she would save him. How this Welsh
soldier came to know of Fierbois and its miracles is not set forth ;
but the only explanation there can be is that the Saint's fame had
spread through all armies that it had come even to his alien ears.
At any rate, there he was, cornered by his enemies, and praying
desperately for help. The swift heels of his varlet took that terri-
fied mortal to safety ; he " escaped by his speed and by the grace of
God and Madame Sainte Katherine;" but Guillaume, either be-
cause he was fat and short of wind; or perhaps because he unsel-
fishly stood back to let his companion make good his flight —
the reason is not stated — was left alone to face the enemy. He
saw " that he might neither fight nor flee," so he " ran into a
thatched house, and those Flemings knew not what had become of
him." Up to the roof of this house he climbed, and through all
the bitter, winter night (our boys today can tell us something of
winter nights in Flanders!) he lay there, flat on his face, fearing
to move lest he be detected; and praying — how he must have
prayed !
All around him the town was burning; there was the crash of
falling roofs, the heat of flaming walls, drawing ever nearer and
nearer him ; and it was no easy matter to hide, perched on a roof
top in the lurid glare of such a conflagration. But he did not give
up. He prayed. He placed his all in the hands of St. Katherine.
He made his vow to her, over and over again. The long, perilous
hours passed flaming over his head. At dawn, the fire still raging
and the heat becoming unbearable, matters grew altogether des-
perate for him. " And when the fire had burned all the houses there-
about, the said Guillaume, seeing all the houses fall flaming against
him, and the fire entering at front and rear " — thus graphically
1918.] A SAINT FOR SOLDIERS 489
does the old parchment tell the story — with the name of St. Kath-
erine on his lips, and one last measuring glance to the hostile ground
below, Guillaume slid down from the burning roof, determined to
fight his way through the street to safety. But once more he was
surrounded by the Flemish and cornered. Yet even now he did
not surrender. There was still St. Katherine to succor him. With
a prayer bursting from his heart, he broke from his captors and
made a dash for the river — he could not have been such a fat man,
after all ! — and leaping in, swam for the opposite shore. There
again he was set upon, stripped of his purse and his money and sav-
agely attacked " with axes and pikes." " And seeing that they
thought to smite him and slay him .... he prayed yet again to
Madame Sainte Katherine;" and despite all his weakness and ex-
haustion, and all the uneven odds of the struggle, he escaped,
though he roamed the plains for three days afterward, hiding by
daylight, traveling by night — as many a fugitive in the No Man's
Land of today's Flanders has done — before he rejoined his men.
There may not be so much of the miraculous in the Welshman's
story as there is of sheer pluck; but there was the faith of the man!
— it was that that gave him wit and grit to win out. To him it
was a miracle, or at any rate a direct answer to prayer; and he
came duly to the shrine at Fierbois to pay his promised pilgrimage.
Soon on his heels came others to testify — this time to a veritable
miracle. In the next record of the Chronicle we find not one alone,
but four men, come to acknowledge together the heavenly aid
of St. Katherine. They had been taken prisoners by the English
stationed at a garison near La Souterraine, and when caught had
been " bound as straitly as they might," and beaten " sorely,"
after which their captors had left them in their dungeon and had
gone off to enjoy a well-earned dinner. The poor whipped wret-
ches, left thus to their smarting pains and their heavy irons, trying
to comfort one another with hopeful words, were minded at last to
pray to St. Katherine for deliverance. They made their prayer —
and their plea was heard immediately! Straightway the irons fell
from their feet and hands, and out from their prison, past guards
and sentinels, they walked, the four of them, unharmed ! " And to
accomplish their vows, they came hither together, they, their wives
and their children, and swore and affirmed that the said tale is
true, making oath in the presence of several notable persons."
Two fellow-soldiers, Thomas du Mont and Perrinet 1'Auver-
gnat, imprisoned in a fosse " narrow and deep as a lance's length.
490 A SAINT FOR SOLDIERS [Jan.,
and above them laid a right great rock, that they might not avail
to win forth," were held for fourteen months " at so great a ran-
som that all their friends would have been over hard-set to pay it."
Three of their companions, taken with them, had already died in the
same fosse, and the bodies were left there to corrupt beside the liv-
ing captives " whereby the said Thomas and Perrinet suffered sore
from the filth and stench." They prayed to St. Katherine. Kneel-
ing in the trench, they turned their faces, as well as they could
guess, in the direction of Fierbois, and begged their patroness in
heaven to send them a quick deliverance out of the horrible death
that was slowly creeping over them. Thus praying, sleep came
upon them ; " and when they woke they found themselves above
the fosse, and the rock rolled away, as it were two turns, the said
rock being so heavy that it needed two men to turn it over."
Casin du Boys, sentenced to be beheaded, and imprisoned in a cage
" locked with a key, bound moreover with a right strong rope all
about it," and with a guard lying on top of the cage, was likewise
delivered through prayer to St. Katherine. " Right so, his vow
being made and his prayer, the said cage flew open of its own ac-
cord, and forth went Casin, he that lay above the cage perceiving
naught." But still the prisoner was a prisoner. The only opening
in the dungeon was a window " set the height of two men from
the ground;" yet Casin was miraculously lifted up to it: " he found
his breast on a level with the window, and him seemed that he was
hoven under the armpits." And he " went forth of the house. ..."
Again it was in something of the same manner that Guillaume Guy,
who was " put endlong in a barrel, and above him laid two great
tables, and an Englishman lay on the tables," was rescued by St.
Katherine. Perrin Gougeaut, " bound with four ropes right
straitly," was miraculously released, along with seven of his fellow-
prisoners, after they had prayed to the Saint; and so record after
record reads — the opening of doors, the falling away of chains, the
saving of soldiers from every imaginable sort of peril and death.
The fate of non-combatants in the wars of five hundred
years ago was quite as bad as it is today. But St. Katherine pro-
tected them too, as well as the fighting men. Jehan de Pons, peace-
ably enjoying a partridge hunt one bright June day in 1423 — very
likely getting ready for the next meatless day forthcoming — was
snatched up by a party of marauding Scotch soldiers of the in-
vading armies, and with seven farm hands plucked from their tasks
in a neighboring wheat field, was marched off to a nearby oak tree
i9i«-J A SAINT FOR SOLDIERS 491
to be hanged with a halter. The seven unfortunate laborers were
hanged first; " then remained the said Jehan, the last to be hanged,
because he had prayed for this grace in God's name to him that
took him " (a Scotchman, not a Hun!) " that he might have time
and space to pray God's mercy and pardon." This prayer was
granted, the while he saw " all these seven hanged and strangled
before his eyes," and then it was that he turned to St. Katherine for
help.
How often it happens that when we desire the most earnestly
and pray the most urgently, the ear of God and His saints seems
deafest to our pleading ! And then — the sudden answer ! Jehan de
Pons prayed ; but he was hanged nevertheless, " right high on the
said oak tree by a halter that was almost new." And yet his prayer
was heard, even in that extremity. The quaint language of the
Chronicle best recounts the ending of the story :
And when he that hanged him was mounted and riding after
the others, being now about a bow-shot from the said oak,
the halter wherewith Jehan was hanged broke asunder, and
he fell on a heap of sharp stones, harming himself no mdre
than if he had been on a pillow, and he felt no pain when he
was hanged up, for it seemed that one hove him up under the
feet. So came he to accomplish his vow .... bringing with him
the broken halter.
The leaven of the grace of God was working among those
braw Scotch warriors marauding in French fields, it seems. They
who had mercy enough to give the trembling Jehan de Pons at least
time to say his prayers might have a praying man or two among
themselves, no telling! And they did. And as surely as hanging
and heavenly rescue therefrom was good enough for peaceable
Frenchmen hunting partridges, so was it to be proven good enough
for at least one alien fighter abroad in France for the spoils of
war. Among these foreign soldiers posted on the continent was one
" Michael Hamilton, a Scot," a native of a Scottish parish dedi-
cated to St. Katherine, and all his life a devotee of hers. That the
- soldier going off to the wars need not leave his religion at home be-
hind him, but rather that he does very well indeed to take it with
him to the fray, the story of Michael Hamilton pointedly attests.
Stationed with his company of " foot-soldiers at arms " in Brit-
tany, he and his companions suffered an ambuscade in which sev-
492 A SAINT FOR SOLDIERS [Jan.,
eral of his men were slain, and he was taken prisoner because he
" could not flee for the weight of his armor." He was sentenced
to death by hanging, and the sentence was to be executed not only
as an act of war, but as one of personal revenge, by the son of a
Breton spy whom the Scots had already dispatched by the halter.
And so it was done. " In truth, before the eyes of the other
Bretons, he bound Michael's hands behind his back, and hanged
him from the gibbet at Clisson in his shirt, hose, and shoon. There
was he hanged on Maundy Thursday, two hours after noon;"
and there the Bretons left the victim of their vengeance, suspended
in mid-air, given up for dead.
But Michael Hamilton, devout parishioner of St. Katherine's
— somewhere-in-Scotland — Shotts, Bartram Shotts/ or Bothwell
Minor, in Lanarkshire, opines Andrew Lang — this soldier who had
all his life prayed to St. Katherine, had not now, in his hour of
peril, forgotten his patroness. " So soon as he was taken [he] .did
nothing but think devoutly of Madame Sainte Katherine and
prayed that she would be pleased to guard him from death." In
what sensational manner those prayers were answered the old
Chronicle tells us in simple, thrilling language:
So chanced it, that, when he had been hanged there came a
voice to the cure of the town bidding him go speedily and cut
down Hamilton. Of this voice the cure took no keep, and for-
got it until the morrow, which was Good Friday. And when
the said cure had done all his service it was near noon. Then
he bethought him of the said voice, and bade one of his parish
go to the gibbet and see if Hamilton were dead or not. Where-
fore the man went on that errand. And when he got thither he
turned and spun the Scotsman about, and knew not whether he
was dead or alive.
Nevertheless, to know the very truth, he took the hose from
the right foot and slit the little toe with a knife, so that therein
was a great wound and much blood. And when the said Ham-
ilton felt it, he swears by his oath that as long as he was hang-
ing he felt no harm, no more than if he had been hanged by a
rope under the arms. For when he was hanged he kept praying
Madame Sainte Katherine to be his aid, without other thought.
And it seems that he was hoven up under his feet. Neverthe-
less, when he felt the wound in his said toe, he drew up his leg
and stirred. Thereon sore fear fell on the messenger of the
cure, as Hamilton hath since heard him say. Wherefore he ran
hastily to the cure, declaring that Hamilton was still alive and
I9i8.] A SAINT FOR SOLDIERS 493
he had seen him move. Then the said cure, considering his
voice in the night, and considering that Hamilton had been
hanged from Maundy Thursday to Good Friday afternoon,
deemed that it was evident miracle, and proclaimed all these
things to the people present. Whereafter he and the other
people of Holy Church put on their vestments and with a great
company they went to the gibbet and cut down the said Hamil-
ton Now he that had hanged him was present, who, in
wrath that he was not dead, struck him over the ear with a
sword, and gave him a great wound, for which he was blamed.
Nevertheless, the said Hamilton was set on a horse and taken
into a house to be nursed and cared for. . . .And today the said
Hamilton came hither in his shirt, bringing the halter where-
with he was hanged
These strange happenings occurred in Brittany in the spring of
1429; in May of that year Hamilton, true to his vow, was at Fier-
bois testifying to his miraculous deliverance through the aid of St.
Katherine. But already in this same year the shrine had been vis-
ited by another and a far more illustrious warrior — by Jeanne
d'Arc herself, not only a devotee of the Alexandrian saint, but one
who had even seen her in visions and hearkened to her voice. This
was in mid- winter, in February, 1429, in the darkest hour that the
arms of France have known between sorry Vaucouleurs and the
bloody but victorious Marne of the present day. From Vaucou-
leurs, leading the distracted armies of the Dauphin, rode the battle-
weary Maid; and halting at Fierbois for rest, she repaired to the
shrine of her beloved St. Katherine to pay her devoirs to that
glorious patroness and to assist at Mass in her honor. She heard
three Masses there that day, the records tell us; and what prayers
she prayed, what thought she thought, as she knelt before the bodily
relics of that heavenly spirit whom already she had beheld crowned,
in an ecstasy, what fears were allayed in her heart, what courage
renewed, we can easily imagine. The walls of the chapel around
her were hung thick with the votive offerings of those whom St.
Katherine had succored in the hour of peril and despair: there
were crutches and canes and irons and ropes; there was the arrow
that had struck but had not pierced, the culverin ball that had
glanced away from the prayer-protected body; the halter of Jehan
de Pons was there, and the chains that had bound Perrot Chapon.
On every hand were testimonies of the powers of this Saint who so
loved the soldier of the ranks. Could Jeanne's ardent soul resist the
494 A SAINT FOR SOLDIERS [Jan.;
thrill of such inspiring sights, the encouragement of such irrefutable
witnesses? No! Rather, she rose from her knees there in the
chapel of Fierbois with her heart beating high with renewed hope
and strength, renewed faith in her divinely appointed mission.
A month later this holiest of the devotees of our Saint for
soldiers was the acclaimed of France, and Charles was showering
her with royal gifts, with horses and arms, with armor and the
richest raiment. But whatever else was forced upon her, one thing
she would not accept from him. She would have no sword from
him. Her Voices bade her look for a more sacred weapon than
even his kingly anointed hands could proffer. This was to be none
other than the sword of Charles Martel, the selfsame sword that
had vanquished the Paynim at Tours. It was to be a blade marked
with five crosses — thus should it be known — and it was to be found
awaiting her under the altar of St. Katherine's shrine in the village
of Fierbois. So said Jeanne's Voices; and forthwith, an armorer
being sent from Tours to make search for the mystic weapon, under
the altar of St. Katherine at Fierbois, just as had been foretold,
the sword was found.
This supernatural happening not only roused the greatest en-
thusiasm for the Maid, and played a great part in establishing her
before the eyes of all France, but likewise it gave to the cult of St.
Katherine a new impulse of popularity. And though the actual
connection of the Warrior Virgin with the shrine at Fierbois ceases
with the discovery of the holy sword — unless we note from the
chapel Chronicle a Mass said " for the King and the Maid, the
worthy servant of God " on May 5, 1430; or mark down the names
of Dunois La Hire and de Gancourt, all her associates and all to be
found in the chapel register from that time henceforth, neverthe-
less, these two names of Blessed Jeanne and St. Katherine were in-
extricably linked in the popular mind of France. Miracles con-
tinued to be wrought and pilgrimages to be made. " Two fingers
deep " into the head of Jehan Fary — another Scotchman looking
for trouble ! — flew an arrow which yet left the man unhurt. Jehan
Prevost, struck by a culverin ball, could find no remedy, " for the
stone of the culverin abode fast in his leg," until St. Katherine
cured him. There were still other hangings and escapes, still other
rescuings from dungeons and loosening from stocks. Wherever
the soldier fared or fought, whatever befell him, he had a helpful
friend in St. Katherine of Fierbois, did -he but call upon her.
Of such are the wonders wrought by this blessed Saint for sol-
I9i8.] A SAINT FOR SOLDIERS 495
diers in the fifteenth century, rescuer of the imprisoned, curer of
the injured, saver of the doomed ; above all, patroness and inspirer
of the patroness of all Christian warriors, Jeanne the Maid;
these things and many others, proved and attested beyond
questioning. "Ah yes," smiles the skeptic; "quite so! But she
did not save Jeanne, this Saint of yours, I see ! She let her be taken,
and held, and even burned to death. What do you say of that?"
To the Christian soldier, dear as life and freedom and victory
are, there are still higher and dearer things; and these, above all
succorings and rescuings, St. Katherine will give to him whenever
the need be, if he but ask her, just as she gave them to the Blessed
Jeanne. Strength to withstand temptation, strength to remain
steadfast and true to his ideals, to his cause and to his flag, what-
ever the cost, be it even death, these are the rarest gifts heaven can
accord the fighting man on the field of honor. To Katherine her-
self, imprisoned in Alexandria and doomed to martyrdom if she
would not recant her Faith, God's comforting angel came, promis-
ing her help to withstand her judges and accusers, promising her
release from her suffering, and entrance into paradise. To Jeanne,
imprisoned and doomed, the holy Katherine brought the same
comfort; and a gift greater and more desired than even liberty and
triumph could ever be. The true soldier surrenders only to God.
And that surrender made, he can turn even death into a victory, and
if life be denied him, can welcome with a soldier's salute the fall-
ing away of the chains of his mortal flesh, the unbarring of the
bright doors of eternity.
SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS: TO WHOM DEDICATED?
BY B. FRANK CARPENTER, PH.D.
AYS Dr. Appdeton Morgan, President of the New
York Shakespeare Society, in THE CATHOLIC WORLD
of April, 1916, in a sort of official contribution to the
harmony of that wonderful Shakespeare Semester of
1916: "Shakespeare's other noble friend was Wil-
liam Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, and to him Shakespeare dedicates
a sheaf of one hundred and fifty- four delicious Sonnets. It is in-
teresting to wonder why Lord Pembroke asked that Shakespeare
make this dedication, not in his titular, but in his family, name:
' William Herbert ' and then only using the initials ' Mr. W. H.' "
But, that this "Mr. W. H." was really Lord Pembroke, Ben
Jonson (always a bit jealous of Shakespeare whose plays crowded
the theatre while Jonson's would not pay for a sea-coal fire) re-
vealed. For Ben Jonson, in dedicating his own Epigrams to " Wil-
liam Herbert, Lord Chamberlain, etc.," in the year 1616, plainly
says : " I dare not change your Lordship's Title, since there is
nothing in these Epigrams in expressing which it is necessary to
employ a cipher " (p. 12).
For fully forty years Dr. Morgan had elected to occupy an
attitude of the most complete negation anent these two reigning
theories as to this dedicateeship. Dr. Morgan denied that they
were ever dedicated to any noble lord whomsoever. It is possible
that merely this opaque Jonsonese dedication (for such it will ap-
pear when we quote it in full) has induced Dr. Morgan to desert
his former position, and accept one cryptic Elizabethan dedication
upon the strength of another cryptic Elizabethan dedication which,
upon examination, is quite as occult and collapsible? Forty years
ago, in a volume, The Shakespearean Myth, Dr. Morgan asserted :
first, Shakespeare never dedicated any Sonnets to anybody ; second,
no Sonnets were dedicated to Southampton ; third, no Sonnets were
dedicated to Pembroke; fourth, Thomas Thorpe dedicated the
Sonnets in question to some friend of his own, a " Mr. W. H.,"
a gentleman, the pleasure of whose acquaintance, however, he per-
mitted nobody to share with himself.
Has Dr. Morgan discovered a new proposition (we had al-
I9i8.] SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 497
most said, in view of the hectic, not to call it pugnacious, state of
the controversy, a new weapon) for believing' that Shakespeare
dedicated these Sonnets to Lord Southampton? Or has he only
done that next best thing to solving a riddle, namely, devised a new
element to make that riddle more cryptic still ?
Prior to this proposition in THE CATHOLIC WORLD, Dr.
Morgan had been credited with a theory of his own upon The Son-
nets, their dedication and authorship, which at least had the ad-
vantage of being sui generis, -his own and nobody else's! That
theory, as far as the present writer is able to extract it from three
representative works,1 ran about as follows: First, as to Pem-
broke. There is nothing anywhere historical, traditional, internal
or external to connect the name of Shakespeare with the name of
Pembroke save the dedication in 1623 of the First Folio by the
elusive Heminge and Condell,2 who say that these two noble lords
were selected as dedicatees for these plays because they had been
pleased to show " their author, while living, some favor."
Second : As to Southampton. The fact that Shakespeare had
already dedicated to Southampton quite His Grace's share of poetry
— the Venus and Adonis and the Lucrece — raises no presumption
(rather the reverse) that Shakespeare went on dedicating poetry to
Southamption indefinitely !
For if the Sonnets were to be dedicated to that noble lord in
addition to the two poems, why depart from the form of dedication
already adopted to his lordship by name and in epistolary form?
This form had been arrived at gradually. The dedication of the
Venus and Adonis was diffident, apologetic, a bit fulsome, after
the manner of Tudor dedications, signed " Your Honour's in all
duty." The dedication of the Lucrece brings an advance in camara-
derie, " The love I dedicate to your Lordship is without end." Not
unnaturally, then, one might look in a third dedicatory letter for a
still further advance toward " a marriage of true minds." Has
there been a quarrel between the nobleman and the poet? If so,
why any dedication at all? Or why, if a quarrel, rub in the con-
*
*The Shakespearean Myth (1880-1885) Shakespeare in Fact and in Criticism:
Chapter, "Whose Sonnets?" (1888) and A Study in the Warwickshire Dialect (1885-
1900). In the two latter Dr. Morgan said, that if challenged to prove from in-
ternal evidence that the author of the plays was the author of the poems and the
sonnets, he would be unable to take up the challenge.
1 Dr. Morgan elsewhere makes merry over these two gentlemen, who, he claims,
after depriving their countrymen of their talents as journey-actors by retiring from
tke stage, became a green-grocer and a publican respectively, and were innocent of
any suspicion of the nature of the boon they were reputed to have conferred upon
their race.
VOL. CVI. — 32
498 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS [Jan.,
tumely by addressing His Grace, of many titles, as plain " Mister "
(or, perhaps, "Master") " W. H?" Or, worse even than this,
take not the trouble to dedicate his Sonnets at all, but carelessly ask
his publisher to do the dedicating and, to italicize his insouciance,
transpose the initials of Henry Wriothlesey " H. W." to " W. H.,"
which meant in such a connection just precisely nobody at all?
Was Shakespeare ashamed or afraid to dedicate to His Grace of
Southampton still one more poetical effort? Had Southampton
ordered him to refrain from more dedicatory assumptions and
tempted Shakespeare to observe the letter of the command while
breaking its spirit? Otherwise what could have been the motives
for so senseless and childish, useless and unnecessary a transpo-
sition of initials; or, indeed, for the employment of initials at all?
How could either Southampton or Pembroke have been expected
to recognize himself as "Mr. W. H.?" The modern story (Dr.
Morgan submits) of the Shakespeare- Southampton friendship be-
ing one it was nobody's particular cue or interest to deny, has been
suffered to pass without examination. But, once examined, the
mere fact that Shakespeare dedicated poetry to Southampton will
not float it! Everybody dedicated poetry to Southampton. He
loved to pose as the Macaenas of his day. Being not overburdened
with worldly goods, he was perhaps not too lavish in the gifts he
made to his dedicators — a cold capon's leg in the servant's hall, a
cup of sack at the buttery hatch, anything so that the hungry poet
need not dine with Duke Humphrey, or sup with Sir Thomas
Gresham, that day! That Southampton encouraged hungry poets
to dedicate verses to him without inviting them to share his bed and
board may be very likely. That Pembroke's tastes led him to make
similar overtures in any quarter, nobody ever pretended to suggest.
If Damon and Pythias were friends, cries Dr. Morgan, let us
know it from Damon as well as from Pythias ! Let it appear from
the family records of Damon as well as from the family records
of Pythias. Granted that the records, so far as we have any,
of the Shakespeare family (at least its traditions) assert that
Shakespeare and Southampton, the poet and the commoner, were
habitually arm-in-arm, always the closest of intimates; are there
any records or traditions of the Southampton family that assert as
much ?
As to the Sonnets themselves, admire them as we must to-
day, the fact is they attracted no particular contemporary attention.
Meres reports them as in private circulation among Shakespeare's
1918.] SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 499
private friends in 1598. But, except by Thorpe, who prints them
eleven years after in a "broadside," or quarto, along with a
poem called The Lover's Complaint, they are not rescued from
their manuscript condition, or mentioned anywhere in any connec-
tion whatever. The four Shakespeare Folios failed to collect and
include them. The " editors " par excellence — Rowe, Warburton,
Pope, Theobald, Hanmer and Capel — ignored them. Even the
variorum editors, Boswell and Johnson, failed to honor them with
their criticism, and George Stevens gave it as his opinion that
nothing less than an act of Parliament would induce anybody to
read them. But it happened that, in the year of Our Lord eigh-
teen hundred and thirty-eight, a gentleman of leisure, such as Dr.
Appleton Morgan himself (perhaps a bit ennuye for something
to pass the time away) happened to conceive the idea of actually
reading them,8
So far as appears, from the " private friends" of 1598 down
to himself in the year 1838, a trifle of two hundred and forty
years,
He was the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea
This gentleman found that these Sonnets were actually six poems
of different lengths, each poem having a consistent theme and
argument. And this gentleman, Charles Armitage Brown by
name, who makes this marvelous discovery by the simple process
of reading these Sonnets, was able to demonstrate, in the familiar
way of demonstrators ("sign-post critics" they have been called,
who antiphonate a line of comment with a snatch of the text and
then a snatch of the text with a line of comment) that these six
poems were an appeal to some golden youth, enjoying too keenly
his bachelordom, to settle down, marry and beget offspring, not
upon any ethical considerations, but solely because :
From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty's rose might never die,
But as the riper should by Time decrease
His tender heir might bear his memory !
Another of these six poems is a lament over a sweetheart's
inconstancy; another mourns a rival-in-love's successful rivalry;
another voices the remorse brought on by satiety, etc., etc.; all
* The Shakespearean Myth, p. 278.
500 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS [Jan.,
(omitting the first — the suggestion of marriage) conventional in
theme; however, as we recognize today, passing the highest flights
of poetry elsewhere touched! But the difficulty, not to call it the
impossibility, of bringing either Southampton or Pembroke into
their neighborhood is immeasurably increased by Mr. Brown's dis-
coveries. Add to the absurdity of it all that Pembroke was barely
eighteen years of age (he was known as Lord Herbert, until his
majority in January, 1601, when he became third Earl of Pem-
broke) and so presumably subject to tutors and governors, and
Southampton was but seven years his elder — neither of them at a
point in life when marriages for them must be matters of solici-
tude or of arrangement by third parties!
Why should William Shakespeare, a commoner — or even, as
he was later, a gentleman entitled to coat-armor — beg, or even dare
to suggest to, either Pembroke or Southampton that they should
marry? How would either of those noble lords have tolerated,
passed around among William Shakespeare's private friends for all
comers to gossip about, so extraordinary a suggestion touching the
most intimate and immune concerns of one or the other of them?
It seems to us that Dr. Morgan was right forty years ago in
his Shakespearean Myth, when he concluded that Thomas Thorpe
dedicated this sheaf of heretofore undedicated Sonnets to a crony
of his own in 1609. Dr. Morgan quotes a passage from George
Wither's Scholler's Burgatorie (1625), which we think ourselves
might be more widely remembered when we essay to solve, point-
blank, all these irksome questions as to Elizabethan and Jacobean
authorships! Speaking of the publisher (printer) of his date, Mr.
Wither says : " If he gets any written note, he will publish it and it
shall be contrived and named also according to his own pleasure.
Nay, he oftentimes gives books names as will, to his thinking, make
them saleable, when there is nothing in the whole volume suitable
to such a title."
If the publisher could give a book a title and an author, why
could he not also give that book a dedicatee ? Why should not Mr.
Thomas Thorpe feel himself moved by the fugitive condition of
Shakespeare's vagrant Sonnets to rescue them from their manu-
script state, offer them the custody of print and supply them with a
sponsor-dedicatory? He need not hesitate as to their vagrant state.
The printing of a random two of them years before, with a careless
collection of Songs and Sonnets (dubbed — for some unascertained
reason — The Passionate Pilgrim), appeared to indicate that Shakes-
1918.] SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 501
peare placed no value upon them. Surely, argues Dr. Morgan,
Tennyson would not have permitted two stanzas of In Memoriam
to be printed in Maud or in The Idyls of the King!
But Mr. Publisher Thorpe does not stop here. He gets into
his possession not only these one hundred and fifty-four Sonnets
rumored to be in circulation among Shakespeare's private friends,
but, as already noted, a poem, The Lover's Complaint, from some
utterly conjectural source quite as anonymous and quite as undedi-
cated as are the Sonnets themselves. And so both being publici
juris — like umbrellas — our tender-hearted Thomas Thorpe gives
these little Japhets in search of a father, the father and the dedi-
catee they seem in need of !4
But that Shakespeare himself had neither hand nor voice in
this Thomas Thorpe printing of 1609 (its imprint ran: "Printed
by G. Eld for T. T. and are to be sold by John Wright, dwelling
at Christ's Church Gate"), is sufficiently obvious from the one
hundred and twenty-sixth Sonnet, the last two verses of which
are wanting, their places being supplied by brackets, thus:
[ ]
[ 1
It not being supposable within the bounds of reason that an
author would have forgotten or been unable to supply two verses
of his own 'composition; or, if he had forgotten them irrevocably,
that he would call attention to his lapse by printer's signs ! Thorpe
evidently had obtained these vagrant Sonnets and this Lover's
Complaint, perhaps by the aid of the Mr. Hall whose acquaintance
we are soon to make. But that, judging from Wither's revelations as
to the tendency and the license of the publisher of that date, Thorpe
could have resisted such a choice morsel as putting the name of
Southampton or of Pembroke to his Book of Songs and Sonnets, it
is hard to imagine! What more readily would have made it mar-
ketable ? What a lustre it would have shed over the humble printer
(so humble that he dares only to use in his imprint his initials) had
he been authorized to parade on his title-page one or the other of
these lordly names.
Contemplating all these considerations, Dr. Morgan, in his
Shakespearean Myth, decides that the Sonnets are dedicated by
Thomas Thorpe to one, not of Shakespeare's, but of his own
" private friends'." Has Dr. Morgan's attention been called to the
4 If The Lover's Complaint had also been in private circulation among Shakes-
peare's private friends, Meres does not mention the fact.
502 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS [Jan.,
fact that, twenty years later, a corrobo ration of his judgment was
discovered ?
In the year 1898, twenty-one years after Dr. Morgan broached
his Shakespearean Myth, it was discovered that in the year 1616
this same Thomas Thorpe actually did become possessed of literary
material which there was some pretext for dedicating to the Earl
of Pembroke. It appeared that one Joseph Healy had previously
made and dedicated to Pembroke certain translations from the Latin,
and that at his (Healy's) death he left unprinted a translation of
Epictetus. This translation Thorpe possesses himself of, and
straightway, evidently, without asking permission at all, he prints
it in the year 1616, with as fulsome and abjectly cringing a dedica-
tion as one could well make :
To the Right Honourable William, Earle of Pembroke, Lord
Chamberlaine to His Majestic, One of His Majestie's Most
Honourable Privy Council and Knight of the Most Noble Order
of Garter, etc.
Right Honourable : It may worthilie seem strange unto your
Lordship out of what frenzy one of my meanness hath pre-
sumed to commit the Sacrilege in the straightness of your Lord-
ship's leisure to present a piece for matter and model so
unworthy and in this scribbling age when great persons are so
pestered daily with Dedications. All I can allege in extenuation
of so many incongruities is the bequest of a deceased Man who
(in his lifetime) having offered some translations of his unto
your Lordship, ever wished if these ensuing were ever published
they might only be addressed unto Your Lordship as the last
tribute of his dutiful affection (to use his own tearmes) the
true and learned upholder of learned endeavours. This therefore
being left with me as a Legacie unto your Lordship (pardon my
presumption Great Lord, from so mean a man to so great a
Person) I could not without some impiety present to anie other:
such a sad privilege have the bequests of the Dead, and so
obligatory they are more than requests of the living. In the
hope of this Honourable acceptance I will ever rest
Your Lordship's Humble, devoted Servant
T. T.
Such is the dedication T. T. does achieve when presuming to dedi-
cate something to his " Great Lord " Pembroke. Can one infer
that, seven years before, he would have dared to address this same
" Great Lord " as " Mr. W. H." Compare this with the dedication
of the Sonnets: " To the Onlie Begetter of These Ensuing Sonnets
1918.] SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 503
— Mr. W. H. — All Happiness and That Eternitie, Promised by Our
Ever Living Poet, Wisheth the Well- Wishing Adventurer in Set-
ting forth. T. T." and it is sufficiently apparent that the two
compositions are not addressed by an identical person to one and
the same dedicatee.
What then, in spite of this confirmation of his own conjecture,
could have so powerfully moved Dr. Morgan's recantation? Ac-
cording to the paragraph in THE CATHOLIC WORLD used as the
rubric to this paper, he finds himself moved by another dedication —
(also by the way, dating from the year 1616). Here is that dedi-
cation verb. lit. et punet.:
To The Great Example of Honour and Virtue, the Most Noble
William, Earl of Pembroke, Lord Chamberlain, etc.
My Lord — While you cannot change your merit, I dare not
change your Title. It was that made it and not I, under which
name I offer to your Lordship the ripest of my studies, my
Epigrams, which though they may carry danger in the sound
do not therefore seek your shelter, for when I made them I had
nothing in my conscience to expressing of which I did need a
cipher. But if I be fallen into those times, wherein, for the
likeness of vice, and facts, everyone thinks another's ill deeds
objected to him, and that in their ignorant "and guilty mouths
the common voice is for their security. BEWARE THE POET !
confessing therein so much love to their diseased as they would
rather make a party for them than be either rid or told of them.
I much expect at your Lordship's hand the protection of truth
and liberty while you are constant to your own goodness. In
thanks whereof I return you the honour of leading forth so
many good and great names (as my verses mention on the
better part) to their remembrance with posterity. Amongst
these if I have praised unfortunately any one that doth not
deserve — or if any answer not in all numbers the pictures I
have made of them — I hope it will be forgiven me that they are
no ill pieces, though they be not like the persons. But I foresee
a nearer fate to any book than this, that the vices will be owned
before the virtues (though there I have avoided all particulars
as I have done names) and some will be so ready to discredit
me as they will have the impudence to belie themselves, for
if I meant them not, it is so. Nor can I hope otherwise. For
why should they remit anything of their riot, their pride, their
self love, and other inherent graces, to consider truth or virtue,
but with the trade of the world lend their long ears against
men they love not, and hold their dear mountebank or jester
504 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS [Jan,
in far better condition than all the study or studiers of human-
ity? For such I would rather know them by their vizards still
than they should publish their faces at their peril in any theatre
where Cato if he lived might enter without scandal.
Your Lordship's Most faithful Honourer
BEN JONSON.
Is it within the bounds of possibility that Dr. Morgan has been
converted from agnosticism to gnosticism by such incongruous,
maudlin and incoherent rubbish as this? When my Lord Pem-
broke sat himself down to peruse this Bunsbyan performance (if
he ever did), was he able to make head or tail of it, we wonder?
Had honest Ben habitually written in this muddy idiom it would
not have been so wondrous strange that his plays would not pay
for a sea coal fire. " Antoni gladios potuit contemnere si sic omnia
dicere " remarked Juvenal over that unfortunate alliterative of
Cicero's! Possibly Ben was a bit more tipsy than usual when he
delivered himself of this dedication. The scant score of words
which Dr. Morgan quotes as justification for reversing himself and
pronouncing that Shakespeare dedicated the Sonnets, and dedicated
them to Pembroke, dp really seem — isolated from their context — to
have a meaning of some sort! But any remote possibility of their
meaning anything, is destroyed the moment we try to construe any
significance into the jumble of incoherency as a whole. Can Dr.
Morgan parse it? Can anybody parse it? What is the subject of
" it " or the predicate of " is," in the sentence " It is so," in line
twenty-eight? Compared with this muddy Jonsenese, Master
Thomas Thorpe's dedication to " Mr. W. H." is clarity itself !
According to Dr. Morgan, any publication in those times
was properly styled a " venture," and the person launching a ven-
ture is naturally an adventurer. In setting forth, then, the ad-
venturer, "T. T." wishes some friend of his (" W. H.") all happi-
ness and a long life. He is issuing a book of poetry, and so strug-
gles to express himself poetically. He describes the long life be-
spoken for his friend as " that eternity promised by our ever-living
poet" (obviously — since neither T. T. nor Mr. W. H. is a poet—
the sonneteer himself). For the remainder: " That eternitie prom-
ised, etc.," we may perhaps find a pretext, in the opening lines of
the first Sonnet, in the fantasy " that thereby beauty's rose might
never die " — there is no other " eternitie " nor immortality, prom-
ised anywhere else either in the Sonnets or in The Lover's Com-
plaint! But what is a " begetter?" Dr. Morgan asks and answers
1918.] SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 505
his own question : clearly one who gets or procures. " I have some
cousin-Germans at court," says Dekkar in Satriomastix, " shall be-
get you the reversion of the master of the king's revels."5 The
printer of these Sonnets, then, feels himself at liberty to dedicate
them to whomsoever he sees fit, and he sees fit to dedicate them to
the obliging party who has possessed himself of one of these manu-
script copies that Meres tells about, and has brought it to Thorpe to
make a book of Songs and Sonnets out of — to one who has, in Dek-
kar's phrase, made himself, as to Thorpe, an " only begetter !"
Moreover, by referring to the Stationers' Registers we are able to
ascertain who this obliging party was. He stands revealed. And
his name is — not only in initials " W. H." but — " William Hall!"
And if we merely take the trouble to delete a trifling punctuation
mark in that troublesome dedication, we will get — William Hall !
This Mr. William Hall, who seems to have occupied himself
with obtaining matter for his fellow printers, too, first appears as
apprenticed to one John Alide, a member of the Stationers' Company
from 1577 to 1584, in which latter year he is himself admitted to
membership in the Stationers' Company. In 1609 he brings out
a book under his own imprint, but giving his name in his imprint
precisely as did Thomas Thorpe, by initials, and occupying evi-
dently about the same rank as Thorpe in the craft. He printed sev-
eral works on theological subjects — a book entitled The Displays of
Heraldrie, and another The Life of John Spelman, a notorious pick-
pocket captured in the Royal Chapel at Whitehall. In 1613 he sold
out his business to John Beale and disappeared. Now, Dr. Morgan,
we have only to eliminate a punctuation mark in this much betor-
tured " T. T." dedication, reading " Mr. W. H. all happiness " as
" Mr. W. Hall : happiness !" and the mystery is solved without call-
ing upon either Shakespeare, Southampton or Pembroke to help us
out, and without violence to either probability or common sense, and
your proposition of forty years ago is — taken in connection with
the opaque Jonson dedication to Pembroke — most abundantly con-
firmed !
Had anybody undertaken, in the year 1640, to assert that
these Sonnets had been dedicated to Lord Pembroke by Shakespeare
(then only twenty-four years deceased) he would have been obliged
to account for a book with this title-page : " Poems by Will Shakes-
peare Gent : Printed at London by Tho. Cotes and are to be sold by
lohn Benson, 1640." On examination these Poems consisted of all
5 Shakespeare in Fact and in Criticism, p. 74.
506 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS [Jan.,
but seven of the Sonnets that Thorpe had helped himself to (sans
The Lover's Complaint, but including the more or less perfect
Passionate Pilgrim that Heywood protested was mainly his own
work). Evidently lohn Benson, like " T. T." was a publisher after
George Wither's own heart! For, behold! this Mr. Benson, like
the " T. T." of thirty-one years before, feels that he too must
write, and he prefaces his Book of Songs' and; Sonnets (or
" Poems by Will Shakespeare Gent.") with his dedication — not to
a noble lord, nor to a co-adventurer, but —
To the Reader: I here presume, under favour, to present
to your view some excellent and sweetly composed poems,
which in themselves appear of the same purity the Author
himself then living avouched. They had not the fortune, by
reason of their infancy in his death, to have the due accommoda-
tion of proportionable glory with the rest of his ever-living
works. Yet the lines will afford you a more authentic appro-
bation than my assurance any way can to invite your allowance :
in your perusal you shall find them serene, clear, elegantly
plain — such gentle strains as shall recreate and not perplex
. the brain. No intricate or cloudy stuff to puzzle your intellect,
but perfect eloquence such as will raise your admiration to his
praise. This assurance will not differ from your acknowledg-
ments, and certain I am my opinion will be seconded by the
sufficiency of these ensuing lines. I have been somewhat so-
licitous to bring this forth to the perfect view of all men, and in
so doing glad to be serviceable for the continuance of glory
to the deserved author in these his poems.
I. BENSON.
But, if, as says Dr. Appleton Morgan in 1916, these Sonnets
had already, thirty-one years before Benson, been dedicated to a
powerful lord — Lord Chamberlain of England, Lord Pembroke —
called not " Poems by Will Shakespeare " or by anybody else, but
" These ensuing " (a phrase used by Thorpe in 1609 in the dedica-
tion of the Sonnets to " W. H." and again in dedicating the Epictetus
to Pembroke in 1616) — Sonnets! under whose favor does Benson
" present " these poems, in face of Lord Pembroke, who is entitled
to them and who is dead ? When did the author " then living '*
" avouch " their purity ? Was it purity of text or of sentiment that
was thus "avouched?" How had Benson alone managed to hear
of their author (Shakespeare) avouching anything about his Son-
nets or about any other composition of his? Where, in all chron-
icle, is there a record of Shakespeare ever having mentioned to
I9i8.] SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 50?
anybody a single one of his works, plays or poems, or anything
else ? And what was the "infancy" of the Sonnets (they had been in
print for seven years when Shakespeare died in 1616) which de-
prived them of their "proportionable glory?"
Is there but the one answer to all these questions ? And is not
that answer the same that Dr. Morgan made to it forty years ago
and from which he now recants?
To wit : that these Sonnets were never placed under the pro-
tection of a powerful nobleman; neither under the protection of
Southampton nor Pembroke nor any other: that they were in 1640
— just where they were in 1609 — at large; little Japhets in search
of a father. Or, if we prefer, still in 1640 when Benson lighted
upon them, just as they were in 1609 when Thorpe took possession
of them : publici juris — like umbrellas — anybody's for the asking !
The contention of this article is, therefore, that the correlation
of these four contemporary dedications establishes the fact that Dr.
Morgan guessed right when he asserted, prior to his apostasy to
himself, in THE CATHOLIC WORLD of April, 1916, that these trou-
blesome Sonnets were not dedicated, by Shakespeare to anybody,
noble lord or commoner, or anybody else : that they were never ded-
icated to any noble lord by anybody ; that a man named Thorpe ded-
icated them to one of his own personal friends ; and that it is a great
pity that Dr. Morgan, after establishing these postulates, should
have recanted them, when they had been so abundantly buttressed
and fortified by later discoveries. Dr. Morgan's proposition, which
we have quoted above from THE CATHOLIC WORLD, tossed another
gauntlet into quite another arena, which, we think that he, with
both tact and reason might have then and there abandoned to his
successors. Then, like Lucretius, he could have reflected :
Sauve mare magno turbantibus sequora ventis
E terra longa alterius spectare labor em I
CANON SHEEHAN AND PUBLIC EVENTS.
BY P. J. LENNOX.
O all whose interest in events in Ireland is of the
ephemeral order, as well as to all who did not possess
an intimate, personal acquaintance with the late
Canon Patrick Augustine Sheehan, Parish Priest of
Doneraile, and to those whose knowledge of his
writings does not penetrate beneath the surface, the fascinating
biography,1 recently given to the world by the Very Rev. Dr.
Heuser, will come as a complete revelation. The author of this book
has one most essential prerequisite of a good biographer, in that
he finds himself in thorough sympathy with his subject. Further,
as the editor who first introduced the creator of My New Curate
to a wide circle of readers, who, in consequence, had many personal
conferences as well as a long-continued interchange of letters with
his contributor, and who, finally, made a painstaking investigation
among the few persons who knew the gifted Irish author really
well, Dr. Heuser speaks with an authority that cannot be impugned.
From these pages Canon Sheehan stands out in many unexpected
roles : not only as a novelist, essayist, and poet, but also as a hym-
nologist, dramatist, and composer of music, as an ideal pastor, a
zealous reformer, an educationist of mark, an eloquent and per-
suasive preacher, a successful lecturer, a patient bearer of physical
pain, around whose head a halo of sanctity clings, a reserved man,
who under a somewhat cold exterior, hid a warm heart and was
capable of sincere and abiding friendships, a practical patriot, who
dared to be unpopular in pursuing the course of action which he
considered best for his country and his Faith.
It is not the purpose of this article to deal with the literary
achievements of Canon Sheehan, or their genesis, for that is done
with great circumstantiality of detail, and in a very interesting
way, in the volume now before us; nor to attempt to fix his place
in the literature of his country, for the perspective is too short to
allow final judgment to be passed; nor yet to follow him in all
1 Canon Sheehan of Doneraile. The Story of an Irish Parish Priest, as Told
Chiefly by Himself in Books, Personal Memoirs, and Letters. By the Very Rev.
Herman J. Heuser, D.D., Overbrook Seminary, Philadelphia. With portraits and other
illustrations. 8 vo., pp. xvii., 405. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. 1917. $3.50
net.
1918.] CANON SHEEHAN AND PUBLIC EVENTS 509
the ramifications of his many-sided activities, for they are too
numerous to be treated with even approximate adequacy within
the space at our disposal. The purpose is rather to investigate, in
a broad way, his relations to his times and, with the aid furnished
by his own writings and the further particulars supplied by his
biography, to examine his attitude towards some of the major
movements which influenced the Ireland in which he had his being.
Canon Sheehan's span of life (1852-1913) embraced many
momentous happenings in the land of his birth : it is a far cry from
Lucas and Tenant Right to Eoin MacNeill and the Irish Volun-
teers. He saw the rise and fall of Sadleir, the development of the
Fenian movement, the rebellion of 1867, the disestablishment of the
Irish Church, the land war and the acts of parliament that sought
to end it, first by improving the conditions of tenure, and then by
the abolition of landlordism. He saw the foundation of the Catho-
lic University, with Newman at its head, and he noted its gradual
decline. He saw the erstwhile loud-mouthed patriot, Judge Keogh,
burned in effigy because of his diatribes against the priests during
the Galway election petition. He saw the forging of the weapon of
parliamentary obstruction, and the merciless wielding of it by
Biggar and Parnell. He saw the beginning of the Home Rule
agitation under Butt, and the passing of the sceptre to the young
lieutenant, who, as the defiant scorner of the mother of parliaments,
had so often caused the old-school leader poignant pain. He saw
that young lieutenant fashion into a solid and powerful phalanx the
Irish parliamentary party, which swayed the destinies of British
politics., and made and unmade governments ; and alas ! he saw the
same party go to pieces, in dissension and sordid wrangling, when
the grievous, moral lapse of its chief was publicly exposed. ,He
saw its opposing sections fused together again, after a fashion, but
sadly missing the touch of the vanished hand. He saw the turmoil
of the Land League and its various successors. He saw the prisons
packed with " suspects," the flower of the land, held without charge
and without trial in defiance of habeas corpus, under the regime of
"Buckshot" Forster. He saw the tyrant hurled from office amid
the jubiliation and the high hopes of the people whose feelings he
had outraged ; and then he saw the almost immediate set-back to na-
tional aspirations when Cavendish and Burke fell beneath the knives
of the Invincibles on that fatal Saturday evening in the Phcenix
Park. He saw the great reforms in Irish local government and in
every branch of education. He saw the establishment of the Gaelic
510 CANON SHEEHAN AND PUBLIC EVENTS [Jan.,
League, of Sinn Fein, and of the Irish-Ireland movement. He
saw the Irish Literary Revival. He saw the introduction of three
Home Rule bills; and he died, like Moses, in sight of, but without
entering, the promised land.
In 1852, the year of the birth of the future author, Ireland
was sunk deep in the slough of despond. The Repeal agitation was
buried in the grave of O'Connell; the New Ireland movement, al-
though its influence was destined to be felt for many years, and is
felt even now, had apparently come to an end in an abortive rebel-
lion, and most of the men who had been its leaders were either dead
or in exile; the members of the Brass Band, having captured the
Tenant Right League, were in the saddle, and were riding fast to-
wards the Great Betrayal; famine and fever, eviction and emigra-
tion had reduced the population by a fourth ; the whole country was
dotted over with deserted villages and demolished houses; indus-
tries had decayed where they had not disappeared; poverty was on
the increase; public spirit was on the decline. Three years later,
in 1855, Duffy, on leaving his native land for Australia, declared
that Ireland was a corpse on the dissecting table; and when in 1856,
the London Times, exulting over the still diminishing population,
prophesied that in another generation the Irish Celts would be as
obsolete in Ireland as the Phoenicians in Cornwall and the Catholic
religion as forgotten as the worship of Astarte, there seemed solid
foundation for the boast. Yet Ireland, like the hind in Dryden's
poem, though doomed to death, was fated not to die.
These are the general conditions under which the childhood of
Patrick Sheehan was spent. But by the time he was fifteen, tyr-
anny and oppression had produced their inevitable results on a
long-remembering, long-enduring, determined race, and the seeds
sown in the darkness of a nation's eclipse sprang up portentously
as armed men. The Fenian rising failed of its immediate object;
but it established the Irish Church, passed the Land Act of 1870,
and, opening Gladstone's eyes, started him on his long career of
remedial measures for Ireland. Young Sheehan was not insensible
to the influences by which he was surrounded. Fed, like all Irish
boys of his class and creed, on the old Jacobite ballads, which sang
eternal hostility and unending resistance to the national foeman and
to the spoiler of the domestic hearth, and which almost invariably
predicted a bright and triumphant future for Dark Rosaleen, he
viewed with sympathetic interest the refurbishing of the pikes of
'98, the nightly drillings, and the other preparations for the re-
1918.] CANON SHEEHAN AND PUBLIC EVENTS 511
bellion of 1867; and it was with sorrow and anger that he learned
of the killing of Peter O'Neill Crowley in Kilcloony Wood, and
viewed his remarkable funeral procession from the college terrace
at Fermoy. It is highly significant that in later life he spoke of '98,
'48, and '67, the years of rebellion, as the golden periods of modern
Irish history.
Maynooth College, which Sheehan entered as a student for
the priesthood in August, 1869, was then in a state of transition,
and even of ferment, caused by the passing of the Irish Church Act
in that year, the cessation of the yearly government grant of twen-
ty-six thousand pounds, and the changes in personnel and curricu-
lum thereby rendered necessary; and the conditions prevailing, as
well as the general atmosphere, were not wholly congenial to the
young and ardent student from the South. Like many other be-
ginners in logic, before and since, he found Jennings' Compendium
rather hard and dry work; and he sought relief and consolation in
Carlyle, Wordsworth, and Tennyson ; in Milton, Shelley, and Keats ;
in Browning and Ruskin, as well as in excursions into German and
Italian literature. His reading was not well ordered, but it was not
exactly indiscriminate; and in after years it bore wonderful fruit.
After his ordination in 1875, Father Sheehan served for about
two years on the English Mission, at Plymouth and Exeter, succes-
sively. He was then recalled to his own diocese of Cloyne, and ap-
pointed curate, first in his native town of Mallow, then at Queens-
town, and again at Mallow, whence, in 1895, he was promoted to
be Parish Priest of Doneraile. His residence in England had not
uprooted his national sentiments, but it had toned them down some-
what, and had given him that tendency, so noticeable in many of
his writings, to institute comparisons between the two races. The
characteristic of the English people which most impressed him was
their individualism. To him England was a " strange land, where
everyone is so interested in religion, because every man is his own
pope; and so uninterested, because he cares so little what all the
other popes, even the Archbishop of Canterbury, may hold or
teach." He had returned to Ireland with what in that country is
somewhat contemptuously called an English accent, and we are told
by his biographer that " this un-Irish mode of speech he consistently
retained through the remainder of his life." He had also the idea
of improving the Irish people after the English model ; but that was
a Herculean task beyond his powers, or the powers of any man;
and in maturer life he realized that the English and the Irish ideals
512 CANON SHEEHAN AND PUBLIC EVENTS [Jan,
are irreconcilable, and, as was to be expected, it was the Irish ideal
that he embraced. As Dr. Heuser puts it : " He had come to under-
stand that the difference of national temper between his own people
and their political masters was fundamental, and that this fact could
not be ignored in their economic and religious improvement. He
had come to see the two nations by comparison on a common scale,
and as a result his love for his countrymen had taken on a degree of
deeper affection than he had been conscious of in the years before."
All his life Canon Sheehan was a teacher. He had thought
much on pedagogy, but he did not .stop at theory. He was a prac-
tical educator. Already as a young curate he founded at Mallow,
in 1880, a Literary Society, which was principally designed for the
benefit of the young men. As pastor of Doneraile, he was deeply
concerned for the welfare and progress of the seven schools of his
parish. He visited them regularly and frequently, and it was his
constant endeavor to maintain them in a state of the highest effi-
ciency. He was a firm believer in vocational training, and he had
the boys and girls taught according to their talents with the specific
object of fitting them for whatever position in life they were des-
tined to occupy. When school days were over, he retained a
friendly interest in each and every one of the former students. By
means of literary, musical and dramatic entertainments, of which
his own talks and lectures were a specially attractive feature, he
spread a tone of culture and refinement throughout the whole dis-
trict.
In connection with a request for an official report from the
United States Department of Education, Canon Sheehan prepared
an elaborate analysis of the system of education in vogue in Ireland,
in which he lays down the soundest doctrine regarding both the per-
sonality of the teacher and the programme of studies. Judged by its
influence on humanity, teaching, he says, stands out as the premier
secular profession. Therefore, in order to make the teachers happy
and contented with their work, to liberate their minds from anxiety
about their future, and to enable them worthily to sustain the dig-
nity of their position, he advocated a generous scale of payment and
of retiring pensions. He also registered a firm protest against the
overlapping of studies as between the primary and the intermediate
systems, and again between the secondary school and the university.
For the preservation both of health and morality, he urged the
teaching of animal physiology and at least elementary anatomy;
and he insisted that, for girls, a knowledge of the science of nurs-
1918.] CANON SHEEHAN AND PUBLIC EVENTS 513
*
ing should be made indispensable. Inasmuch as half the joy and
pleasure of most lives is to be found in books, he would have the
teacher create a " passion " for reading, and a knowledge of what
ought to be read, so that the beauties of English literature, and the
hoard of precious thought hidden beneath the covers of books, may
not remain unknown and concealed from the eager and inquiring
spirits in which Ireland abounds.
In the vexed and much discussed question of higher Irish edu-
cation he took the keenest interest ; and we have it on the authority
of Lord Castletown, Chancellor of the Royal University during the
negotiations which preceded the latest reform of the Irish univers-
ity, system, that it was largely due to Canon Sheehan's assistance
and his knowledge, which went to the root of things, that Chief
Secretary Birrell was able to formulate the scheme, in accordance
with which the National University and the Queen's University of
Belfast were finally established.
Canon Sheehan was particularly anxious to offset the harmful
trend of modern education. The founding of the Irish Intermedi-
ate Board in 1878 and of the Royal University of Ireland in 1879,
and the secularizing and materialistic tendencies underlying both,
gave him occasion to set forth, in different numbers of The Irish
Ecclesiastical Record, those views on education which he after-
wards developed more fully in Geoffrey Austin, The Triumph of
Failure, and The Intellectuals. His object was to plead for the in-
fusion of more religion into classical and professional studies, and
to prevent the practical elimination of religious training from the
schools — a result which he thought certain to follow unless reli-
gious instruction was placed on at least as high a level as secular
learning. Without this training in religion he feared that the Irish
would not remain a high principled race, nor become a cultured
one. In order to arouse his countrymen to a full realization of their
high destiny, he considered it necessary that there should be a sys-
tematic leavening, through religious instructions, of all educational
activities. He desired to see Ireland, as of old, opening sanctuaries
of science to strangers, and sending apostles of intellect, as well as
of faith, to other nations, and to win those intellectual triumphs
while the deposit of faith remained intact, and the past and eternal
glory of Ireland's fidelity to religion remained undimmed.
It was to the priesthood of Ireland that he looked for the pres-
ervation and continuance of the traditional Irish religious ideals.
In an unpublished manuscript, entitled The Work and Wants of the
VOL. cvi.— 33
514 CANON SHEEHAN AND PUBLIC EVENTS [Jan.,
X
Irish Church, he appealed to them to take the necessary steps to
check " the waste of energy that finds its results in tepidity, laxity
of morals amongst the people, indevotion, impiety in conversation,
irreverence in the young, irreligion amongst the older members, and
a total absence of the ' higher sanctity ' that might be expected to
be general among a people so highly dowered by nature and grace."
His beginning of reform would be in the educational system of
the theological seminary ; but he is careful to point out that he made
such a suggestion in no spirit of captious criticism, and with no con-
sciousness of any personal superiority, for he emphatically states :
" No one could be more keenly alive than the present writer to the
self-sacrifice, the devotion to duty, the fidelity to their flocks, which
have always characterized the Irish priest, and which were never
more clearly manifested than in the crucial trials of the past ten
years." " But," he goes on, " we think with all diffidence and hu-
mility that the system at present in operation in the Irish Church
needs revision and amendment ; and it is hoped that the suggestion
made here may stimulate those in whose hands God has placed the
power of reformation and reconstruction to modify and organize
on a healthier plan the principles that at present are guiding the
Irish Church.
In all this matter Father Sheehan was of course treading on
very delicate ground, and it is no wonder that in many cases he
wounded feelings proverbially quick to take offence. It was, how-
ever, as Dr. Heuser points out, to a misconception of the under-
lying motives that most of the unfavorable notices of Geoffrey
Austin, My New Curate, and The Triumph of Failure were due.
Some theorists saw in Luke Delmege a direct attack upon May-
nooth College and its educational methods, and its author was ac-
cused, as he himself phrases it, of a desire to lampoon and discredit
the Irish priesthood. These strictures, whatever surface justifica-
tion there was for them, stung to the quick the man who had felt,
and expressed, that the Irish colleges "turn out the best equipped
students in the world for the exigencies of modern missionary life,"
and who set it down as his considered opinion that " the staff of
professors at Maynooth gives promise to maintain all the traditions
that belong to the teaching staff of the greatest ecclesiastical sem-
inary in the world." On the whole, however, the voice of hostile
criticism was drowned in the general chorus of praise. When
Glenanaar, which had run its course in The Dolphin in 1904 and
1905, came out in book form, it went far towards appeasing former
1918.] CANON SHEEHAN AND PUBLIC EVENTS 515
cavillers, because of the ardent patriotism that everywhere per-
vades the story. He secured the highest ecclesiastical approval
when the Pope, who had read My New Curate in an Italian trans-
lation, conferred on him the title of Doctor of Divinity; and it
was a mark of further approbation and favor in high quarters
when the bishop of the diocese made him a Canon of the Cathe-
dral chapter of Cloyne.
In addition to education, and the necessity of reforming it
which is emphasized again and again in his stories and essays,
Canon Sheehan was interested in other Irish problems, notably
emigration and landlordism. Both topics are developed with pathos
and power in Lisheen, which, after appearing serially in THE
CATHOLIC WORLD, was published in book form in 1907. As a curate
at Queenstown it had pained him to see the boys and girls, the sap
of the nation, pouring across the Atlantic in hundreds every week,
leaving behind the middle-aged, the old, and the decrepit. He used
whatever influence he possessed in his immediate circle to induce
the young people to stay at home. Those who left Ireland he re-
garded as objects of commiseration, because in the race for wealth
and power they so often sacrificed their faith, their native simplic-
ity, their domestic affection, and their love of their native land and
its ideals and traditions. His attitude on this question is made
manifest in the chapters entitled " A Parliamentary Dinner," in
Luke Delmege. An itinerant vocalist, a young girl, sang outside
the dining-room window Lady Dufferin's touching ballad, I'm Sit-
ting on the Stile, Mary. Not a word was spoken until she had fin-
ished the last stanza:
I'm biddin' you a long farewell, my Mary, kind and true!
But I'll not forget you, darlin', in the land I'm goin' to;
They say there's bread and work for all, and the sun shines always there,
But I'll not forget old Ireland, were it fifty times as fair,
for, as the author says, it was the infinite pathos of Ireland. Then,
"I'll not forget you, darlin'," solilquized the young priest ; " but
they do forget you, darlin', and what is more, they despise you.
And there isn't on earth, or in the nether hell," he said vehemently,
bringing his hand down heavily on the table, " a more contemptible
being than he, who, seduced by the gilitter and glare of foreign civ-
ilization, has come to despise his motherland."
The subject of emigration, and its results to the emigrants, as
516 CANON SHEEHAN ^ND PUBLIC EVENTS [Jan.,
_-i
well as to the home land, was much in his thoughts, as is shown by
his frequent references to it in his writings. As early as 1882 he
published in The Irish Ecclesiastical Record an article on The Ef-
fects of Emigration on the Irish Church. Elsewhere he speaks
of the life-blood of Ireland " welling out in the open sore of emi-
gration, her towns decaying, her population diminishing at the
rate of a million a decade." At the station the old pastor was
scarcely able to bring himself to give his blessing to the young
girl, who is starting the next week for Boston, and all the way
home he could not help being silent and distracted, because he
found the whole modern and universal exodus from Ireland mad-
dening. Canon Sheehan deplored, in particular, that " the wealthy
Irish-American is raising a generation that learns not merely to
forget the old land of their fathers, but to become ashamed of it;
to imitate the manners and fashions, and last of all the vices and
infidelity, of the great body of Americans who recognize no defi-
nite faith, and who make civic virtue their sole religion, secular
training their sole education, and worldly success- the standard of
all their attainments." He lays the blame partly on the genius of
the race (" We were always exiles and wanderers," he says), but
mostly on Mammon. " Peregrinari " is still their destiny, but " it
is no longer ' peregrinari pro Christo !' but ' peregrinari pro M am-
monal' Ah! Yes! the dear old Spartan simplicity of Irish
peasant life is yielding to the seductions of the Zeitgeist: we want
the city, and the electric-light, and the saloon, and the ball-room.
There's the secret of Irish emigration!"
He almost despaired of finding a remedy; but, if one existed
at all, he believed that it was to be found in the abolition of land-
lordism, and in the establishment of a nation of peasant propri-
etors who, safe in the knowledge that whatever they made out of
the soil would not be swept away from them in the shape of rent,
would feel at liberty to devote their energies to the betterment of
their condition. Hence arose his attacks on the practical workings
of the Gladstone Land Act of 1881, as well as on the whole frame-
work of landlordism. Hence, too, his reason for becoming, though
behind the scenes, one of the moving spirits in the pourparlers and
conferences which eventuated in the Wyndham Purchase Act of
1903. When that Act was passed, he used his best exertions to
have its provisions put in force in his own district, and with infinite
patience and perseverance he smoothed away difficulties and over-
came obstacles, until, by 1907, practically every farmer in his parish
I9i8.] CANON SHEEHAN AND PUBLIC EVENTS 517
had availed himself of the purchase facilities, and was the prospec-
tive owner in fee simple of the land he tilled. The result was soon
visible in increased industry, in the adoption of modern scientific
agricultural methods, in many external evidences of prosperity, and
in happy homes. " We can now work at their education," said the
Canon. " Hitherto our preaching was to make our people patient
under their insufferable hardships, because they might hope in God's
mercy. Now we can exhort them to gratitude, and they feel the
joy of being Christians." The same results followed over large
parts of Ireland; and emigration, which has been gradually di-
minishing, is now virtually at a standstill.
In politics Canon Sheehan, like most Irish patriots, was a
Home Ruler. He did not, however, always agree with the later
methods of the Irish Parliamentary Party. In The Intellectuals,
published in 1911, he puts into the mouth of Dr. Holden some very
strong fulminations against national disfranchisement and the
total extinction of popular rights in constituencies, where, as the
doctor alleges, the members of parliament are dictators and the
voters obedient and tolerant slaves. He is prophetic of the future,
too, for he makes the doctor predict that " the country shall never
recover its political independence except along the bloody paths of
revolution. And thither are we tending so surely as our solar sys-
tem is moving towards the constellation of Hercules in the
heavens." That the protestations of Dr. Holden against the usurp-
ation of power by the Irish members truly echoed the Canon's own
sentiments is shown by the following outburst, occurring in a letter
to Mr. Justice Holmes in 1910: "I have been for the last few
months here in Ireland in a state of silent fury against the inso-
lent domination of the Irish parliamentary party and their at-
tempt to stamp out all political freedom. At last, I was forced
to speak out, and I send you two articles on our political situation
and in favor of a new movement to establish political liberty and
break down the barriers between Protestants and Catholics in
this country."
The pastor of Doneraile belonged to the School of Davis,
his fellow-townsman, who would band all Irishmen in one com-
mon cause for the betterment of the country, a policy which
Parnell later crystallized in the well-known formula, " Ireland needs
the services of every one of her children." In the Cork Free
Press, established by his friend and schoolfellow, William O'Brien,
M.P., another Mallow man, he found a congenial outlet for his
518 CANON SHEEHAN AND PUBLIC EVENTS [Jan.,
opinions. The leading editorial in the first issue of that paper was
from Canon Sheehan's pen. It is, for one thing, a complete pro-
fession of political faith ; but it is more than that : it is an eloquent
and impassioned appeal for the restoration of what its writer con-
sidered to be the true principles of nationality. He argues for a
press free from bribery and intimidation; for the overthrow of
political expediency in favor of political morality; for the aban-
donment of sectarian bitterness and the adoption of a friendly
attitude towards the Protestant minority; and the settling of the
Home Rule problem by the methods of " conferences, conciliation,
and consent," which had proved so efficacious as a means of passing
the Wyndham Act in 1903. There are warnings and danger signals
in abundance in this article and elsewhere in his later writings, and
they are repeated with great emphasis in his posthumously published
work, The Graves at Kilmorna, a historical novel dealing with
the rise and suppression of the Fenian insurrection in 1867. This
story ends abruptly on a note of what some writers consider pes-
simism, almost despair, regarding Ireland; but read aright, in the
light of the author's outlook on past and present Irish political
complications, it is capable of quite another construction.
In view of the stinging criticism to which he was subjected,
principally by some of his own countrymen, the question naturally
arises, Was Canon Sheehan a good Irishman? The answer must,
I think, be an emphatic, Yes. From the beginning to the end he
labored earnestly to live up to his own motto : To do God's work,
however imperfectly; to serve Ireland, however unworthily.
The Ireland, from which Patrick Augustine Sheehan took his
final departure in 1913, has since passed through a great up-
heaval and a sore trial, and she is yet far from being out of the
valley of the shadow. But there are forces at work that augur
well for her future. Whatever further tribulations are in store for
her in the coming years, we may, without irreverence, associate
ourselves with the language of Father Cussen, who, when asked
by Luke Delmege what could save Ireland, answered :
"THE GOD OF ABRAHAM, AND OF ISAAC, AND OF JACOB ! The
same God that pulled our race through seven centuries of fire
and blood."
A YANKEE HAGIOGRAPHER: AGUECHEEK.
BY MICHAEL EARLS, S.J.
FERTILE cause of regret, one which frequently
turns to censure, is that the lives and even the char-
acters of the saints have suffered at the hands of
their too ardent biographers; that heroic men and
women who ought to occupy unique positions in
Catholic devotion, have been presented to modern readers in stere-
otyped vesture, their splendid personalities being worn smooth
of marked features to the conventional regularity of waxen
images; and that, in consequence, these worthy examplars fail of
interest and influence among their brethren of the Faith in a distant
age, and in a different social atmosphere. Without admitting the
entire catalogue of explanations which are advanced in support of
this criticism — fifty per cent of them arise from the worldly view-
point taken of the other-worldliness of the saints — it remains, as
a desideratum in hagiography, that the glorious records of these
heroic men and women should be presented in a manner to win the
appreciation of the various national temperaments and the changing
spirit of the times : that the narratives should exhibit a great solici-
tude for historical truth and edify and interest the readers.
A classic in literature, said de Quincey, should be re-edited
with each succeeding generation. A similar favor should be ac-
corded the biographies of the saints, especially of those saints who
occupy a position of uncommon applicability to the world at large.
To this end, a native historian ought to be fittest to tell the story to
his fellow-countrymen. The standards of measurement will appear
more natural — it is easier for an American to deal in dollars and
cents than in francs and centimes : and, what is more considerable,
the high lights of saintly endeavor, which at times appear so daz-
zling when viewed upon the landscape of an Italian or French
translation, will seem quite approachable when set within the
horizons of our own. atmosphere. Francis Thompson, presenting
his saints in modes of modern sympathy and in present-day terms
of literary expression, has gone far in advance of his kinsman,
Edward Healy Thompson, who cut the pattern of his biographies
from old French and Italian models. .
520 A YANKEE HAGIOGRAPHER: AGUECHEEK [Jan.,
In our country, many novice pens have written abridged lives
of the saints. Butler and perhaps some occasional note from the
Bollandists constituted their field of research; and though they
may not claim the repute of scientific hagiography, they served a
good cause in keeping at least a passing acquaintanceship current
among the children of the Faith. One of these American books of
biography, perhaps more interesting than any other similar work,
is Memorials of the Blessed by Charles Bullar4 Fairbanks. This
volume, published in 1860, contains fifty sketches of notable saints.
It cannot be called a marvelous contribution to hagiography —
scientific researches very likely did not engage the writer, though
there are copious citations from reliable predecessors, and constant
evidences of painstaking care in the facts and the manner of stating
them. The book, however, can challenge attention on other worthy
counts. First, its author, a Yankee brought up with strong New
England prejudices, as he proclaimed himself, is none other than
the famous " Aguecheek " — a name known over a half century
ago for those brilliant essays done under that pseudonym, and
again, feliciter redivivus in the new edition of his work, under the
title, My Unknown Chum. ' Secondly, the* motive of this book of
biographies sets its apostleship high; for it is the insistent cry
of an ardent convert to the Faith against the worldly and mater-
ialistic spirit of the times. Sixty years ago ! If that was the spirit
of America in that green wood, how much more now in the dry!
And finally, these sketches wrear the fullness of Yankee expressive-
ness— the temperate tone of laudation, a quiet manner in urging
the fact that its lesson, little literary nuances out of what might
be called the New England Academy, felicities in the phrasing of
some observation, or in the prim considerations which flower forth
as a moral from the chapter.
Of the author, Charles Bullard Fairbanks, an exhaustive bi-
ographical record need not be given here. His short term of years
was a busy school of religious study and growth. To the readers
of " Aguecheek " (now known as My Unknown Chum) he might
seem to have been a steady itinerant upon the highways of Europe,
a constant pilgrim to the beautiful shrines of art, to the cities and
hamlets rich with the best traditions of the Old World. But his
greater pilgrimages were those of the soul — a busy negotiator
traveling candidly forward- in quest of the pearl beyond all
price.
Born in Boston in 1827, Fairbanks was brought up in the
1918.] A YANKEE HAGIOGRAPHER: AGUECHEEK 521
Unitarian doctrines. Later he became acquainted with Episcopal-
ianism and for a time followed its tenets. But, as Rt. Rev. George
H. Doane said in a biographical notice, " he was too earnest to
play Catholic: he wished to be one indeed." And in 1852, on the
Feast of St. Martin, he was received into the Church by the Bishop
of Boston. "For myself," he writes to a friend, "I can only say that
every day I find new occasions for thankfulness that I was led to
the Catholic Church. I took the dreadful step in doubt. I went
with many fears and suspicions; but now I know them all to have
been groundless, and I can assure you that I have found a hap-
piness such as I had never dreamed of before."
There were other steps to take; his heart would go yet farther
on and up. He began to study in preparation for the priesthood.
At Holy Cross in Worcester, (where many notable converts have
started upon a new road, and where at that time, three sons of the
illustrious Orestes A. Brownson were completing their college
studies), Fairbanks set out upon his curriculum. He doubtless en-
joyed a literary reputation even at that date, for an old diary at
Holy Cross notes succinctly, " Fairbanks entered today." His ill-
health bore hard upon him, and in the hope that by a change of
climate he might have " passable good health" to pursue his studies,
he went to seminaries as far apart as St. Hyacinth's in Canada and
St. Sulpice in Paris, and thence to the Collegia Pio in Rome. He
received Minor Orders in Rome; but his health compelled him to
withdraw from his ambition,. In Monsignor Doane's conclud-
ing sentence, " He entered into rest on Saturday, September 3,
1859, and on Sunday, the 4th, after the Requiem Mass, and the
solemn service of the dead, he was laid in the cemetery at Mont-
martre." Sunday, and the Mount of Martyrs hallowed the farewell.
Even during those last years, fraught with many burdens of
physical pain, he found time and courage, like many another holy
ascetic before him, to use his talent in letters. As Aguecheek he had
sent forth a splendid chapter on " The Philosophy of Suffering," no
word of it apparently about himself; yet his contemporaries, in
telling us that Aguecheek was a name suggested by the facial
neuralgia from which he suffered intense pain, lead us to infer that
much of that chapter about suffering was written out of vivid ex-
periences. He had the temper of heroic Christianity. " This showed
itself," wrote a friend, " among other ways, in the patience with
which he bore the sufferings of disease, never allowing a murmur
to escape his lips, but rather masking what he suffered by his cheer-
522 A YANKEE HAGIOGRAPHER: AGUECHEEK [Jan.,
ful playful manner." He could count as nothing the afflictions of
the flesh and the vanities of the world, assured that incomparable
reward was being stored up beyond the horizons of time.
And this is in great part the message of his book about the
saints. It is, as we have noted, an insistent cry against the world's
love of materialistic comfort, a call to learn the culture and conduct
of the saints as a manual of arms for Christian combat. This
apostleship of his pen had found exercise even in the pages of the
" Aguecheek" papers — many passages speak protest on the god-
less ways of London and other money-mad cities. And in his
preface to the translation of Father Nepveu's Spirit of Christianity
(another labor of love, which illness could not impede), he strikes
off a paragraph which is keen analysis of the times and people
therein. " This treatise," he writes, "is admirably adapted also to
a large class among English-speaking Catholics, upon whom the
unction of a Bernard, a Bonaventure, or an Adphonsus would be
poured out in vain. It is no fault of theirs that they cannot sym-
pathize with the simple and affectionate piety of the warm-hearted
people of the Mediterranean countries — for they are constitution-
ally serious, and averse to any external demonstrations of feeling;
and the main object of education, in the communities they live in,
whose spirit affects them whether they will or no, appears to be
the inculcation of a due regard for the proprieties and the respect-
abilities of life. The increasing devotion to material interests, of
course, tends to drive such people, day by day, further from a
religion which is, in doctrine and practice, a stern remonstrance
against their spiritual self -isolation, and a severe reproof to their
worldly and calculating spirit. Perhaps this book may be the means
of tempering the chilly atmosphere in which they dwell, so that
the graceful and fragrant flowers of piety may flourish there.
Perhaps it may open their hearts to the tender pleadings of those
saintly ascetics, and may cure them of their tendency to mistake
fervor for poetic enthusiasm, and unction for sentimentalism."
Commentaries akin to this permeate his reflections upon the
saintly characters of whom he wrote. As an illustration of his
style in these sketches, take his final paragraph on St. Rose of
Lima; it deserves quotation also on the ground that it reads
piquantly to a multitude of modern Catholics. " Perhaps some who
read this sketch may think that such a life as that of St. Rose is
not intended for an example to them. They are engrossed, they
may say, by occupations which necessarily distract them from
1918.] A YANKEE HAGIOGRAPHER: AGUECHEEK 523
spiritual interests; and it cannot be expected that they should prac-
tise any extraordinary self-denial, or do anything more than is
absolutely required to keep them from losing the name of Christian.
But the truth is, it is to just this class of negligent and self-
indulgent Christians that the pure and mortified life we have
sketched most urgently appeals. It shows the prophetic wisdom
of the Apostolic See that it should have honored with canoniza-
tion such a saint as this shining model of self-abnegation, in a
hemisphere which was to become the abode of a worldly and
materialistic spirit, more arrogant and exclusive in its exertions
than the Church has ever before had to combat in a land professedly
Christian. If it be true that " friendship with the world is enmity
towards God," then the life of a saint, whose whole career was one
continued act of the love of God and detestation of the world and
its maxims, is worthy of the study and imitation of every
Christian. And they who are obliged to live in the whirl of society,
among people devoted to money-getting and money-spending, to
the vanities and unrealities which hem them in on every side, need
to imbibe something of the heroic character of St. Rose of Lima
if they would preserve their faith, and would cherish the hope of
ever sharing in her blessedness."
From the lives of great Apostles also, whose operative zeal
might seem to be inimitable, he would weave a little lesson for
souvenir. This gentle-toned paragraph, which terminates his chap-
ter on St. Patrick, offers further illustration of his manner : " Few
are called to such a work as that of St. Patrick; but there is no
one, from the mightiest to the most humble, from the most learned
to the most ignorant, who may not imitate his virtues. We may
not evangelize a heathen country, but our lives may be made to
reflect the humility, and patience, and all-embracing love of God
and man, which made the apostle of Ireland a saint in the Church of
God, and embalmed his memory in the hearts of a redeemed and
grateful people."
These citations may suggest to the reader an observation
about the literary style which invests the book — that the author
here writes with exceeding simplicity, no elaborate sentence struc-
tures, no far-sought turns of phrase; that he aims rather at com-
prehensive accuracy than at embellished elegancies or majestic am-
plifications which make for rhetorical force fulness. This observation
will occur to anyone conversant with the style of Fairbanks in his
" Aguecheek " papers; for in his splendid essays, keen with intellec-
524 A YANKEE HAGIOGRAPHER: AGUECHEEK [Jan.,
tttal erudition as well as with humanistic emotions, he exhibits a
stylistic power in that genre of writing which brings him abreast
with the masters. Fifty years ago, his critics mentioned him in the
same breath with Washington Irving; a half century later our re-
viewers place him in the superlative class of their eulogies. In the
volume about the saints, on the other hand, Fairbanks' style is indic-
ative of a beginner's limitations, there is a plain and formal struc-
ture to his sentences, a simple yet forceful order for phrase and
clause, no searching after smart habiliments for the vesture of his
narratives, a decent poverty rather than gay splendors, quiet dignity
always, though now and then something of the risus sanctorum
in his brief Yankee smile, and finally, the obvious though acceptable,
moralizations appended to the sketches.
From this disparity in the literary style of these two books,
a reader might be tempted to doubt the identity of Fairbanks and
Aguecheek. Knowing, however, from abundant testimony of his
contemporaries that Fairbanks is Aguecheek, the explanation of his
stylistic manners is not far to find. With a true eye to what may
be termed literary prospective, he knew how to meet his subjects
and his audiences. When he wished to engage in a tourney upon
the field of secular letters, Aguecheek wore apparel which should
befit the environment and its demands: and when he went to the
other-worldly courts of the cloister, Fairbanks adopted a style in
accord with the simple religious garb of his heroes, " those heroes
who conquered their greatest enemies, their own hearts." Secondly,
with regard to his audiences : as Aguecheek, he wrote for the liter-
ary clientele of Boston's best journals, the Gazette and the Tran-
script; in his Memorials of the Blessed, some of which appeared in
the Pilot, he was addressing readers who, sixty years ago were
foreigners for the greater part, and who, though not academicians,
were studious for the glorious history of the Faith. Then, too,
physical infirmities bore hard upon his pen during the preparation
of his papers about the saints ; " some of them," wrote his very
intimate friend, " were dictated by him to a very near relative, at
times when his disease, besides the suffering it caused him, de-
prived him of the use of his eyes." Elaborate composition was not
possible under such trying circumstances.
Yet it must not be imagined that this volume, because it lacks
the fullness of literary grace, has not stylistic valuations all its own.
On the contrary, the adoption of the simple comprehensive modes,
so truly in harmony with the atmosphere of his topics and with the
I9i8.] A YANKEE HAGIOGRAPHER: AGUECHEEK 525
requirements of his readers marks Fairbanks as a skilled litterateur.
Moreover, time and again, his pen drifts into the charms which
glorify the pages of Aguecheek. That he should employ the same
epithets for the same characters in both books is to be expected, as,
for instance, calling St. Francis " the Apostle of Holy Poverty,"
and Bernard "the honey-tongued Doctor;" but likewise as hagio-
grapher he exhibits that cultured mind which Aguecheek showed to
have been stored with the treasures of ancient and modern liter-
ature. The very title of his book, Memorials of the Blessed,
suggests acquaintance with a famous collection of the Middle Ages,
Memorialis Sanctorum, by Eulogius of Toledo. Montalembert and
Wiseman, good sources surely, as well as countless others, supply
him with confirming testimony. He is conversant with Protestant
writers who have paid tribute to his characters. Thus after narrat-
ing the incident in which the father of Francis of Assisi " insisted
upon his son's immediate return home, or renunciation of all hopes
of his inheritance," he quietly adds, " and here, says an eloquent
Protestant writer concerning Francis' father, history takes her leave
of him, without regret, and without applause, but not without sullen
acknowledgment that, after all, it was from the mortal Pietro
that the immortal Francis derived one inheritance which he could
not renounce — the inheritance of that inflexible decision of purpose
which elevated the father to distinction among the worshippers of
Mammon, and the son to eminence among the saints of Christen-
dom." And of Louis of France our well-read hagiographer is able
to say that " his virtues have since received the homage of his-
torians of every creed, and even of the great coryphaeus of infidelity,
Voltaire himself."
Allied to the literary erudition which marks these biographies
as well as the essays of Aguecheek, there are, albeit the style in
the main is wrought in a simple mold, sentences quite elaborate in
constructiveness, occasional felicities in thought and phrase, now
replete with gentle humor or again with the telling force of direct
reprehension. Borromeo and Fairbanks unite in a witty defence
of corporal austerities, the latter saying of the former : " His diet
often drew remonstrances from his confessors ; but he would abate
nothing of his austerities, insisting upon it that the simplicity of
his life had cured him of a troublesome disorder which had vexed
him for many years." That Christians should strive to be worthy
of the name they bear, stands out in this sentence about John of the
Cross : " His incredible austerities showed that the name he had
526 A YANKEE HAGIOGRAPHER: AGUECHEEK [Jan.,
taken was not a mere unmeaning title." One full sentence suffices
to record that period of Teresa's life which might have been a
wide pathway to peril : " Her rosary, once bright with constant
use, hung day after day untouched in her chamber, and the lives
of the heroes of Christianity, who triumphed so gloriously over
those most powerful enemies, their own hearts, were cast aside
for the chronicles of knight-errantry and the frivolous inventions
of the novelist." In Laurence Justinian, he gives a graphic picture
of son and saint, filial affection and religious decorum : " When he
went out as a mendicant, he visited his mother's house just as he
did those of her neighbors, and received her alms, in the same
manner as he did theirs." As a last illustration of these telling
sentences, let us take one about Bruno, which recalls the story of
Michelangelo commanding his own statue of Moses to speak:
"In the noble church adjoining Santa Maria degli Angeli stands
the greatest work of the sculptor Houdon, the statue of the founder
of the Carthusian Order, faintly typifying in its pure white marble
the splendor and the solidity of the virtues of the saint, and meriting
in the life-like fullness of its artistic perfections the criticism
bestowed upon it by an illustrious Pope, ' It would speak, were it not
that the rules of the Order prescribe silence.' '
As a hagiographer, therefore, as well as a writer in the fore-
front of secular letters, Charles Bullard Fairbanks merits the
esteem and the admiration — it is not too much to say it — of the
worid, and most surely of the American community. As "Ague-
cheek" he produced a book of essays which, during the past sixty
years has won lavish praise from a multitude of knowing readers,
a book which marks him as an ideal American in commentary upon
men and manners. And in his biographies of the saints, he displays
characteristics truly American. In the quantity of his work also —
for we should bear in mind that he was rarely in good health, and
that he died at the age of thirty-two — he was a type of the steady-
going, indefatigable Yankee. In the judgment of his secular
friends, who were near to him when he was writing his Aguecheek
papers, he was a saintly character, this young man, who posed as
" a venerable old gentleman" in his charming essays. The good
Madame Busque — who does not know that lovable housekeeper, a
real personage in the most domestic scene in "Aguecheek" — the good
Madame Busque insisted on calling him a saint on the way back
from the grave on Montmartre. And the great Round Table of
canonized saints of whom he wrote for the interest and edification
1918.] MY LESSON $27
of his brethren in the Faith, are witnesses, we trust, to the truth, in
his regard, of lines which he quoted for Elizabeth of Hungary :
A crown of glory now
Adorns that gentle brow
Which bore another crown while on the way.
MY LESSON.
BY MARY REEVES.
I HAVE grown used to search for Thee always among the
hills,
Or where the stir of forest leaves at dawn, sweet peace
distills.
And I have lifted up my raptured face,
Calm with the thought of Thee to star-lit space,
And surged towards Thee on the winds that race.
But teach me now to find Thee even here, in the stern
mart,
To trace Thy footprints still, through maze of men, with
steady heart.
To see Thy image clear in world-scarred eyes,
To hear Thy summons ring through human cries,
To note Thy beauty from the mire arise.
I have been wont to lift my orisons, in quietude,
Where discord of the world — of strife and sin, dare not
intrude :
I have drawn near to Thee in gracious dreams,
Have found Thee in green woods and purling streams,
And glimpsed Thy glory in the sunset gleams.
But let me now above life's dissonance, sing high Thy
praise,
Bid me to sense Thee, as a light divine, on darkened
ways.
Give me to find Thee on the fetid street,
Hear in the monotone of wearied feet,
And through the toilsome din, Thy meaning sweet.
THE BENEDICTINES OF CALDEY.
• BY KATHARINE TYNAN.
INCE the conversion of Newman no incident in the
religious life of England was so sensational as the
conversion of the Anglican Benedictine monks of
Caldey Island, and the community of Anglican nuns
at St. Bride's, Milford Haven, to the Catholic Church.
Their reception took place in February, 1913, when seventy-four
souls in all, of the fine flower of Anglican piety, returned to the
ancient Church. This great event was a sign of the unrest among
the English High Church people; and its sequel may be looked
for as a result of the decision of the Convocation of Canterbury
refusing the appeal of a thousand High Church clergy for
permission to reserve the Sacrament for purposes of private
prayer. Against this decision the Bishop of London protested, say-
ing that he feared it would have the effect of driving out of the
Anglican Church those thousand men, whom he described as the
most spiritual-minded and devout-minded men they had in the
Church.
It was just such a decision that drove the monks of Caldey
and the nuns of St. Bride's back to the Mother Church — they were
required to give up " illegal practices," such as the reservation of
the Sacrament, and the preaching of the Immaculate Conception as
an article of faith.
Many people believed that the great hour for the return of
England to the Catholic Church had struck when Newman wrote
on October 8, 1845, from Littlemore: "I am this night
expecting Father Dominic, the Passionist, who from his youth has
been led to have distinct and direct thoughts, first of the countries
of the North, then of England. After thirty years of waiting, he
was, without his own act, sent here. But he has had little to do
with conversions. He is a simple, holy man, gifted with remark-
able powers. He does not know of my intention; but I mean to
ask of him admission into the Fold of Christ."
But the great hour had not struck, although as Gladstone
said: "A great luminary drew after him a third of the stars of
heaven." The hour has yet to strike. Many people, especially
1918.] THE BENEDICTINES OF CALDEY 529
army chaplains, believe that the War has sounded it. When it
strikes, its coming will have been helped by the prayers of such
contemplative communities as those of Caldey. Again one remem-
bers Newman : " We are leaving Littlemore and it is as though we
put out on the great sea."
When the Caldey monks made the great renunciation and
the great acceptance, it was as though they put out on the wild
sea, walking on the waters and trusting to the Lord to uplift them.
Before the change they were praised, cherished and loved by all
that body of the Church of England which still believes it possible
to be Catholic within the borders of the Establishment. Before
they settled at Caldey they had been at Painsthorpe in Yorkshire
under the wing of Lord Halifax, the lay leader of the High Church
party in England, " waiting till God should give them a place of
their own," wrote Lord Halifax in the Church Times in 1906,
" where they could dwell from generation to generation." In 1906
the hoped-for thing happened. Caldey Island, which had been a
monastic settlement in the early days of Christianity in England,
was secured for them, and there they were settled to pray for the
world. Caldey is a rocky place off Tenby on the coast of Wales.
About the same time the Anglican nuns of St. Bride moved from
Mailing Abbey to Milford.
Between 1906 and 1913, probably earlier, the Community at
Caldey had been observing all the practices of the Catholic Church.
Like all the extremists of the High Church party there was nothing
between them and Catholicism except submission to Rome. To
Caldey came many spiritually-minded people who found in " Eng-
lish Catholicism " a way of escape from the arid and cold ugliness
of the Low Church, the Church of negations rather than affirma-
tions. There was a Guest-House on the Island at which these
pilgrims stayed, enjoying the " privileges " of the Divine Office,
of " Mass " and all the monastic observances. Caldey was a High
Church pilgrimage and shrine to which were brought many offer-
ings. Doubtless it was a terrible blow to many good people when
the news came that the whole Community, with the nuns of St.
Bride's, had " gone over " to Rome. Caldey had been a gift to
the monks, therefore it could not be alienated. It, with all its
monastic buildings, became an outpost for St. Peter in St. George's
Channel, looking across to Ireland which has suffered so much for
its faithfulness to Rome. But the offerings were withdrawn.
Those who were taken in St. Peter's net were left practically with-
VOL. cvi.— 34
530 THE BENEDICTINES OF CALDEY [Jan.,
out provision. From a plentiful city they passed into a City secure
indeed, but so far as the worldly part is concerned, a City of few
material resources.
Dom Bede Camm, who was to the Caldey monks what Father
Dominic, the Passionist, was to Newman, has some interesting
stories to tell about this event which so fluttered the dovecotes of
High Anglicanism. He says : " When the news of the conversions
at Caldey and St. Bride's first became known to the world, I re-
ceived a very remarkable letter from an English nun in France.
She wrote from the Mother House of the Congregation of St.
Charles at Angers. I will quote her letter at length: 'A Sister
of our Community, who died May 24, 1908, whose autobiography
was published in 1910 — it has now reached the third edition and
fifth thousand, and is in all parts of the world, so to speak — said
in her writings some things which bear such a striking relation to
the events which rejoice the Catholic world at the present time,
that I cannot resist calling your attention to them.'
"For instance, on January 2, 1907, she writes: The demon
is enraged because God chooses for Himself a multitude of souls
in whom He is about to work marvelous things. The adorable
Trinity will have, so to speak, His heaven on the earth. I rejoice
at the reign of God in these souls and I pray for them. I beg the
divine Master to increase their number.
" 'For some time since I see a Community of religious women
all clothed in white. Our Lord finds His delight among these con-
secrated souls. They have always their souls, if not their arms,
raised to heaven. Their thoughts are constantly fixed on God.
Their prayers, which ever rise towards the Eternal God, are very
fervent, and appease His wrath. They appear to me to be about
forty in number.'
" I will break off here to remark that the nuns of St. Bride's
wore a white habit, like the monks of Caldey, though this is very
unusual among the Benedictines. They numbered, too, about forty,
thirty-seven to be exact.
"Again on January u, 1907, she writes: 'At my repeated
prayers, Jesus turned His face each time to this poor land, this
poor France of ours, but His face became ever more sad, as if
ever more oppressed with grief.
" 'At the same time I saw a little island, surrounded by water
on every side. The soil was uncultivated. In the midst of the
island there grew a beautiful rose on a long stem, without leaves.
1918.] THE BENEDICTINES OF CALDEY 531
I was much astonished. A rose at this season ? A rose on a leafless
stem, in this rough uncultivated soil ? I could not understand what
it meant.
" This morning, during Mass, when I was not thinking about
it at all, Our Lord said to me, that this uncultivated soil meant
that religion was not yet properly established in this place which
yet was to be the heaven of the Holy Trinity on earth, and from
which saints would arise to console the Heart of God. Already
I knew interiorly that this world of chosen souls was not in France.
Our Lord then commanded me to take His precious Blood which I
had seen flow abundantly from Him, and to water therewith this
barren soil which would then become fruitful.'
"Again on January 16, 1907, she saw an abundant shower of
rain fall on this island, which was thus wonderfully predestined to
be God's heaven on earth, and she was told that these were graces,
which, rejected and despised by others, were now poured out on
this chosen land. Under this abundant rain she saw the soil become
soft and moist, as souls emerging from their state of ignorance,
were thus prepared to bud and bring forth fruit.
" 'I have no idea,' the writer continues, 'if the good nuns of
Milford Haven wear black or white. Then again, I have never
been to Caldey, so cannot know if the facts coincide in reality as
they appear to us to do. A line from you, Reverend Father, would
be esteemed a great favor, for we have often wondered where the
unknown island was, and also the nuns clothed in white.'
"Of course, I wrote to assure her that the facts did indeed
wonderfully coincide with the Sister's revelations. It was
in October, 1906, that the monks came to Caldey, and already
in January, 1907, this holy nun had visions of this chosen isle,
once the home of so many saints, but for more than three cen-
turies utterly abandoned and neglected as far as religion was
concerned.
" I asked for more information about the nun to whom Our
Lord seems to have intrusted the work of these conversions, and
the Mother General kindly sent me copies of her autobiography,
entitled Une Mystique de Nos Jours.
" Sister Gertrude Marie Bernier was born of a poor family
at Lion d' Angers in Anjou, in 1870. She became a religious in
1887, and spent most of her short life in teaching little children.
She suffered greatly, and after years of severe illness died in the
odor of sanctity at Angers, in 1908. Our Lord Himself com-
532 THE BENEDICTINES OF CALDEY [Jan.,
manded her to write her life, and tell of the marvels of grace
which He was pleased to work in her soul.
" From the day of her First Communion she was inundated
with divine favors, which reached their apogee when, in 1907, she
celebrated her mystic nuptials with her divine Spouse. With these
graces were united, as is usually the case, the most terrible suffer-
ings, for she had offered herself to Jesus to be His victim. Her
favorite device was, 'Love has chosen me, Love has called me, I
yield myself up to Love by love.'
"And if we rejoice today at these wonderful conversions, at
the sight of two Communities with one consent and one heart
begging for admission into the Church of Jesus Christ, we may
find the secret, it seems, of these extraordinary graces in the hidden
life of prayer and immolation of this poor nun whom Jesus chose
to be His instrument in the divine work.
" She did not live to know who it was for whom she thus
poured out her supplications; she never knew the joy, at least
in this world, of seeing her petitions so wonderfully granted. But
no doubt these conversions are mainly due to her sacrifices and her
prayers.
" I may now speak of what came under my own knowledge.
In the year 1891 a dear friend of my own, Miss Charlotte Boyd,
Foundress of the Orphanage of the Infant Saviour at Kilburn,
came to see me during my novitiate at the Benedictine Abbey at
Maredsous. She was a devout Anglican, and from her early days
had been intensely interested in the revival of the monastic life
in England. Possessed of considerable means, she had been moved,
when on a pilgrimage to the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey, to make
a special vow that she would devote her life and the bulk of her for-
tune to rescuing from desecration the holy sites once consecrated
to God and St. Benedict, and to restoring them to religious uses.
" Unfortunately, having been brought up in the belief that
the Anglican Communion was the true representative of the ancient
Catholic Church of the land, she handed over her benefactions to
members of the High Church party, and made the Cowley Fathers
trustees of the fund which she designated 'The Abbey Restoration
Trust.'
" God, however, did not fail to reward her zeal and devotion,
by enlightening her as to His true Church. Her visits to Mared-
sous greatly impressed her, and she began to see that submission
to the Holy See was a necessary condition of true Catholicism.
1918.] THE BENEDICTINES OF CALDEY 533
While still hesitating she acquired Mailing Abbey, a fine old house
of Benedictine nuns, from the Akers family. She handed it over
to a Community of Anglican nuns, which had been founded by the
late Father Ignatius of Llanthony at Feltham in Middlesex, and
whom she had long known intimately.
"About the same time she actually founded in our Abbey
at Maredsous a Mass to be said daily for the conversion of Eng-
land. It was laid down as a condition that when the petition was
granted, the Mass should still be said daily in thanksgiving. She
gave a sum of two thousand pounds for this foundation. The first
fruit of this daily Mass was the conversion of the foundress herself.
"A further result has been the conversion of the nuns to whom
she gave Mailing Abbey. For this is the same Community now
established at St. Bride's, Mil ford Haven, whither they moved
from Mailing two years ago. They let Mailing as the place had
become too small for them, but hoped soon to be able to send back
a colony of nuns to re-people it. They had no intention of deserting
the grand old Abbey, but there were difficulties about building
there, and the house could no longer contain their greatly increased
numbers. At present — 1913 — the fate of Mailing Abbey is in
suspense. It was at Mailing Abbey that Brother Aelred Carlyle
first made his profession as a monk. Thus it was that for many
years the daily Sacrifice pleaded at Maredsous for these souls,
who desired so earnestly to consecrate themselves to God.
" I, myself, as an Anglican clergyman, had known the Com-
munity intimately while they were still settled at Feltham, and I
presented them one day with a statue of St. Scholastica, which
they still keep in their chapel at St. Bride's. The lamp which hangs
beside it, was presented by Monsignor R. H. Benson some years
later to Mailing.
"When I came to St. Bride's this year, to prepare the Com-
munity for their reception into the Catholic Church, I found several
of the elder religious who remembered me well, and it was a very
happy meeting after more than twenty, years.
" My relations with the Caldey Community began much later,
and in rather a curious way. In June, 1905, an article appeared
in a Catholic weekly paper, giving a very laudatory and rather too
gushing account of the Anglican Benedictines then at Painsthorpe
in Yorkshire. This provoked controversy, and some violent let-
ters appeared abusing the monks as shams and frauds. I was so
much disgusted at the tone of the correspondence that I wrote to
534 THE BENEDICTINES OF CALDEY [Jan.,
protest, explaining that while, of course, I could not recognize the
monks as real Benedictines, yet I was convinced from all I had
heard of them that they were sincere and earnest men, leading a
very mortified life according to St. Benedict's Holy Rule, and
striving to serve God perfectly according to their lights. I added
that my own experience had taught me that souls were never won
by abuse, and that the true method to convert them was by showing
them sympathy and charity in their difficulties, and trying to under-
stand their position.
" This letter drew, on July 24th, a private communication
from Abbot Aelred, in which he said : 'I feel that I cannot let
this week pass without writing you a line of grateful thanks for
your Christian letter. There is no question,' he went on, ' but that
we are all in good faith, and in the present state of the world which
is given over to forgetfulness of God and neglect of holy things,
it is a grievous pity that we, who, at least, possess in common the
love of our dear Lord, should make it possible for those who do
not know Him to throw the old gibe at us : " See how these Chris-
tians love one another."
" This letter naturally led to others, and established friendly
relations, which were cemented some years later by the charity
shown by the monks to a consumptive boy who had left their com-
munity to become a Catholic, and whom they took back when he
was friendless and stricken with the fatal disease, and nursed most
lovingly until his death. This was in 1911. The poor boy lived a
year, and died praying with his last breath for the conversion of his
benefactors. In a paper which he left behind him, he expressed
in the most emphatic terms his joy at dying in the holy Faith of
the one true Church of Jesus Christ, and his most earnest prayer
that all whom he loved and who had been good to him, might find
their way into the same sacred Fold."
On SS. Peter's and Paul's Day, June 29, 1913, Bishop Mostyn
clothed Brother Aelred Carlyle in the Benedictine habit, and an-
nounced that by faculties from the Holy See, Caldey Abbey was
established as a true Benedictine monastery. A few days earlier
a like ceremony had taken place at St. Bride's.
All that is four years ago, and the censer of prayer is still
swinging between Caldey and heaven. Dom Aelred is now in the
United States to spread there the knowledge of the English Bene-
dictines and to tell the needs of Caldey and the mission which it
seeks to promote.
Boohs*
HARRY BUTTERS, R.F.A. Life and War Letters. Edited by
Mrs. Denis O'Sullivan. With twelve illustrations. New
York: John Lane Co. $1.50 net.
Here in actual life and death, we have a true Robert Hugh
Benson hero and theme — the mystic guidance of Divine Providence,
hidden under commonplace happenings, working on the world's
greatest battlefield, leading through suffering and humiliation to
the Bethel wherein is the mighty wrestling with God's angel, a
wrestling that cripples the soul in its pride and intellectual self-
sufficiency. Eventually the soul wins the crown from the angel
of suffering, and issues a humbled conqueror, glimpsing life's mean-
ing with the new eyes of Faith, and in the very dawn of God's
spiritual day, passing on to meet the Master face to face.
Yet not every reader will find this guiding of a rare soul from
the darkness of unbelief to the light of Faith as the principal
message of the book. The bright, flashing personality of the young
soldier, whose physical beauty a poet has celebrated, dominates
the pages. His cheery, fun-loving spirit that made him the delight
of his comrades; the loftiness of thought and nobility of purpose;
the mental grasp and insight into the real issues of this war, that
won him the encomiums of England's foremost men, are all before
us; but if we do not see, running through all this and giving it
genuine significance, the story of a soul, groping on in doubt and
pain, unknowingly led by a Guide whose lineaments we can discern
but he could not, then we miss the real issue in this book.
Mrs. Denis O'Sullivan evidently performed a labor of love
when she wrote the Life. The story is told with simplicity and
charm. The boy, the youth and the soldier are depicted with a vivid-
ness that bespeaks exceptional opportunities in acquiring data, and
a more exceptional sympathy, governed by good taste, in presenting
them.
In the letters themselves we come in touch with the rare per-
sonality that inspired the book, and find him as stimulating and as
charming as we were led to expect from the introductory Life.
In the very first letter, written on leaving home, we have a glimpse
of the spiritual element that was in his going. The promise to say
536 NEW BOOKS [Jan.,
every day one " Hail Mary" and the " Veni Creator" would mean
nothing remarkable from a man who was a practical Catholic, but
that promise from one who had lost the Faith entirely, speaks
eloquently of his intense love for the sister who asked it, and who
found courage to send him to the War with smiling face because
she looked for his return — not to her but to God.
If a man during a long life can bring an inspiriting message
to thousands of his fellows, he is considered exceptional in himself
and fortunate in his circumstances. Harry Butters, in the dawn of
his young manhood, enabled many of his fellow-countrymen to see
the greatness of the cause for which we are fighting; showed them
a joyous courage typical of those who battle for justice; and in
the circumstances that preceded and attended his death, exemplified
Francis Thompson's teaching in The Hound of Heaven, and
the principles that Monsignor Benson constantly strove to impart.
This it is that makes the book unique among those that have
come to us because of the War. There are many reasons for special
interest it is true. Harry Butters was among the first to realize
the issues at stake in the present conflict; saw that the rule "of the
people by the people and for the people" would perish from the
earth if the foe were victorious, and gave his life in defence of
that liberty that his fathers had died for, long before the majority
of his countrymen realized that that liberty was endangered. But
the soul-story, where God's grace and the boy are fighting with the
dark angel of unbelief, ending in glorious, inevitable conquest and
the placing of Christ's own coronet on the head of the young
soldier, is of dominant interest to those who see with the eyes of
Faith.
STATE SOCIALISM. Pro. and Con. Edited by William English
Walling and Harry W. Laidler. New York: Henry Holt &
Co. $2.00 net.
In the preface to this book, the editors tell us that " the
tendency toward collectivism is probably the most portentous move-
ment of the twentieth century," yet no hitherto published American
work deals with it adequately. Messrs. Walling and Laidler have
attempted to supply the deficiency. Their volume presents authori-
tative selections from various sources on the recent and present
activities of governments in commercial, industrial and social fields.
In five parts it describes what governments are doing by way of
ownership and operation under the heads : " Finance ;" " Agricul-
I9i8.] NEW BOOKS 537
ture and the Conservation of Natural Resources;" " Transportation
and Communication ;" " Commerce, Industry and Mining ;" and
" Collectivism and the Individual." This is a very comprehensive
programme, leaving no subject untouched that could reasonably be
classed as among " socialistic" or collectivistic undertakings. It
includes subjects as far apart as public housing, mining, savings
banks, land development, shipping, and municipal utilities. How-
ever, they and all the other topics have a proper place in a book
which aims to give an account of what governments are doing in
other than the traditional domain of the state. According to the
editors, all the governmental enterprises and activities that the book
discusses are collectivistic, inasmuch as they are supported and op-
erated by the government for a public purpose.
The editors maintain that " the book is in no sense a brief for
State Socialism," and that they have " not sought to reproduce
partisan arguments on either side," but only " to provide the reader
with the more important data, so that he may be equally free to
reach a conclusion for or against collectivism." While they have,
no doubt, honestly endeavored to carry out this intention, the
superior amount of space given to matter favorable to government
enterprise in the chapters on railroads, telegraphs and telephones,
and municipal ownership, suggests that they have not been able to
overcome entirely their own predilections on the fundamental ques-
tion. The con side does not seem to have received quite as much
publicity as the pro side.
Besides the objective presentation of facts and sources in the
text, there is an introduction of some forty pages, in which the
editors give a summary of "what they regard as the more important
arguments," under such heads as " State Socialism Before and
After the War," " State Socialism and Democracy," " State Social-
ism and Nationalism," etc. This is not the least useful portion of
the book.
It has become almost a settled conviction in the minds of most
observers that State Socialism will be much further extended in all
the great nations after the War than it was before that event. This
belief and expectation are based mainly on the apparently superior
efficiency of government direction of certain industrial activities in
a critical period of the nation's life, and on the assumption that the
need for such centralized and coordinated management will, for a
long time after peace comes, be only slightly less than it has been
during the time of the War. The book before us will tend to
538 NEW BOOKS [Jan.,
confirm this view, for it shows that the movement toward what the
editors have called " State Socialism" had acquired considerable
and steadily increasing momentum in most of the great nations
even before the War began. For the man who deplores, no less
than for the man who welcomes, this trend the volume under review
will be found extremely serviceable. In fact, no other book, no
other half dozen books, contain as much information concerning
the economic or collectivistic functions of modern states.
i
VERY REVEREND CHARLES H. McKENNA, O.P., MISSON-
ARY AND APOSTLE OF THE HOLY NAME SOCIETY.
By the Very Rev. V. F. O'Danid, O.P., S.T.M. New York:
The Holy Name Bureau. $2.00.
The biographer's task in the present instance was far from
easy; in fact, at first sight, it might appear hopeless. Father Mc-
Kenna left little manuscript, and consistently refrained from mak-
ing records of his many missions. This regrettable fact deprived
his biographer of a means of penetrating the inner spiritual life of
his subject, and forced him to draw an estimate only from the
fruits of his labors.
Father McKenna's long life in the ministry brings us into
contact with the great growth of the Catholic Church in this
country. Born in Ireland in 1835, at the age of sixteen he came
to America and settled in Lancaster, Pa. After a course at the
local school, he learned the trade of stonemason in order to earn
funds to carry him through college. The six years he spent at his
trade, moving from place to place, showed him the great need to
preach virile religion and explain the truths of the Church. These
impressions abided through life and mapped his course when he en-
tered the Dominican Order in 1862, and became priest in 1867.
Shortly after he was chosen Master of Novices. From 1870 to
1900 he was almost constantly giving missions throughout the
country. From the first his eloquence made him a marked man,
and years only added experience and power to his brilliant sway
over the minds and hearts of his varied auditors. From 1900 to
1912, he gave himself wholly to the furtherance of two confra-
ternities ever dear to his heart, the Holy Name and the Rosary.
The closing days of his life found him still active at the advanced
age of eighty. He died February 21, 1917.
Of his life and work Father O'Daniel has made a connected
and well-written story, bringing in general topics only so far as they
1918.] NEW BOOKS 539
served as background for the noble activities of the great Domini-
can missionary. Thus we learn in summary the idea and scope
of the institute St. Dominic was instrumental in giving to the
Church. We learn, too, the meaning and method, the rise and
growth of " missions " in this country.
This biography, besides being the record of a life well spent,
and a chapter in the story of the growth of the Catholic Church in
this country, will be a treasure for those who came under the spell
of the preacher's voice and had his counsel in the tribunal of pen-
ance; to priest and aspirants to the priesthood, it will offer an ex-
emplar and encouragement, and perpetuate him as the ignis ardens
et lucens of the Dominicans.
It is so uniformly well done it may perhaps seem hypercriti-
cal to point out the error of James F. for S. in the name of Mon-
signor Duffy (page 198), of 1889 for 1899 (p- 29°)> of tne ques-
tionable propriety of the twice used expression " well into the
swing," and the statement (p. 93) relative to "the salvation of
souls," which would seem to imply that the parish priest's paro-
chial duties are not such.
UTOPIA OF USURERS. By G. K. Chesterton. New York:
Boni & Liveright. $1.25 net.
Although these essays do not represent Mr. Chesterton at
his highest brilliancy, they fix a gesture,- habitual to him, that is
admirably generous and humane. No man writing for the public
is more consistently democratic than he; there are, indeed, but
few who share his high, true conception of democracy. His is the
Catholic ideal, non-Catholic though he is; his views are founded
upon doctrines that " modern thought " rejects. " Only with
original sin we can as once pity the beggar and distrust the king,"
he said, some years ago; and his subsequent writings register an
ever increasing conviction of the spiritual equality of men under
a common load of guilt, and of the sovereignty of each man's soul.
He has steadily refused homage to the ugly idol, efficiency, now
thrust forward as a substitute for character, and denounces its
service as soul-destroying.
The present volume is a protest and a warning. Its burden is
that this plutocratic age is rapidly developing a policy of inter-
vention in the lives of the working classes, their customs, their
amusements, their food and drink, to compel economy and enforce
restrictions; and this, not from any philanthropy, sincere if over-
540 NEW BOOKS [Jan.,
zealous, whose goal is the greater happiness of its objects, but in
the quest of a greater efficiency that will operate to the advantage
of the capitalist class. This shameful usury Mr. Chesterton at-
tacks, as also the monstrous insolence of the prevalent assumption
that easy circumstances carry with them qualification and privilege
to regulate existence for the masses with whom they are always
hard. Mr. Chesterton is little less contemptuous of the invasion of
capitalism into literature and the arts, utilizing them for adver-
tising purposes, a revival of the age of patronage under singularly
uninspiring patrons. We are warned that all this is symtomatic
of a deadly disintegration of society, and that we are rapidly ap-
proaching " a paradise of plutocrats, a Utopia of gold and brass,"
a realization of the Servile State.
The work is an impassioned plea, unmarred by any of the
demagogue's shallow eloquence, for the natural rights of men and
the restoration of their earlier liberties. If there is somewhat
less than usual of Mr. Chesterton's -wit, it is by no means wholly
absent; and there is no lack of wisdom, based upon enduring truths
and expressed with the clearness of a tocsin.
A NATURALIST OF SOULS. Studies in Psychography. By
Gamaliel Bradford. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. $2.50.
Under a somewhat forbidding title the author of this volume
gives us eleven delightful studies with a strong appeal to every
thoughtful reader. In an introductory essay Mr. Bradford defines
what he means by psychography, and makes his aim quite clear in
the following terms : " Out of the perpetual flux of actions and cir-
cumstances that constitute a man's whole life it (psychography)
seeks to extract what is essential, what is permanent and so vitally
characteristic. The painter can depict a face and figure only as he
sees them at one particular moment, though in proportion to the
depth and power of his art, he can suggest more or less subtly, the
vast complex of influences that have gone to building up that
face and figure. The psychographer endeavors to grasp as many
particular moments as he can and to give his reader not one but
the enduring sum total of them all."
This aim the author successfully attains in his Study on the
Poetry of Donne — a piece of discriminating criticism, though
we are not prepared to grant all his conclusions. His essays on A
Pessimist Poet (Leopardi), Anthony Trollope, An Odd Sort of
Popular Book (Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy) and Dumas
I9i8.] NEW BOOKS 541
are thoughtful and full of literary interest; while his three classical
studies, The Novel Two Thousand Years Ago, The Letters of a
Roman Gentleman and Ovid Among the Goths are written with
a finesse of scholarship worthy of Simcox or Mackail, we give
the palm to his concluding study entitled A Portrait of a Saint. It
is a fine appreciation of St. Francis de Sales that could scarcely be
surpassed for beauty.
THE CATHOLIC'S WORK IN THE WORLD. By Rev. Joseph
Husslein, SJ. New York: Benziger Brothers. $1.00.
The sub-title tells us that The Catholic's Work in the World is
the solution of the religious and social problems of the day. Cer-
tainly the book is timely. Catholics have a tendency to ignore their
power and responsibility to set a right attitude towards the many
enigmas of our complex life. Their number in the army may
rouse them to a sense of what the Church does for family and
society by her lofty morality and firm stand against divorce and
race-suicide; by her schools and orphanages and hospitals and
refuge homes; and by the influence of her priesthood and sister-
hood. Certainly this book of Father Husslein presents to every
individual a definite line of conduct for his immediate circle of
influence. The topics, it is true, are briefly handled — with fifty
live issues touched in two hundred and eighty-five pages it eould
not be otherwise — but sufficient is said to set our minds thinking.
The author is in a position to feel the pulse of public opinion and to
know whereof he talks.
THE VOICE OF BELGIUM. Being the War Utterances of Car-
dinal Mercier. With a Portrait, Frontispiece, and a Preface
by Cardinal Bourne. London: Burns & Gates. 70 cents.
In these papers by Cardinal Mercier, constituting his various
addresses both to his own distressed people and to the German au-
thorities, we have the memorable words of a great patriot, a great
thinker, and a great spiritual leader. All the world now knows
the quality of his love of country, and that love is manifest anew
for us here in ringing sentences all the more moving because they
were originally uttered at the peril of their maker. His pastoral
charge to the Belgians on the sorrowful Christmas of 1914, with
its memorable words : " Mere ulitarianism is no sufficient rule of
Christian citizenship," will forever remain a model standard for
that same citizenship.
542 NEW BOOKS [Jan.,
Scarcely less famous are his letters of protest to the German
officials and to neutrals concerning forced labor and deportations.
These are masterpieces of eloquence, of wit, of irony, and of close
dialectic. This book reveals not only the conspicuous patriot, but
the less well-known philosopher, and former President of the In-
stitute of Thomistic Philosophy. Many notable thoughts and
phrases are scattered through its pages. Where, for instance, could
we get a happier definition of Modernism than where he speaks of
Pius X. who " saved Christendom from the immense peril, not of
any single heresy, but of every heresy at once, all mingled haphaz-
ard in a dangerous and deceitful whole?"
So stupendously destructive in the material order has been the
present War that we are apt to overlook the fact that it has ex-
tended its shattering effect also to the region of ideas. Since Aug-
ust, 1914, many feeble philosophies that had sprung up in the easy
times of peace have drooped and perished, and even many systems
possessing a stronger and more vital principle have cracked under
the strain of such tremendous events. But there has been one
grand exception, and in the person of the heroic Cardinal Arch-
bishop of Malines, Scholastic philosophy has again showed itself
capable of victoriously grappling with the thorniest questions, the
most fundamental problems that can be put to human intelligence.
And finally in his spiritual capacity this book discloses the
Cardinal as the true shepherd of his flock; advising, encouraging,
and above all comforting his stricken people. Here he rises to
heights of real spiritual grandeur; and certain passages, notably
where he speaks to the bereaved mothers of the nations, have a pro-
found and piercing pathos that go straight to the heart and will
have their effect long after the original occasion.
THE RIGHT TO WORK. By J. Elliot Ross, C.S.P., Ph.D. New
York: The Devin-Adair Co. $1.00.
This little book is a Catholic manual on the labor problem.
The proposition that " each man has a right to work " is orientated
in Catholic moral teaching, and is shown to be explicity stated or
indirectly derivable from the social doctrines of Noldin, Cathrein,
Lehmkuhl, Father Kelleher, Cardinal Manning and Leo XIII.
This, with its correlative proposition, that, in cases of extensive
unemployment, " the state has a duty in legal justice to provide in
some way for those out of work," forms the theoretic basis of
Father Ross' discussion. There follow a consideration of the
I9i8.] NEW BOOKS 543
causes which today constitute a bar to the exercise of this funda-
mental right on the part of countless men, and a proposal of prac-
tical measures for the removal of this great social injustice.
Two classes are recognized, the capable and the incapable:
those who, because of external conditions, are simply unemployed,
and those who are normally unemployable — " at least by private
employers." The need of the first class is to be met by controlling
the vagaries of the labor market by a machinery designed to bring
about a more perfect correlation between labor demand and labor
supply; responsible municipal and federal labor bureaus, vocational
guidance based upon the statistics of such bureaus, a reorganization
and coordination of industries to establish a steady demand for
labor and to destroy seasonal fluctuations, and, finally, unemploy-
ment insurance. Each of these expedients is discussed concretely
and critically. " The finding of productive employment " for the
second class, in spite of the difficulties involved, is declared to be the
only sound solution of their problem; and definite suggestions are
made as to the nature of this employment and the means for pro-
viding it.
The books ends with an inspiring statement of the duty of the
individual. Catholic social workers should be grateful to Father Ross
for clarifying the moral and economic issues involved in what is
perhaps America's greatest problem, and for producing a prac-
tical social guide-book which stands four-square with Catholic
ethics.
THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD. By Theodore Roose-
velt. New York: George H. Doran Co. $1.50 net.
Those who enjoyed and profited by such of these stimulating
papers as appeared in The Metropolitan Magazine, will be glad to
obtain them in a more permanent form. In them Colonel Roosevelt
continues to combine the brilliance and the sincerity which will
always provoke enthusiastic assent or thoughtful replies to his dis-
cussions of public questions.
Although numbered as successive chapters, these papers are re-
lated not so much by a strict continuity of organization in the
volume, as by the relevance and importance of their various sub-
jects. They are practically a series of independent essays on topics
of vital interest to Americans. The titles of some of the chapters —
"The Instant Need and the Ultimate Need;" "A Square Deal in
Law Enforcement;" "Industrial Justice;" "Social Justice;" "So-
544 NEW BOOKS [Jan.,
cialism;" "The Farmer;" "Birth Reform" — give an idea of the
breadth of the field covered. Though this is a war book, emphasiz-
ing with consistent gravity the enormous importance of war issues,
Colonel Roosevelt has not confined himself to a narrow discussion
of the origin and ideal conduct of the present struggle. The foes
within he conceives to be not merely the formal traitors, insidious
and powerful though they are; the unscrupulous owner, the anarchic
workman, the " radical " Socialist, the propagandist of birth-con-
trol, all those whose teachings and activity are calculated to menace
the order and sap the life of the nation, are put into the category of
" the enemies of our own household." The reader's expectation
of vigorous thought and forceful expression is not disappointed,
the chapters on birth reform and Socialism being especially im-
pressive for their wholesome, plain speaking. At a time like the
present, when those who desire the public welfare, often must ac-
knowledge with pain the public power of wrong-headed leaders of
society, it is good to realize that a man of Colonel Roosevelt's in-
fluence has the sane, constructive attitude toward matters of such
moment.
DUNSANY THE DRAMATIST. By Edward Hale Bierstadt.
Boston: Little, Brown & Co. $1.50 net
There is no doubt that Lord Dunsany is one of the most
gripping and original of contemporary English, or rather Irish-
dramatists; and while Mr. Bierstadt's comments are entertaining
rather than authoritative, the volume will repay perusal. Perhaps
the excellent illustrations, and the analyses of the plots of the vari-
ous plays, make up its chief value ; for the letters which passed be-
tween Lord Dunsany and Mr. Stuart Walker are after all of
very ephemeral interest. There can be no question that the pres-
ent work has been undertaken con amore, and its somewhat rhap-
sodic appreciation is a significant sign of the almost popular esteem
already accorded to Dunsany's exotic genius.
ESSAYS ON THE REFORM AND REVIVAL OF CLASSICAL
STUDIES. By Henry Browne, S. J. New York : Longmans,
Green & Co. $2.60 net.
Father Browne, Professor of Greek in University College,
Dublin, has just published a number of illuminating essays on the
renaissance or revival of classical studies. He maintains that
modern educators, instead of setting aside the classics as antiquated
I9i8.] NEW BOOKS 545
and useless for the modern state, should so teach them that they
become a real contribution to the vital welfare of human society.
From any human standpoint the Greeks were incomparably
the greatest people the world has ever known. Not only did they
have ideals, but they knew how to translate them into reality. Most
men admit the excellence of Greek poetry, drama and sculpture, but
some forget that the Greeks also had a passionate love of freedom
and of citizenship. They were not like the Roman Imperialists, but
they desired a direct and personal share in the government of the
city-state as zealously as any modern democrat. Combine the study
of Democratic Greece with Imperial Rome and you provide at once
a perfect historical discipline for our youth.
A good deal of the modern distrust of the classics comes from
the fact that classical education in the past was lifeless and uninspir-
ing. Father Browne, therefore, pleads for the infusion of new vir-
tues into its teaching methods. He denounces as a deep-rooted
heresy the old view that classical education exists simply for the pur-
pose of strengthening the mechanical powers of the mind, and of im-
parting to it clearness and suppleness in the use of language. This he
tells us implies a total misconception of values, and a confusion of
what is accidental with what is essential. The classical professor
must do more than teach prosodies and vocabularies. He must in-
spire a human and living interest in his work, and teach his pupils
the lessons of the ancients' greatness, nobility and achievements.
Even their vices and deficiencies can be made to point a moral. In
contrast the teacher must point out the weak points of our modern
civilization.
No faculty of learning ought to claim any exclusive right of
recognition. That is the fault of many defenders of scientific edu-
cation since the days of Herbert Spencer. The real scholar does
not belittle any faculty which is truly helpful and progressive.
The last part of this interesting volume is devoted to the edu-
cative value of modern museums, and a good account is given
of the growth and development of them during the past twenty
years both in England and the United States.
ALASKA THE GREAT COUNTRY. By Ella Higginson. New
York: The Macmillan Co. $2.50.
Anyone who has visited Alaska will appreciate the enthusiasm
which colors every page of this delightful volume. It was written
some thirty years ago when this great wonderland was just emerg-
VOL. cvi.— 35
546 NEW BOOKS [Jan.,
ing from the pioneer state, and entering upon its era of rapid indus-
trial development. This new edition leaves the body of the work
intact, merely mentioning in a final chapter the many changes due
to modern commercial, agricultural and railroad development.
The author describes vividly Alaska's many natural beauties of
glacier, waterfall and river, the severe hardships of the early ex-
plorers and colonizers, the indomitable energy of the pioneer build-
ers of the railroads and the government surveyors, the romance of
the hunt for gold, copper and coal, the boundary disputes with Eng-
land, the purchase from Russia, the heroism of our Catholic sisters.
CANADA THE SPELLBINDER. By Lilian Whiting. New
York: E. P. Button & Co. $2.50.
Miss Whiting gives us a perfect picture of Canada from Que-
bec and the Maritime Provinces to Prince Rupert and Vancouver.
In an introductory chapter she gives a brief sketch of the makers of
Canada from the days of Champlain to the days of Sir John Mac-
Donald and Wilfrid Laurier. She lacks great power of descrip-
tion, but to offset this, falls back upon scores of writers and
poets who have written of the scenes she visits in her trip from
coast to coast/ The volume is superbly illustrated in color and
monotone.
THE QUEST OF EL DORADO. By Rev. J. A. Zahm. New York:
D. Appleton & Co. $1.50.
The chapters of this most fascinating volume first appeared in
the Pan-American Bulletin five years ago. They tell of the fruitless
quest of the Conquistadores for the kingdom of El Dorado, the
Gilded King. The same spirit, that draws men of our day to the
gold fields of Alaska or prompts them to hunt for the treasures of
Alaric the Goth or Captain Kidd, urged on these explorers of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These extraordinary expedi-
tions have been barely mentioned by the English writers, yet they
show forth, as nothing else could, the amazing audacity, the match-
less prowess, and the thrilling heroism of the dauntless Belalcazar,
Pizarro, the Quesadas, Ursua, Berrio and Silva.
Some moderns have blamed these explorers for believing the
lying tales of the Indians. But they forget that Cortez learned of
Mexico City from an Indian, as likewise Balboa learned of the
Pacific. Men were prepared for the marvelous in that age of great
discoveries.
1918.] NEW BOOKS 547
Father Zahm maintains that the prime motive of the Spaniards
was not a thirst for gold, but a love of glory and a sense of patri-
otism which impelled them to make sacrifices and to undertake
enterprises before which even the bravest men of today would re-
coil with horror.
The narrative is illustrated with a number of engravings of
De Bry, Colijn and Gottfriedt, which their contemporaries accepted
strangely enough as perfect representations of the objects por-
trayed.
VARIOUS DISCOURSES. By Rev. T. J. Campbell, SJ. New
York: Joseph F. Wagner. $2.00 net.
These twenty-five discourses are, as Father Campbell tell us,
" the remnants of thirty-five years of pulpit and platform work.
There are no sermons among them, properly so-called, though sev-
eral of them have been delivered in churches or at religious gather-
ings." They are a fitting memorial of the author's fiftieth anniver-
sary in the Society of Jesus. He treats of the higher education of
women, Jesuit education, the only true American school system ; the
life of Father Rasle, Jean Nicolet and Leo XIII.; marriage, Social-
ism, and the establishment of the American hierarchy.
Readers of THE CATHOLIC WORLD will appreciate his tribute
to Father Hecker. Father Campbell says : " No one who ever
looked upon this man of noble mien with head erect, his kindly face
illumined by the sunlight of affection for all mankind, could ever
doubt that he was a leader of men. You felt that he himself was
conscious of the power he possessed, and exulted in it, without the
slightest trace of self-seeking or pride. His sacerdotal zeal was a
fire that consumed him; a spark running through the reeds to set,
if possible, the world aflame."
i
A SCALLOP SHELL OF QUIET. With an Introduction by Mar-
garet L. Woods. Oxford : B. H. Blackwell. 60 cents net.
In England, since the outbreak of the War, there has been a
quite noteworthy revival of interest in poetry that has extended over
a wide area and even as far afield as the soldiers in the trenches.
One of the signs of this revival is the large number of books of
verse put on the market, and though the vast majority of the poets
are distinctly of the minor variety, their mere multiplicity is a sure
evidence of the old fact that song is the natural medium of expres-
sion in times of great spiritual and emotional stress.
548 NEW BOOKS [Jan.,
The present little booklet is No. XII. in the " Adventurers All "
series, the object of which is to present to the public the work of
the younger poets as yet unknown to fame and to remove from poetry
the reproach of insolvency. A Scallop Shell of Quiet is made up of
contributions from four women poets — Enid Dinnis, Helen Doug-
las-Irvine, Gertrude Vaughan and Ruth Young — and its chief char-
acteristic is the grave note of spirituality running through the various
pieces. This is particularly so in the case of Miss Dinnis, whose
verses are of a definitely religious and Catholic cast. The love-
lyric, usually so strong a favorite with women poets, is here, as
Miss Woods points out in her introduction, remarkable for its
absence. All the poems have a certain freshness of appeal, but as
a whole they do not achieve success and none reaches an exalted
level of expression. Their failure is rather on the side of execu-
tion than of emotion or thought. The Sisters of Perpetual Adora-
tion is the most satisfying poem in the book.
A HARMONY OF THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS. By Ernest De-
Witt Burton and Edgar Johnson Goodspeed. New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons. $1.25.
This book is interesting to the Catholic chiefly for the insight
it gives into the Biblical teaching of the Chicago University, and
the self-satisfied way that Professors Burton and Goodspeed put
forth their unproved hypotheses regarding the Synoptic Gospels
and their literary sources. We notice that The Harmony of the Four
Gospels published by Professor Burton in 1894 has become A Har-
mony of the Synoptic Gospels, because, in the interim, the Fourth
Gospel has been rejected as unhistorical by the " Higher Critics!"
A YOUNG LION OF FLANDERS. By J. Van Ammers Kueller.
New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co. $1.50 net.
The author tells us she has written this " Tale of the Terror
of War " in order that her two young sons, as they grow
up, may realize the anguish and devastation wrought by the
great conflict, especially upon family life, not only physically but, to
an equal extent, spiritually, subjecting domestic relations to a miser-
able strain in cases where the units are of different nationalities
and sympathies, and exacting, as the price of allegiance, unprece-
dented sorrow and desolation. It is, however, no plea for pacifism
that Madame Kueller presents ; every line is instinct with the spirit
of martyred Belgium, calling for the willing sacrifice of life and
1918.] NEW BOOKS 549
all that makes it dear, that the spectre of war may be laid, to rise
no more. The author follows the fortunes of a family group, so
far as is compatible with vividly picturing general conditions and
concentrating interest upon one of its members, the " young
lion," Leon Casimir. He is a boy scout, who refuses to be with-
held from the strife, in which he plays a gallant part; as a bearer
of dispatches he has many adventures, and finally distinguishes
himself by tearing down the German banner from the tower of
Marbeke, and substituting for it the flag of Belgium.
It is not exclusively juvenile readers who will be held by this
stirring story, of which the translation is exceptionally fluent and
satisfactory. In spirit and execution the work is of a character
to make it altogether fitting that its illustrations should be by Louis
Raemaekers.
THE WATER BABIES. By Charles Kingsley. With illustrations
in Color by Maria L. Kirk. Philadelphia : J. B. Lippincott Co.
$1.35 net.
That long-lived and popular tale of Tom, the chimney sweep,
and his submarine adventures has just reappeared in handsome form
to introduce another generation of children to the wonders of the
world of living things beneath the surface of the waters. Written
for a real boy-baby by his father, and told with all the charm that
experience and a rare gift enabled that father to impart to tales of
nature's marvels, the story is as attractive to children of the present
day as it was when first published some fifty years ago. Binding,
letter-press, and illustrations combine to make this new edition a
fine gift book.
THE RUBY CROSS. By Mary Wallace. New York : Benziger
Brothers. $1.25 net.
David Beresford, younger brother of Judge Beresford, having
sowed a bountiful crop of the traditional wind, seeks to shift on the
other shoulders the inevitable reaping of the whirlwind. He aban-
dons his wife and child; but later when riches come to them, he
tries to lay hands on it. The young wife, however, has found a
friend in the strong-willed, clear-headed Anne Holloway, and event-
ually the war for the coveted securities resolves itself into a bitter
conflict between Anne and David. The good name of a thought-
less impulsive girl, Rosalie, whose soul is very dear to Anne,
happens to be at the mercy of young Beresford, and he
550 NEW BOOKS [Jan.,
quickly seizes on the chance to force Anne to surrender. How he
was foiled; how the guilt of his youth, for which the innocent
Johnnie Ward had suffered unto death, was revealed; how he was
brought to repentance ; and how the Catholic faith came at last into
the household of the Beresfords again — all this is told with a good
deal of well managed dramatic suspense.
THE SORRY TALE. By Patience Worth. Edited by Casper S.
Yost. New York: Henry Holt & Co. $1.90.
According to Mr. Yost, the editor of the St. Louis Globe
Democrat, this strange tale purports to have been dictated by Pa-
tience Worth through the ouija board to Mrs. Curran of St. Louis.
From three hundred to five thousand words were dictated at a
sitting, and some two hundred and sixty persons were present as
witnesses or aids of Mrs. Curran in transcribing the words of the
medium.
This tale of the Christ is not in the least impressive. It is con-
cerned chiefly with the tedious life history of Hatte, an illegitimate
son of Tiberius Caesar, who dies in the end as the thief on the
cross. We defy the normal man to wade through these incoherent,
sensuous, badly-written pages without throwing the volume aside
in utter disgust. Its sole interest lies in its much advertised and
to our mind spurious origin.
THE PARISH THEATRE. By John Talbot Smith, LL.D. New
York: Longmans, Green & Co. $1.00 net.
We predict a heavy demand for this practical and valuable
little book. For a good many years Father Smith has been the
foremost Catholic spokesman- for the drama in America. He has
made a study of the stage and its mission, and has done more than
any other man to encourage Catholic dramatic art in the United
States. His writings have educated a large public to measure the
productions of the theatre by the standards of Christian truth and
purity. There is no one in the country interested in the stage —
actor, manager, playwright, or theatregoer — who does not owe a
debt to Father Smith. And now he has put under obligation a still
larger public — priests, pastors, nuns, brothers, religious and laity —
all who are interested in parish dramatics or the multifarious prob-
lems of parochial entertainments, benefits, and so on. In The
Parish Theatre he discusses from a practical standpoint the presen-
tation of those plays and other forms of stage entertainment which
1918.] NEW BOOKS 55*
form a large part of the activities of hundreds of people in scores
of parishes all over the land. " With three thousand parish halls
giving at least four plays a year," as Father Smith remarks, there
can be no doubt about the Parish Theatre being a very real and
lively actuality. How to organize this vigorous phenomenon, how
to bend its efforts to the most fruitful ends, how to conserve it and
develop it to greater achievements — these are the points discussed
by Father Smith. His brief chapters on the rise of the Parish
Theatre, its present conditions, and its prospects, will be eagerly
read by large numbers of our parochial leaders; and in this handy
volume they will find all this interesting information richly sup-
plemented by a descriptive list of one hundred choice plays suitable
for parish production, every one of which has been tested by ex-
perience. If the publication of this book does not give a strong
new impulse to the Parish Theatre, we are much mistaken.
CHILDREN'S BOOK OF PATRIOTIC STORIES. Edited by Asa
Don Dickinson and Helen Winslow Dickinson. Garden City,
New York: Doubleday, Page & Co. $1.25 net.
Especially appropriate and timely in this crisis of the nation's
history is this publication for children of varying ages. The con-
tent is made up of reprints of writings that have received the stamp
of approval from discriminating readers. Some are fiction, some
are extracts from histories, and all are concerned entirely with the
Revolutionary period, for it is the avowed purpose of the compila-
tion to keep alive in young hearts the " spirit of '76." The work
of selection has been well done, and the book may be recommended
for juvenile libraries, public or private.
CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE. By James J. Walsh,
M.D., LL.D. Third Series. Philadelphia: The Dolphin
Press. $1.00.
This is a neat little volume, the third of a uniform series deal-
ing with the work of Catholic churchmen in science. In the intro-
duction, as also throughout the volume, Dr. Walsh reminds us that
science was the basis of education in the much despised Middle
Ages, and that the classics, as the great element of culture, are only
in prominence since the impetus given them by the Renaissance.
He combats the idea that the Catholic Church is the enemy of
science by showing first that the Popes have been steadfast and con-
tinuous in their support of scientific research, and then by adducing
552 NEW BOOKS [Jan.,
five great scholars who were churchmen and scientists — Roger
Bacon, Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, Abbe Spallanzani, Abbe Breuil
and Father Obermaier.
Dr. Walsh reviews not the biography of these men, but the chief
characteristics of their life work. The last two are of our own
day, and stand conspicuous for their revelations of the cave men,
their art and their place and time in history. Spallanzani is her-
alded as the precursor of Pasteur by reason of his far-reaching
studies in regeneration. Cardinal Nicholas " represents one of the
important links in that chain from the thirteenth century scientists
to the Renaissance time which culminated in Copernicus' revolu-
tionary theory and the beginning of modern astronomy." The dis-
cussion of the diversely fertile work of Bacon follows the line of the
great celebration at Oxford in 1914.
This volume is a valued contribution to Catholic literature,
commended to both clergy and laity.
MANNA OF THE SOUL. A Book of Prayer for Men and Women.
Extra Large Type Edition. Compiled by Rev. F. X. Las-
ance. New York: Benziger Brothers. $i.25-$2.75 according
to binding.
This new prayer-book was prepared for the use of all persons,
young and old, who either because of poor eyesight, or on account
of the dim lighting of some churches, feel the need of larger print
than that usually found in prayer-books. The book is handsome,
complete without being bulky, and will prove acceptable to many
readers. The prayers are drawn largely from the liturgy and from
the indulgenced prayers of " The Raccolta." With excellent judg-
ment, the compiler has included the Requiem Mass as said on the
day of burial ; also the Marriage Service and the Nuptial Mass.
LONG LIVE THE KING. By Mary Roberts Rinehart. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Co. $1.50 net.
This stirring story of the intrigues of a Catholic court, some-
where in Europe, will be read with pleasure by young and old. Its
hero, the Crown Prince Ferdinand William Otto, is a real live boy,
bored to death with the burdens of an exacting royal etiquette, and
longing with all his soul for freedom from tutor and from gov-
erness. Despite the strictest vigilance he manages to make friends
with another real boy from the United States, and is initiated into
all the joys and privileges of real childhood. The hero's favorite,
1918.] NEW BOOKS 553
the dashing young officer Nikky, wins the hand of the princess in
spite of every obstacle, and the plots of the rebels are frustrated
through the people's love for their endearing boy prince. It is a
bright, clean, entertaining novel.
THE PROPHECY OF MICAH. By Arthur J. Tait, D.D. New
York : Charles Scribner's Sons. 75 cents.
It is a relief to find a work that exhibits clear and definite
Christian principles, delivered with strength and conviction. This
little book of Dr. Tait's is a popular exposition of a great prophet of
Israel, although he is styled a minor prophet. It is not a com-
mentary and does not aim to discuss the difficulties of the prophecy ;
but keeping to the main lines of thought in the sacred writer, it
develops them clearly and makes them luminous in the light of
Hebrew and Christian truth. There is in this book a breadth of
handling and a vigorous mastery rarely found; it is well balanced
and sensible and filled with the thought of a personal, loving God,
and of the realization of His divine plan in the Incarnate Son.
THE EXPOSITORY VALUE OF THE REVISED VERSION.
By George Milligan, D.D. New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons. 75 cents.
This work belongs to the Short Course Series of popular reli-
gious books. It tells once more the oft-told story of the English
Bible, nor does it omit the usual strong Protestant bias. Its chief
aim, successfully fulfilled, is to show how the Revised Version
of 1 88 1 brings out more clearly and correctly the meaning of the
original. It deals only with the New Testament, although the
title would include both the Old and New. The Revised Version
is already justified at the bar of science, and Dr. Milligan exhibits
some of its claims. The book is useful, but contains little that is
noteworthy. Its scholarly author would have done better had he
omitted the commonplace history which did not belong strictly to
his subject, and expanded his real theme which is both interesting
and important.
THE MEDIATOR. By Rev. Peter Geiermann, C.SS.R. St. Louis:
B. Herder. $1.50 net.
We have many excellent volumes in English on the priesthood
by Cardinal Manning, Canon Keating and others. But Father
Geiermann has made a worthy addition to them by his new treatise
554 NEW BOOKS [Jan.,
which portrays Jesus Christ in the Scriptures as the model of the
priest. As a book of spiritual reading it is invaluable, bringing out
clearly all the qualities that go to make a devout, zealous and ef-
fective " good shepherd " of souls.
THE MARTYR OF FUTUNA. Blessed Peter Chanel of the So-
ciety of Mary. From the French by Florence Gilmore. Mary-
knoll, Ossining P. O., N. Y. Catholic Foreign Mission So-
ciety. $1.00.
This simple life of Blessed Peter Chanel will do much to
arouse enthusiasm for foreign missions, and, we trust, will lead
many an American youth to work in the " Field Afar." The martyr
of Futuna was at first a parish priest of Crozet, a little village
near Geneva in the Jura mountains. He joined the Marists, and
spent some years as superior of the preparatory seminary of Belley.
Feeling the call of the missions he left for Oceania in 1836, and in
a brief ministry of three years, won, after incredible hardships, the
crown of martyrdom in the little island of Futuna.
His murderer, Musumusu, became a convert, and the island
today is entirely Catholic. It has five priests and several native
nuns. The blood of Blessed Chanel has indeed been the seed of
many fervent Christians.
PROLEGOMENA TO AN EDITION OF THE WORKS OF DECI-
MUS MAGNUS AUSONIUS. By Sister Maria Jose Byrne,
Ph.D. New York: Columbia University Press. $1.25.
This scholarly volume was presented to Columbia for the
doctorate by Sister Marie Byrne, Professor of Latin in the College
of St. Elizabeth. Its five chapters treat of "the life of Ausonius, his
friends and correspondence, his works, the history of the text,
metre and prosody.
Ausonius was a fourth century rhetorician and poet, the son
of a physician of Bordeaux. He taught in that city for thirty
years, and like many professors of his day practised law. He be-
came tutor of the Emperor Valentinian's son, Gratian, in 365, and
held a number of political offices including the consulship (379), of
which he was most proud. It is generally believed that Ausonius
became a Christian at the time of his court connection, but he was
never more than a nominal one. The spirit of paganism domi-
nates all his work, the few references to Christianity being mostly
for effect or prettiness.
1918.] NEW BOOKS 555
As a poet he does not rank high. His work is imitative, in-
genious, filled with erudite allusions, and largely devoted to trivial
themes. He was more of a rhetorician than a poet. He was very
well read in all the Greek and Latin authors of antiquity, and quotes
and paraphrases them in page after page of his work. He numbers
among his friends the most eminent statesmen and the most famous
literary men of his age.
MARTIE THE UNCONQUERED. By Kathleen Norris. Garden
City, New York: Doubleday, Page & Co. $1.35 net.
Mrs. Norris' novel will give transient entertainment to the
general reader, but it is not memorable. Her heroine, Martie, en-
ters womanhood handicapped by an indifferent upbringing, makes
the mistakes natural to ignorance, self-will and impulsiveness, en-
dures several years of marriage with an intemperate actor, and is
left a widow, in poverty, with a young child to support. From this
time circumstances take a more friendly turn, so much so as to de-
preciate the book's rather flamboyant title; for it is more by happy
fortune than inherent force of character that, through a newly dis-
covered talent for writing, we leave her making her living, and
with an outlook toward the future of pleasurable anticipation. The
book is readable, and much of it is well written; but it fails to
carry out the author's evident intention to picture the triumph of
a dauntless spirit over adverse conditions.
A MONG the books produced by the demands of the War we
>*•*• have a compendium of Army and Navy Information, by
Major De Witt Clinton Falls, N.G.N.Y. (New York : E. P. Button
& Co. $1.00.) It gives in handy form the uniforms, organi-
zation, arms and equipment of all the warring powers, fully illus-
trated by line cuts and color plates. This timely and useful little
reference book is something no one can afford to do without today.
We also recommend from the same publishers, Hospital
French (25 cents net), a handbook for doctors and nurses working
in the Base Hospitals in France. By means of this ingenious sys-
tem of questions, arranged by the Base Hospital Division of the
New York County Chapter of the American Red Cross and trans-
lated into French by Ernest Perrin, an English-speaking doctor and
a French patient or a French doctor and an English-speaking pa-
tient may arrive at perfect mutual understanding without an in-
terpreter or any further knowledge of the other's language.
556 NEW BOOKS [Jan.,
Another excellent French manual for the use ot our men
" somewhere in France," is The Soldiers' English and French Con-
versation Book, by Walter M. Gallichan ( Philadelphia : J. B. Lippin-
cott Co.). The sentences are arranged according to the situation in
which a man may find himself: landing; marching; traveling;
camping; billeting, etc. Money, weights and measures and military
terms, also a general vocabulary of useful words are added to these
specialized conversations, forming an invaluable aid to the man who
has neither the time nor the taste for French grammar.
Of rather wider range is The Soldier's Service Dictionary of
English and French words and phrases, edited by Frank H. Vize-
telly, LittD., LL.D. (New York: Funk & Wagnalls Co. $1.00 net).
Not only will this little book serve the soldier, but it may be recom-
mended to anyone needing a dictionary of modern war terms. It is
khaki bound and of convenient size.
IN The What? Why? How? Plan for Writing an Essay, pub-
lished by the Educational Company of Ireland (Dublin and Bel-
fast), Rev. John B. Murphy outlines a clear and simple method for
teachers and pupils to follow in the study of English composition.
Father Murphy resolves the whole thing to a technical skeleton
which the dullest student can instantly comprehend. His plan is a
plea for clarity of thought and expression; and he follows its
outline with a series of forty-eight specimen sketch essays which
will prove helpful in the class-room or for home work.
IN its second booklet of the Soldiers' and Sailors' series, the G. R.
C. Central Society of St. Louis offers to the Christian warrior Joy
(5 cents) " as a sure charm against the many foes of the spirit."
The little treatise breathes the true Catholic spirit, and has a
message for more than the men of the service for whom it is pa-
triotically intended.
IN The Soldiers' and Sailors' Prayer and Song Book ( Baltimore :
John Murphy Co. 10 cents), Rev. Albert L. Smith combines
short prayers for morning and evening, Mass, etc., with hymns,
national and popular songs. The uniquely excellent features of
the little book are the words of address by His Eminence Cardinal
Gibbons, and the short " Scripture Readings," on " Christ,"
" Prayer," " The Sea," " War," " Victory " and " Peace."
IRecent Events.
A momentous event which has taken place
Turkey. in the past month, one which will appeal
most to the sentiments of the Christian
world, is the fall of Jerusalem after it had been for six hundred
and seventy-three years under the domination of Turkey. No
event was more unexpected when the War was first entered upon,
and nothing so unlocked for as the freeing of the Holy Land from
the cross of Ottoman tyranny. It has always been a reproach to
Christians that the scene of Our Lord's Crucifixion should be dese-
crated by the unbelievers and the fierce enemies of Christianity.
Between 1096 and 1270 the Christians had striven in seven differ-
ent expeditions to capture the city, and had succeeded once in tak-
ing it and holding it for a comparatively long period. Then they
lost it; and held it again only twice and for very short periods.
Since 1244 it has been without interruption in possession of the
enemies of Christ. Now it has been recaptured. Whether it will
be held finally and forever by Christians depends upon the result
6i the War, and its fate will be decided in the fields of France.
The Holy Father has condemned any attempt on the part of Catho-
lic nations to assist in its recapture by the Turks.
The capture by the British of the Holy City was made pos-
sible because the plans of the Turks and Germans to invade Egypt
had failed. The German force which overran Serbia was called
" the Army of Egypt," and it was confidently asserted that after
this army had conquered Serbia, it would march upon Egypt and
seize the Suez Canal. The Triumvirate which at that time domi-
nated Turkey had set its heart upon restoring Egypt to the Otto-
man domination. The Army of Egypt succeeded in making two
attacks which proved to be futile, and the British army in Egypt
instead of contenting itself with defending that country, assumed
the offensive, built a railway across the desert of Sinai, and grad-
ually pushed the Turkish army back until it reached Gaza and
Beersheba. Here their advance was stayed for a long time. A new
general was sent out from England to take the place of the former
commander. After a good deal of delay devoted to making prepa-
rations, General Allenby, the new commander, finally again took
the offensive and advanced rapidly, taking Gaza, Jaffa and the rail-
558 RECENT EVENTS [Jan.,
way leading to Jerusalem, and succeeded in pushing northeast-
wardly, so as almost to surround Jerusalem. It was expected that
von Falkenhayn might make a great effort to stay the British ad-
vance, but that expectation was not fulfilled and the British by the
use of the bayonet, without cannonading the city, drove the Turks
out of Jerusalem. This entrance might have been made with less
loss to the attacking forces, had it not been for the fixed determina-
tion of the British commander not to use artillery against this city,
which contained the sacred place of Our Lord's death,
and so many other shrines venerated by all Christians, and it may
be said also by the Mussulmans.
This event took place December loth. General Allenby en-
tered the city on foot, with bared head, attended by his staff, and
the commanders of the French and Italian detachments. From
this it appears that the credit of the capture was not exclusively
due to the British forces, inasmuch as French and Italian soldiers
took part. In addition to these the General was accompanied by
the heads of political missions and the military attaches of France,
Italy and of this country. General Allenby was received at the
gates of the city by guards, representing England, Scotland, Ire-
land, Wales, Australia, New Zealand, India, France and Italy. The
flag of Great Britain was thrown over the citadel and in London,
for the first time since the beginning of the War, the bells of
the Catholic Cathedral, at Westminster, were rung and a Te Deum
was sung in honor of the momentous event.
The future course of General Allenby is not yet disclosed.
Whether he will proceed towards the north to cut off the Turkish
supplies to Aleppo, or whether he will push eastward across the
Jordan to cut the railway which leads to the holy place of Islam,
thereby isolating the Turkish forces in Arabia who are fighting
for the regaining of the Turkish holy places, is not yet known.
For something like a year, von Falkenhayn, it is said, has been
drilling and organizing an army for the purpose of recovering Bag-
dad, the city of the Caliphs, which the British seized several months
ago. The capture of this city was almost as great a blow to
Turkish prestige as was that of Jerusalem, and, it may be added, to
German prestige also, because Bagdad was the terminus of the
railway which the Germans had hoped would be the means of
destroying British influence and trade in the region of the Persian
Gulf, and even perhaps of India itself. Not only has Bagdad been
captured by the British, but they have advanced north for a hundred
1918.] RECENT EVENTS 559
miles, up the Tigris, on the way to Mosul. Latest accounts say
that General von Falkenhayn has made his first move to recapture
Bagdad, with what success is not yet known. The recent opera-
tions of Great Britain, however, in Turkey have resulted in Great
Britain's obtaining possession of the sea gates of the Turkish em-
pire.
The death of General Maude, the only one of all the British
generals who, it may be said, has been uniformly successful, is to
be regretted. His successor has not yet proved his capacity. This
will doubtless be revealed in a very short time, if the report of the
German offensive be true.
In the text of one of the secret treaties be-
Belgium. tween Great Britain, France, Russia and
Italy, as given out by the Bolshevik Gov-
ernment, it was disclosed that " France, Great Britain and Russia
take upon themselves to support Italy in her disallowing representa-
tives of the Holy See to take any diplomatic steps for the conclu-
sion of peace, or regarding matters pertaining to the present War."
Whether the text thus made public is authoritative or not is still
a question. Lord Robert Cecil, British Minister of Blockade, de-
nied in the House of Commons on December 6th that " England
or France has entered into any treaty or understanding to support
Italy against the Holy See, if the Holy See attempted to take any
steps towards peace." The Osservatore Romano stated that such
a treaty between Italy and the Allies was known to the Vatican,
but that it would reserve discussion of it for a later day.
In view of all this, it may be well to review what action the
Holy Father has taken, and what declarations he has made with
reference to the treatment of Belgium by the Germans.
On January 22, 1915, Benedict XV. addressed an Allocution
to His Cardinals in Consistory. In the course of it, he said:
" Whilst not inclining to either party in the struggle, we occupy
Ourselves equally on behalf of both; and at the same time we fol-
low with anxiety and anguish the awful phases of this War, and
even fear that sometimes the violence of attack exceeded all meas-
ure. We are struck with the respectful attachment to the common
Father of the faithful; an example of which is seen in regard to
Our beloved people of Belgium, as referred to in the letter which
We recently addressed to the Cardinal Archbishop of Malines."
For anyone who may think these utterances of His Holiness
56o RECENT EVENTS [Jan.,
too vague, the letter which Cardinal Gasparri sent to the Archbishop
of Paris gives to them point and precision : " The violation of the
neutrality of Belgium, carried out by Germany, on the admission of
her own Chancellor, contrary to international law, was certainly
one of ' those injustices' which the Holy Father in his Consis-
torial Allocution of January 226. strongly reprobates!" From
this it is clear that the Holy Father has condemned Germany's
action as unjust and a violation of international law.
Of the Holy Father's address to the Consistory, Cardinal Gas-
parri has given the above cited, authoritative explanation, an ex-
planation which concurs with that of an influential German news-
paper : " The one belligerent power against which the Vatican has
officially spoken is Germany." The Hamburg Fremdenblatt thereby
endorses the interpretation of the Holy Father's address, which
was given by the Secretary of State, Cardinal Gasparri, and rec-
ognizes the condemnation which it affords of German violation of
Belgian neutrality. No other neutral power except the Vatican,
has officially censured the violation of Belgian neutrality. To the
affirmation, made by a newspaper correspondent, who had been
vouchsafed an interview with His Holiness, that the British block-
ade was to be condemned, Cardinal Gasparri made an emphatic
denial and said that the Holy Father had never given utterance to
such condemnation. In denial of a second assertion of the same
newspaper correspondent, the Pope in an interview with another
correspondent, declared : " At the beginning of the bombardment of
the Cathedral of Rheims We charged the Cardinal Archbishop of
Cologne to convey Our protest to the German Emperor," and he
added : " I condemn strongly the martyrdom of the poor Belgian
priests and so many other horrors on which light has been cast."
Thus it is clear that the Holy Father reprobates German ac-
tion in Belgium. His Holiness also condemned aerial bombard-
ments on open towns and cities on the occasion of the bombardment
by the Austrians of Padua, and he proceeded to express his reproba-
tion of all such bombardments : " by whomsoever they are com-
mitted." This condemnation more nearly affected Austria than
any other State.
The Holy Father's reprobation includes the deportations of
which Germany has been guilty. His protest, however, has been in-
ineffectual, for out of sixty thousand who suffered in this unjust
way, His Holiness was able to secure the return of only thirteen
thousand.
1918.] RECENT EVENTS 561
These facts prove that the Holy Father has censured the Ger-
man invasion of Belgium; that he protested against the bombard-
ment of the Rheims Cathedral as a sacrilege; pointedly refused to
judge the British blockade on Germany; reprobated aerial bom-
bardments of open towns and secured the release of some of the
victims of the Belgian deportations, and that His Holiness has
gone to the limit to which any neutral power could go, and beyond
that to which any neutral power has gone. The effect of this ac-
tion of the Holy Father has caused German writers to criticize him
for not supporting the German peace offers, for declining to excuse
the infractions of canon law, committed by German prelates in the
occupied territories; and for showing in his general policy an undue
affection for Italy. By refusing to give countenance to a congress
which it was to assemble at Zurich for the purpose of obtaining the
Holy Father's approval of Germany's methods, he deprived that
congress of all authority and frustrated its objects.
Unwarranted criticisms of the Holy See are now and again
published, but even writers outside the Church are beginning to see
that : " The Roman Pontiff is the supreme head of a great religious
communion, the members of which live dispersed among all the
nations of the earth. There is no state of any importance today
which does not count numerous Roman Catholics among its sub-
jects. It follows that if the Pope in policy or war were to support
any one Power or group of Powers against their opponents, he
would be favoring one section of the Church at the expense of
another.
" It can scarcely, therefore, need argument to prove that at
all times political neutrality is required of the Holy See, on grounds
of elementary justice, not to say necessity."
The Ministry formed by M. Clemenceau
France. received a vote of confidence from the
French Assembly by a majority of four
hundred and eighteen to sixty-five. The speech of the Premier
gave a clear indication not only of what was to be the policy
of the Government towards the enemy in front of the French
lines, but also its policy towards the enemy behind those lines.
The line of this enemy is perhaps as dangerous to the countries at
war with Germany as is Germany's army. It stretches from one
end of the world to the other, as we have experienced in
our own country even before the United States declared war on
VOL. cvi.— 36
562 RECENT EVENTS [Jan.,
Germany. It showed itself by the destruction of ships, and muni-
tion works, by fomenting labor troubles and secret propaganda.
Of its strength and potency, proofs have been seen in Russia and,
later still, in Italy. Of the same malevolent activity France has
been within the last few months a victim. " No more pacifist cam-
paigns, no more German intrigues, no treason nor semi-treason.
War, nothing but war " said M. Clemenceau in the exposition of
his policy before the Assembly. This reference to pacifists and
German intrigues refers to the propaganda of Bolo Pasha which
has now been proved to have been financed by Germany, with large
sums of money. It had among other objects the exciting of distrust
among the French people and the French soldiers in the good-will
' and good faith of her British ally. The campaign was so success-
ful as to involve M. Malvy, the Minister of the Interior. Within
the last few days, further disclosures have been made of their
extent. M. Joseph Caillaux is now on the point of being tried for
what amounts to treason in the same connection, for being more or
less involved in Bolo Pasha's attempts to weaken the French re-
sistance to Germany. M. Caillaux is accused of having gone so
far as to have entered into negotiations with Germany to make
peace with France, and to treat France's ally, Great Britain, as the
common enemy of the two countries. A treaty is said to have been
made to that effect. Efforts were made by him in Italy also to de-
tach her from the Allies. Such charges were made after an investi-
gation by a committee of the House of Deputies, and it is likely
that M. Caillaux will be put upon trial. It is fair to say that he in-
dignantly denies what is charged against him ; and it would indeed
be an ominous sign if the ex-Premier of France and the head of
the largest political party should have gone so far in serving the
enemy's interests. However, it has long been known that he has
been of all the politicians in France the chief one who has actively
furthered Germany's interests. Evidence of this was seen in the
Agadir negotiations in 1911.
The seriousness of the situation may be seen from the utter-
ances of M. Clemenceau : " We come before you with the sole idea
of an integral war We shall not resort to violence. All the
accused before court martials — that is our policy No more
pacifist campaigns, no more German intrigues, no treason nor
semi-treason. War, nothing but war. Our armies shall not be
taken between two fires. Justice is on the way. The country will
know that it is defended and is a France forever free."
I9i8.] RECENT EVENTS 563
The secret of the fall of M. Painleve's cabinet is revealed in
these utterances of M. Clemenceau. M. Painleve was afraid that
division would be caused by a strong policy against these in-
triguers. M. Clemenceau on the contrary thinks that severe meas-
ures will promote unity.
So many councils have been formed since
Means to Pro- the last notes were written that it may be
mote Unity. well to enumerate them and describe as
far as possible their objects. The first, if
it may be called a council at all, is the formation of a war com-
mittee to direct the War, which followed upon the disaster in Italy.
One representative from each of the armies of Great Britain, France
and Italy, one of whom is General C.adorna, now meet daily to
direct or to advise upon the active operations that are being con-
ducted on what is now the single front which stretches from the
British Channel to the Adriatic. Its object is to secure unity of ac-
tion in the armies there day by day.
The second council, which has the name of the Inter-Allied
War Council, consists of one representative of all the Allied coun-
tries with technical advisers drawn from all the Allied armies. Its
object is to help the various governments to coordinate their efforts.
Its advantage is that the information which is at the disposal of
each of the Allied staffs would then be at the disposal of this cen-
tral council. It is to be a permanent body to bring about that unity
which, notwithstanding the many conferences held and the various
means taken, has proved impossible so far.
Mr. Lloyd George in his Paris speech gave many instances
of the misfortunes that have resulted from unconnected action.
For example, if such action had been possible, Germany's way
through the Balkans might have been blocked, and on the other
hand the movement of Italy towards Vienna by way of Leibach,
which her troops so nearly approached, might have been effected.
The council, however, has no executive powers, as many in this
country wished it to have, but is only an advisory council, advising
the representative governments as to the operations which seem de-
sirable. Should this council fail, another means of achieving unity
which has been discussed may be adopted, that is to say, the ap-
pointment of one generalissimo over all the Allied armies. This
proposal, however, has been dismissed for the time being, as
likely to produce even greater difficulties.
564 RECENT EVENTS [Jan.,
It is to this council that the President referred in his speech
at Buffalo, when he said that he was taking the best measures to
secure peace by sending a representative to a war council. Of this
council and its first meeting Colonel House said, upon his return,
that the word peace was not uttered either officially or unofficially
during his twenty-eight days in Europe. All discussion was di-
rected toward a speeding-up of the War. Complete agreement, the
Colonel said, had been achieved. The morale of the French and
British people has never been better.
A third council, which is to meet permanently in London, has
been formed, the objects of which, so far as the writer knows, have
not been disclosed. Yet another council, the fourth, has been
formed for bringing about unity between the navies of the nations
that are at war against Germany, and to unify all their efforts.
This council is to meet in London, and its objects are so clear as
not to need further specification.
Yet a fifth council was to have been held,
Allied War Aims on the demand of the new Government in
and Peace Talk. Russia, for the purpose of defining finally
and precisely the war aims of the Al-
lies. At present there seems no prospect of such a council being
held since Russia has no longer any right to expect an answer hav-
ing, according to the latest news, acted in disunion from them,
and formed an armistice with Germany, preparatory to entering into
peace negotiations. But the war aims of the Allies have been
clearly enough indicated, both by this country, by England and with
less precision, but not with less determination, by the Premiers of
France and of Italy. This country's war aims were placed clearly
before the world in the President's address at the opening of the
second session of the sixty-sixth Congress, at the beginning
of last month. In the address the President declares that
" our object is, of course, to win the war, and we shall not slacken
or suffer ourselves to be diverted until it is won. . . . (The American
people) desire peace by the overcoming of evil, by the defeat once
for all of the sinister forces that interrupt peace and render it impos-
sible, and they wish to know how closely our thought runs with
theirs and what action we propose. They are impatient with those
who desire peace by any sort of compromise — deeply and indig-
nantly impatient (Our objects are) First, that this intolerable
thing of which masters of Germany have shown us the ugly face,
1918.] RECENT EVENTS 565
this menace of combined intrigue and force, which we now see so
clearly as the German power, a thing without conscience or honor
or capacity for covenanted peace, must be crushed, and if it be not
utterly brought to an end, at least shut out from the friendly inter-
course of the nations; and, second, that when this thing and its
power are indeed defeated and the time comes that we can discuss
peace — when the German people have spokesmen whose word we
can believe, and when those spokesmen are ready in the name of
their people to accept the common judgment of the nations as to
what shall henceforth be the bases of law and of covenant for the
life of the world — we shall be willing and glad to pay the full
price for peace and pay it ungrudgingly " The President
while disclaiming vindictive action of every kind, and accepting
the formula " no annexations, no contributions, no punitive in-
demnities," proceeds to explain in what sense he accepts that for-
mula, as not excluding the reestablishment of the rights of the
small nations in every particular, and leaving to all peoples the
right to control their own destinies. After enumerating what is
necessary to be accomplished before peace is made, he reaffirms the
demands which the United States will make on Germany, which
while they disclaim any interference in the internal affairs of Ger-
many, practically demand that the people of Germany shall have
political control of their country, a demand which, in fact, is more
extreme than any demand put forth by any of the Allied powers.
On the other hand, the President's demands on Austria are less than
those which have been made by some of the other powers, for he
disclaims any intention of disrupting Austria-Hungary into the
various states or the various nationalities of which the Dual Mon-
archy is composed.
The President's address has been adopted by France and Great
Britain and Italy in substance, but without any very clear declara-
tion. On the other hand, for the first time in the history of the
War, a statesman of note has raised the question of peace in Great
Britain. Lord Lansdowne, in a letter, urged upon the people of
England the consideration of a more particular declaration of their
war aims, indicating a fear that revolutionary movements might
follow on account of the continued indefiniteness. He declared
that the peace movement in Germany is strong, and growing
stronger, but might receive a set-back if a war d I'outrance contin-
ued. The letter created quite a surprise, coming from a statesman
of his character and familiarity with foreign affairs, but it does not
566 RECENT EVENTS
seem to have produced much effect so far, as Mr. Lloyd George
re-declared British aims in favor of a knock-out blow; while
Lord Northcliffe says that Lord Lansdowne is one of three or four
British junkers who are intimidated by the fear of a land revolu-
tion which they think sure to follow upon the long continued war.
As for Germany's war aims and peace terms, they have not
yet taken the form of definite statement, which has been demanded
so often. The new Chancellor of the empire has been as stout in
affirming that they must fight on to victory as any war lord could
desire. He has recently declared that there is no possibility of
making peace with England if Mr. Lloyd George represents the
mind of the British people, and this, notwithstanding some political
mutterings, is an unquestionable fact. While Germany is obdurate,
it has long been known that Austria is extremely willing to make
peace, and the latter has recently disclaimed any desire to gain
territory in the Balkans, being content with the right to purchase
the swine of Serbia, and certain other products.
The untrustworthiness of the news from
Russia. Russia is exemplified by a statement made
in these notes last month that M. Kerensky
had defeated the Bolsheviki in Petrograd, whereas in truth he had
been defeated three days before in a battle with the Bolsheviki,
which lasted three days, and had surrendered to the military leader
and was to proceed to Petrograd to make his submission. Instead
of doing this, however, he disguised himself and fled, no one knew
where. As he has been elected to the Constituent Assembly he
seems to be still extant, but he has lost the confidence of every
party in Russia. It would be futile to review the news which has
come to this country from Russia since the last notes were written;
or to say anything about the declarations made by the preposterous
government now in power, which has not yet been recognized as
even a de facto government by any power, except perhaps Ger-
many. An example of the contradictory statements which come
from Russia is found in the rumor that the Tsar had escaped and
was accepted as the ruler of Siberia, and the later statement that
the Tsar is still a prisoner. Finland, it is declared, has become
absolutely independent and has expelled all the Russians. The
Cossacks, under Kaledine and Korniloff, are said to have taken
possession of large tracts of the wheat lands of Russia, and have
secured possession of the great supply of gold which Russia is
1918.] RECENT EVENTS 567
known to possess. The Constitutent Assembly is on the point of
meeting at Petrograd, but the Bolsheviki have declared their in-
tention to prevent its meeting, or to nullify all its proceedings in the
event of its decision not being agreeable to themselves. It would
take a long time to enumerate all the high-handed proceedings of
the Bolshevik Government, such as the confiscation of lands and
of all the factories. The world has seen that the Socialists who
claim to be its regenerators, are as high-handed in their methods
of government as the worst of autocrats. An English writer has
said that they have done more harm to Russia in six months than
the Tsars have done in three centuries. It would be truer to say
that the present situation is the result of the autocratic methods of
the -Tsars. These methods have been such as to deprive the
Russian people of political independence, so that when freedom
came they have not had sufficiently instructed intelligence in po-
litical affairs to distinguish between license and liberty.
In Flanders the British have made really
Progress of the War. no progress, but in a surprise attack in
the direction of Cambrai, in which a very
large number of tanks did great service, the British victory was
so great as to be the cause of their defeat. They got within two
and one-half miles of the city of Cambrai on a very broad front.
Not expecting such a success they had not resources enough to sup-
port the advance they made, and were in turn surprised by the
Germans at a point on the old British line. The British lost more
guns in this battle than its army ever lost in any war, but to offset
this, they claim to have taken more guns than the Germans
in this attack. The British were forced to retire — how far has not
been disclosed,. So dissatisfied are the British people with the
result of this attack, which began with a triumph, that strict
inquiries are being made into the conduct of the generals in charge.
In the French sector there have been more or less miscellane-
ous attacks and counter-attacks, but nothing of any importance.
A great deal has been said about a stupendous German drive
to be made by Hindenburg on some portions of the British or
French lines. The greater the talk about it, the less likely is it to
come, for the Germans do not advertise their attacks in advance, but
fall upon their enemies unawares. However, it is generally be-
lieved that with the troops relieved from the Russian front a
strong German offensive will take place ultimately.
568 RECENT EVENTS [Jan.,
The Italians have held the Brenta-Piave line considerably to
the surprise of military experts, who expected that they would have
to retreat back to the Adige. There were experts who thought that
this would be expedient in any event, because, by so doing, the
Germans would be forced into action in a more difficult country.
Nothing has taken place at Saloniki. Under the head of
Turkey the capture of Jerusalem by the British has been chronicled,
and reference has also been made to the possible attempt of von
Falkenhayn to recapture Bagdad.
After continuous warfare since the beginning, the last pos-
session of Germany in Africa has fallen into British hands, thereby
placing under British control more than a million square miles of
what was German territory. Germany possesses not a square
mile of the large colonies which she had before the outbreak of
the War. None of her ships may sail the ocean, her trade with
the whole world has been completely destroyed, except with Scan-
dinavia, Holland, Denmark and Switzerland, although if peace
be made with Russia that vast empire will be reopened for com-
merce.
Some time ago, in the course of his speech in parlia-
ment, in which he replied to the critics of his Paris speech, Mr.
Lloyd George announced that the submarine menace was definitely
checked; that in one day five submarines had been sunk. Sub-
sequent events, however, show that this campaign still goes on and
in fact the number of vessels lost have increased. However, some
time after Mr. Lloyd George's speech, the first Lord of the Admir-
alty said " that the U-boats are being held, but are not definitely
mastered." He also declared : " That the upward curve of ship-
building and the upward curve of destruction of enemy submarines
have been as satisfactory as the downward trend of mercantile
marine losses." Close economy in the use of tonnage and the con-
centration of all efforts against the submarine would bring victory
to the Allies. He further stated : " Within a measurable time ton-
nage will be launched at the rate exceeding the sinkings ; and, also,
if the naval measures continue to improve, as it is reasonable to
expect, the Allies will be able to say that U-boats are being sunk
faster than the Germans are able to build them, and that the Ger-
man U-boat fleet is steadily dwindling away." Merchant ship-
building tonnage is equal at present to that of the record year of
1913, which, of course, was before the War began.
December 18, 1917.
With Our Readers.
'PHE New Year finds the whole world in conflict. Our own country
A is in the thick of it, and for her the opening year may be one of the
most fateful in her history. The burden of the sacrifice and of the
honor rests upon us all — for all of us, men and women, young and old,
whether uniformed or not, as one heart, one soul, one body, have en-
tered her service.
An article in this issue of THE CATHOLIC WORLD, Re-education
by War, gives our readers a vivid picture of the new conditions to be
found; the problems to be met; the reconstruction in the application
of standards which has been forced upon us.
* * * *
THERE is this high and redeeming consideration for us, as Ameri-
cans : that we have entered the War for no selfish purpose ; that we
seek no increase in territory; we will ask no material gain for the un-
speakable sacrifices we will be asked to make. Our own country, with
her democratic institutions, is dearer to us than life. Her existence
was not only threatened, but endangered, and we have been forced to
enter upon a crusade to safeguard her existence ; to enable us to live
under the laws and traditions established by our fathers; enjoy our
own political liberty, and vindicate to the world our claim and that
of our fathers, that a democratic form of government does insure
safety, liberty, peace for the people who are its citizens. This ques-
tion is now one of supreme importance to us and to all the world. The
year 1918 may go far towards answering it, indeed it may an-
swer it completely and forever. To this end our country has asked
millions of her sons to leave their homes and give their lives, if need
be, for her sake; for this purpose she has, for the time at least, as-
sumed arbitrary power, and demanded of all submission, obedience,
personal sacrifice ; and to this cause must thousands look, with tearful
eyes, for the immediate consolation of their tried souls and their
broken hearts.
* * * *
THE world tragedy cannot but bring man nearer to God. It brings
him nearer to God, first, by showing him that the other gods which
he foolishly worshipped have proved vain idols. Intellectualism has
been the fetish of the modern world for two generations. Pride in
intellectual gifts, intellectual research, intellectual attainments has been
the root whence sprang the modern neglect of the spiritual and the
570 WITH OUR READERS [Jan.,
overthrow of moral principles. Viewed in its origin, the so-called
Protestant religion is a claim that every man has the right through his
own rational investigation to choose that form of belief which his in-
tellect approves. The process rests on no authority; but on rational
choice, which may be reviewed and altered as often as the individual
sees fit, since the process begins and ends with himself. According to
it, God has not delivered a definite revelation and imposed it on man.
To escape the charge of rationalism, its champions substituted per-
sonal, individual and immediate inspiration by the Holy Spirit, but
this in turn, making a mockery of truth before men, only drove
them with apparent greater justification into rationalism.
So under the guise of intellectualism, it is really to rationalism
that the world has given reverence and obedience. Scientific investi-
gations, current theories of man and creation, of life and death, of
marriage, of the family and of the nation have not been guided by a pre-
declared, supreme, unalterable law of God. The modern process had been
just the reverse. Intellectual research was thought to hold the key not
only to the secrets of nature, but to the secrets of man's well-being
here .and hereafter. The fundamental truths not of Christianity alone,
but of Theism were summoned before the bar of human investigation,
human reason, not to be defended, but to be questioned, found want-
ing and denied.
* * * *
THUS rationalism, far from being a merely intellectual quality and
characteristic, grew necessarily to be moral and practical. It con-
trolled states and their policies ; it controlled the industrial life of the
world and the whole question of property. What a profound difference
an abiding religious sense in these questions would have effected, is
clearly shown to the reader of Hilaire Belloc's papers in the two latest
issues of THE CATHOLIC WORLD. Rationalism controlled the popular
notions of marriage ; hence divorce is advanced as an advisable and bene-
ficial institution ; it molded the concept of parental duty and parental ob-
ligation, and so birth control was taken out of the hands of the Creator
and placed in those of the created; it robbed the modern world of the
true status and importance of the family, and therefore the true con-
cept of citizenship must be taught the world anew.
* * * *
IT is manifest that the prevalence of rationalistic and liberalistic
principles has not only disturbed but destroyed the right order of
society in every country. No nation can pervert them with impunity.
The modern world sees that its industrial system has been unjust, that
perverse, dishonest business methods have prevailed and have won
security of position; that admiration for the thing cleverly and at-
tractively well done, for the bold success, without regard to its mo-
1918.] WITH OUR READERS 571
rality, have characterized our literature, our art, our drama, our in-
dustrial and business life; that love of ease and comfort and lux-
ury have led to a selfishness that works indifference to the rights of
others. The awakening has shocked us with the sense that all is
wrong with the world; that in this terrible conflict which shakes na-
tions but which also trumpets forth a demand for the reestablishment
of fundamental spiritual truths, no nation can claim freedom from
blame. We as a nation, and we know our own conscience best, know
that we have ample cause to strike our heart and exclaim : mea culpa.
Cardinal Mercier had the courage to say publicly of his own
country. " It would, perhaps, be cruel to dwell upon our guilt
now, when we are paying so well and so nobly what we owe.
But shall we not confess that we have indeed something to
expiate? He who has received much, from him shall much
be required. Now, dare we say ,that the moral and religious
standard of our people has risen as its economic prosperity has risen?
The observance of Sunday rest, the Sunday Mass, the reverence for
marriage, the restraints of modesty — what had you made of these?
What, even, within Christian families, had become of the simplicity
practised by our fathers, what of the spirit of penance, what of re-
spect for authority? And we, too, we priests, we religious, I, the
Bishop, we whose great mission it is to present in our lives yet more
than in our speech, the Gospel of Christ, have we earned the right to
speak to our people the word spoken by the apostle to the nations:
' Be ye followers of me, as I also am of Christ?' '
* * * *
WE have quoted this expressly Catholic exhortation because, besides
its immediate purpose, it brings home a most vital truth of human
well-being and human progress, characteristic of religion alone. Car-
dinal Mercier sees not only the Calvary which his own country must
endure, not only the unspeakable injustice and barbarities to which
she has been subjected, but he can see beyond the night into the re-
deeming and risen light of the morn in which they who would walk
must be personally purified, purified not only by the justice of their
cause, but by a personal spiritual righteousness which will justify
them in identifying themselves with that cause.
Repentance has no place in any bald system of ethics ; repentance
is known only to religion — religion which reestablishes the personal
relation of the creature with God. Repentance is the desire and the
determination to undo the offences of the past and never to permit
their repetition. Repentance begins with the individual even with
regard to national sins. And national repentance, a necessary fore-
runner of renewed national life, must be the unified expression of the
hearts of the people. It matters not how worthy the cause, if the up-
572 WITH OUR READERS [Jan.,
holders be not just themselves, or filled with a desire for justice, that
cause will fail. It matters not how noble her mission ; how glorious
her institutions ; how upright the crusade on which America has en-
tered, if we, who have them in our keeping, look not into our in-
most souls and individually make ourselves, before God, worthy in-
struments.
* * * *
world, even as did the first sinner, blames somebody else for
1 its sins. It has been our habit to blame the state ; society ; indus-
trial and economic conditions. But, however much they are to blame,
our guilt also has been individual and personal. Unless we keep burn-
ing within our hearts that truth of eternal wisdom we will never find
the way of peace.
The extraordinary, incredible changes effected in our economic,
political and social life since the War began, should prove to the
thinking man that greater, more radical changes will follow when the
War is over. Society is not going to tolerate the great injustices
under which it has suffered. And the only way by which justice and
not radicalism or chaos will rule over a world re-making itself, is
that we merit right guidance then, by repentance now.
* * * *
F) EPENTANCE will free us from the unsafe boastfulness too char-
IV acteristic of our country, and give us that consciousness of weak-
ness so necessary for strength. Repentance will make clearer the way
for a more united national spirit. It will show us how we have failed
in our duty to thousands in our own country who, because of in-
justice, have never had reason to look upon her and love her as a
mother.
Repentance will bring out in clearer light the magnitude of the
task before us both during and after the War, will sanctify our sac-
rifice, sober our imagination, restrain our habits and enlarge our trust.
Nothing so much as repentance helps us to realize our need for
charity from others ; and through this realization, to extend charity to
others. The hour demands the effacement of self, the promotion of
the national cause. If we are to make it the occasion of adverse criti-
cism, of chronic caviling; of eager listening to rumor and report of
the unworthy personal motives of national officials, of associates and
co-workers, then we are in a fair way to wreck our national cause. It
would profit us more to abstain from seeking victory elsewhere and
to seek it here at home and over ourselves.
w
E always look to the opening of a New Year with some hope of
blessing. Not the least of blessings that this New Year may
1918.] WITH OUR READERS 573
confer upon us, is a sense of our unworthiness to accomplish the
great task assigned to us. Such a sense will fit us to achieve.
A LTHOUGH it has been repeatedly noticed in our Catholic press,
f\ it may with profit be repeated once again that the Y. M. C. A. is
expressly and professedly a Protestant organization. For the willing
cooperation which it has frequently shown in aiding the work of
Catholics in the camps — lending its halls for the celebration of Mass,
aiding the chaplains — we have no word except of sincere gratitude.
At the same time, we Catholics must understand that the Y. M.
C. A. work does not free us from our obligations as Catholics, and
that being a Protestant organization it will not and cannot do Catholic
work for our Catholic soldiers and sailors.
* * * *
IT is the more important to remember this, since it is sometimes said
that there is no special need of the work which the Knights of
Columbus have undertaken and are carrying out. There is grave and
urgent need of such work. We have the care of over thirty-five per
cent of the soldiers of our 'Army and forty per cent of the men of
our Navy, and to the work of the Knights we should as Catholics
give generously of our means and of our support in every way. We
take this opportunity also to request that Catholic men, not subject
to draft, offer themselves to the Knights of Columbus for work as
camp secretaries. Much of the success of the work in camps depends
upon capable secretaries, and surely there should be sufficient mis-
sionary spirit among our Catholic men to lead them, in goodly numbers,
to offer themselves for such work both at home and abroad.
THE political institutions of America, Father Hecker claimed, in
his Aspirations of Nature, " were based on Catholic principles and
Catholic views of human nature." No more important question, save
that of Religion itself, faces the American people today than the right
theory of the state and the just principles of political government.
* * * *
IN a notable article contributed by Gaillard Hunt to the October is-
sue of The Catholic Historical Review, the claim is made and de-
fended by definite evidence, that the immediate source of that part of the
Declaration of Rights of Virginia and of the Declaration of Inde-
pendence which proclaimed the national equality of man, and the
right of governing as derived from the people, is a Catholic source.
Dr. Hunt first points out that, although the Virginia Declaration was
modeled on the English Bill of Rights, the paragraphs declaring
that all men are by nature equally free and independent; ,that all
power belongs to the people, and that when a government fails to
574 WITH OUR READERS [Jan.,
confer common benefit, a majority of the people have a right to change
it, were unknown to the English Bill.
IN examining the sources Dr. Hunt shows that Montesquieu's
The Spirit of the Laws did not influence the framers of the Declara-
tion; that Rousseau's writings had not obtained currency in Virginia
in 1776 and that James Berg was of no help to Thomas Jefferson.
Thomas Hobbes, who anticipated Rousseau's doctrine by one
hundred years, and Richard Hooker bring us nearer to the sources
of the American Declarations. For these two men influenced in turn
Algernon Sidney and John Locke. The former was a hero of the
Americans of 1776. A copy of his Discourses was in every American
library of that time, and every reading man had read it in part or in
whole. Now these Discourses speak of a volume entitled, Patriar-
chs by Sir Robert Filmer, " concerning the universal and undistin-
guished right of all kings." Filmer's book contained a passage from
Cardinal Bellarmine to the effect that all men are created equal, and
Sidney defends Cardinal Bellarmine against the attack of the absolu-
tist, Filmer. John Locke, whose essays were also well known to the
American colonists, also knew Filmer's book and also refuted it. Con-
sequently he also knew Cardinal Bellarmine. Cardinal Bellarmine's
writings, as is well known, made a sensation in England when first
published. In colonial America he was not unknown. A copy of his
works was in the library of Princeton when James Madison, a member
of the committee which framed the Virginia Declaration of Rights,
was a student there. Cardinal Bellarmine's books were to be found
in Virginia. There is every reason to suppose, therefore, that many
of the political readers of America in 1776 had a direct, first-hand
acquaintance with the Cardinal's writings.
* * * *
AND every political leader of note knew of the Cardinal's teachings
through Filmer's book, and the works of Sidney and Locke. Fil-
mer could not have influenced Mason or Jefferson. Filmer was a dead
author to those who were convinced of the equality of the political
rights of men. But Cardinal Bellarmine's teachings would help and
guide them at once. And, as Dr. Hunt points out, in no other author
— in neither Sidney nor Locke — is such a clear epitome of Mason's
and Jefferson's doctrines to be found, as in Bellarmine.
" Were Mason and Jefferson conscious of their debt to Bellarmine,
or did they use Filmer's presentation of his doctrine without knowing
that they- were doing so? Did the Americans realize that they were
staking their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor in support of
a theory of government which had come down to them as announced
by a Catholic priest ? We cannot answer these questions, but it should
1918.] WITH OUR READERS 575
be a satisfaction to Catholics to know that the fundamental pronounce-
ments upon which was built the greatest of modern revolutions, found
their best support in the writings of a Prince of the Church."
\T7E wish to call the attention of our readers to the observance of the
VV Octave of Prayer for Church Unity which begins on January
1 8th, the Feast of St. Peter at Rome, and ends on January 25th, the
Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul. The observance of this Octave
originated with the Society of the Atonement, and His Holiness, Bene-
dict XV., in February, 1916, extended it to the whole Church. It is
happily significant that the " World Conference on Faith and Order "
representing many Protestant denominations, have chosen the same
Octave as a special time of prayer for the reunion of Christendom.
The form of prayer to be recited daily during the Octave, author-
ized and indulgenced by Our Holy Father, is as follows:
Antiphon. That they all may be One, as Thou, Father, in Me and I in
Thee; that they may be also one in Us; that the world may believe that Thou
has sent Me. John xvii. 21.
V. I say unto thee that thou art Peter;
R. And upon this Rock I will build My Church.
Let us Pray.
O Lord Jesus Christ, Who saidst unto Thine Apostles ; Peace I leave with
you, My Peace I give unto you ; regard not our sins, but the faith of Thy
Church, and grant unto her that Peace and Unity which are agreeable to Thy
Will. Who livest and reignest God forever and ever. Amen.
N. B. — It is also recommended that one decade of the Rosary (at least)
be said for the particular intention of each day; also that Holy Communion be
received as often as possible during the Octave, daily if possible, certainly on
the First or Last Day of the Octave in order to obtain the Plenary Indulgence.
The daily intentions outlined for the Octave are :
January i8th. Feast of St. Peter's Chair at Rome. The return of all
the " Other Sheep " to the one Fold of Peter, and One Shepherd.
January igth. The return of all Oriental Separatists to Communion with
the Apostolic See.
January 2oth. The submission of all Anglicans to the authority of the
Vicar of Christ.
January 2ist. That the Lutherans and all other Protestants of Continental
Europe may find their way " back to Holy Church."
January 22nd. That all Christians in America may become one in com-
munion with the Chair of Peter.
January 23rd. The return to the Sacraments of all lapsed Catholics.
January 24th. The Conversion of the Jews.
January 25th. Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul. The Missionary con-
quest of the entire world for Christ.
A plenary indulgence has been granted by the Holy Father to every one of
the faithful who on the First or Last Day of the Octave shall receive Holy
Communion under the usual conditions.
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CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. CVT. FEBRUARY, 1918. No. 635.
v
FREEDOM OF SPEECH IN WAR TIME.
BY JOHN A. RYAN, D.D.
E must now consider briefly liberty of speech and
liberty of the press. It is hardly necessary to say
that there can be no such right as this, if it be not
used in moderation, and if it pass beyond the bound?
and end of all true liberty."
These are words of Pope Leo XIII. found in his encyclical,
Libertas Prccstantissimum. They are strikingly applicable to one
of the troublesome problems that have been created in America
by our entrance into the War. If our people find themselves vexed
and bewildered by the question of free speech and free printing in
war time, they must lay the blame upon a greatly exaggerated con-
ception of these privileges both in theory and in practice. Neither
liberty of speech nor liberty of the press has been " used in mod-
eration," nor kept within " the bounds and end of all true liberty."
The prevailing practice has been to permit men to say anything
that they pleased so long as they did not utter nor teach obscenity,
nor attack a natural or corporate person in terms that were clearly
false and libelous.
There exists no moral right to make false statements or to
advocate wrong doctrines. Freedom of expression is not an end in
itself. It is merely a means. It is reasonable only when the end
that it seeks is reasonable, and when it promotes that end in a
reasonable way. Obviously no reasonable end is served by the
utterance or advocacy of doctrines or theories that are contrary to
the truth. If it is wrong to practice polygamy or industrial sabotage,
Copyright. 1918. THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY OF ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE
IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK.
VOL. cvi.— 37
578 FREEDOM OF SPEECH IN WAR TIME [Feb.,
it is likewise wrong to advocate the theories that support and
provoke these actions. A man has no more right to say what he
pleases than to do what he pleases. There is no peculiar sacredness
inherent in the manipulation of the vocal organs, nor in those
actions which produce the written or printed page.
It is a matter of simple historical fact that all governments,
civil and religious, have acted upon the principles just laid down.
When the situation seemed sufficiently grave, governments have
always forbidden the expression of what they conceived to be
wrong doctrines, whether in the field of religion, ethics, politics, or
science. In so far as they have departed from this principle, the
cause has always been either uncertainty or expediency. False
religious teaching has been tolerated because the governing au-
thority was not convinced of the falsity, or because the matter was
not regarded as important, or because this policy seemed in the
circumstances to be more conducive to social peace and social
welfare generally. The same considerations have dictated the
toleration of false doctrines in other fields of thought. No govern-
ment has formally admitted the claim that men have a right to say
or write what is false or unreasonable.
So much for the general principles. The question of freedom of
speech in war time presents two aspects, the legal and the moral.
Under the former comes the alleged constitutional right to oppose
by speech and publication the military policies of our Government.
Men have vociferously proclaimed that such a right is guaranteed
to them by that provision of the Federal Constitution which de-
clares that " Congress shall make no law .... abridging the
freedom of speech or of the press." The espionage law, which
prohibits spoken or printed words tending to discourage recruiting
and the operation of the selective draft, and which has been utilized
to send such exponents of free speech to jail, is angrily asserted
to be in violation of this article of the Constitution. As pointed
out by Louis F. Post, however, there is another article in the
Constitution which empowers Congress to declare war, and to
make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying its
war-powers into execution. On their face, these clauses give
Congress full authority to enact the espionage law, or any other
law which restricts freedom of speech to the extent necessary to
prosecute the war. The freedom of speech protected by the Con-
stitution is stated in very general terms. It is not declared by the
Constitution to be unlimited. Whether and how far it may properly
I9i8.] FREEDOM OF SPEECH IN WAR TIME 579
be limited by statute law in particular cases, can be determined
only through other provisions of the Constitution, and through the
meaning that was authoritatively attached to the right of freedom
of speech when the Constitution was adopted. Both these tests
seem to justify the restrictions which Congress has already placed
upon freedom of expression in the present War. In any case, the
power to interpret the Constitution authoritatively has been located
by that document itself in the Federal Supreme Court. It has not
been confided to the fragile judgment of war-opponents, con-
scientious or otherwise. These zealous defenders of the Constitu-
tion should utilize the remedy provided by the Constitution. They
should take their grievance to the courts.
The moral right of the individual to criticize the war policies
of the Government, may be conveniently considered under four
principal heads: some general considerations; what is certainly
reasonable; what is certainly unreasonable; and what may be rea-
sonable or unreasonable, according to its spirit and circumstances.
In a democracy, efficient government depends upon organized
and enlightened public opinion, which in turn supposes ample
freedom of discussion. This is a general truth the application of
which is not restricted to normal and peaceful conditions. Neither
in peace nor in war are the officials of government infallible. They
can always receive valuable enlightenment and cooperation from
the discussion of public questions by the people whom they represent
Should they attempt to suppress entirely discussion of the War or
criticism of their conduct of the War, they would not only deprive
themselves of important assistance and support, but would become
so alienated from the desires and sympathies of the people that they
could not long carry on the business of war successfully. This is
a fundamental consideration which even Mr. Bryan, democrat as
he is and lover of peace as he is, seems to have momentarily
underestimated, when he wrote that the citizen in private life is not
called upon to discuss questions of war which are before Congress.
The second general consideration is suggested by the words
of Pope Leo XIII., that liberty of speech and of the press should
be " used in moderation." Now moderation must be much more
strictly interpreted when the nation is at war than when it is at
peace. The reason is the indefinitely greater consequences that
may follow a wide liberty of speech in the former situation. A
parcel post system or a protective tariff law may be subjected to
such severe criticism by individuals and organizations that they
580 FREEDOM OF SPEECH IN WAR TIME [Feb.,
will be abandoned by the Government. Though the consequent
injury to the public weal may be very great, it is neither enormous
nor irreparable. Criticism of a war policy may lead to national
defeat, humiliation, and loss of independence. Therefore, reason
and common sense dictate that the critic should examine carefully
the grounds of his opinion and its probable consequences, and set
forth his views with becoming diffidence and modesty.
The right of criticism has been emphasized in the preceding
paragraph because that right is the freedom of speech that is mainly
in controversy. Therefore, we put the question, how far is criticism
of the proposals and acts of the Government certainly reasonable ?
As regards proposals, such as bills before Congress and other
contemplated official programmes, the individual should be per-
mitted to express his opinions publicly; as regards governmental
acts already completed, such as a law or an administrative policy,
a distinction must be drawn between those acts that are essential
to the prosecution of the War and those that are not thus essential.
Since the War could be carried on as effectively, possibly more
effectively, without the latter, the private citizen may properly
criticize them and strive to have them repealed or changed. In
common with thousands of others, I believe that the excess profits
tax which Congress enacted last summer is gravely defective on
account of its comparatively low rates. It seems to me that while
the War lasts the Government ought to take not merely the paltry
proportion authorized in this statute, but all the profits of business
above eight or nine per cent. In the last two sentences I have been
finding fault with a war measure which in its present form is not
essential to our military success. Whether the tax on excess profits
be thirty per cent or one hundred per cent is not vital to the carry-
ing on of the War. Similarly, one can criticize George Creel's Com-
mittee on Public Information without rendering' oneself liable
to the charge of obstructing the Government, or exercising an
unreasonable freedom of speech.
It is possible, however, that the individual may be mistaken in
his estimate of the importance of certain governmental acts and
policies. He may attack one or more of them as unessential when
they are really vital, when no substitute measure would be half as
efficient. In such a situation, the presumption of correct judgment
is against the individual and in favor of the Government. Hence
he cannot reasonably complain if the Government restricts his
freedom of speech for the sake of efficient prosecution of the War.
I9i8.] FREEDOM OF SPEECH IN WAR TIME 581
Even when the private citizen exercises his right to find fault
with unessential measures, he should do so in a helpful, constructive
fashion. Criticism that tends to make the War unpopular, to make
the people feel discouraged, in a word which has the net effect of
hindering the war-making activities of the Government, is not
justifiable. In all criticism the most important element is the spirit.
Where this is obviously malevolent, no technical justification as
regards the subject matter will render the discussion reasonable.
What kind of criticism is certainly unreasonable? In the first
place, one is not justified in uttering falsehoods; neither directly
nor indirectly; neither explicitly nor by implication-; neither by
positive assertion nor by suggestion and insinuation. To say that
the President and Congress plunged the country into war at the
behest of the capitalist newspapers, or of the great financial interests,
or of Great Britain, is an apt example of this kind of criticism.
Such assertions are not supported by even a shadow of positive
evidence, and they are contradicted by all that we know of the
President and Congress. They are plain and simple lies. Yet the
men who have uttered them, have presumed to defend their action
as an exercise of the right of freedom of speech!
In the second place, the private citizen has not a right to speak
or write against the War itself, or against any measure that is
necessary for its successful prosecution. If the War were unjust,
individuals would have not only the right but the duty of pro-
claiming the fact, and of demanding that the country should get out
of the conflict at the earliest possible moment. But the presump-
tion of right is always in favor of the civil authority and against
the individual. This presumption can, indeed, be overthrown by a
convincing presentation of facts to the contrary; but so long as
individuals are unable to produce such a presentation, the authorities
are justified not only in continuing the War, but in preventing all
obstructive criticism and obstructive expression of opinion generally.
While the Government is no more infallible than the dissenting
individual, it has on its side the presumption of truth that always
accompanies the acts of authority. In the absence of .\n infallible
judge to declare on which side truth actually reposes, the decision
must be made on the basis of presumption. To adopt the other
alternative, to assume that the dissenting individual is right and the
Government wrong is, in its essence, anarchy.
To the objection that this conception of free speech compels
the conscientious opponent of the War to violate his moral con-
582 FREEDOM OF SPEECH IN WAR TIME I Feb.,
victions, there are two conclusive replies. The first is that this
hard situation is not peculiar to war or the time of war. It exists
whenever the conscientious individual is called upon to obey any
act of government that he believes to be wrong. The second reply
denies that the individual is compelled to do violence to his con-
science. He is not required to advocate a war in which he does not
believe. All that he is asked to do is to keep his mouth shut and
his pen quiescent. If his conscience will not permit him to adopt this
course, he has the alternative that genuine believers have faced in
all ages. He can become a martyr to his convictions.
As examples of opposition to and criticism of measures essential
to the conduct of the War, one might mention the action of those
persons who protested against cooperation between our military
forces and those of the Allies, and against sending the drafted
soldiers to Europe. Both these programmes are palpably necessary
for efficient conduct of the War. Criticism of them was, therefore,
an abuse of the privilege of free speech. If any public authority,
state or national, prohibited, prevented or punished such perform-
ances, its action was perfectly reasonable. There is no reference
here to those persons who attempted to petition Congress to let the
drafted men stay at home, nor to those who took steps to test
the constitutionality of the selective draft law. Both of these were
orderly and constitutional processes which stand on quite a different
plane from indiscriminate criticism on the platform or in the press ;
nor was either of them repressed by public authority.
Besides direct opposition to and criticism of the War and
essential war measures, there is an unjustifiabkj unmanly, and
disingenuous kind of printed expression which consists mainly of
malicious emphasis. This has been carried on in certain journals,
one of which classifies itself as a Catholic paper. In brief, the
method is : to abstain from printing a line in favor of the War, of
war measures, such as the Liberty Loan, or of unofficial related
activities, such as those of the Red Cross or the Knights of Colum-
bus; to print no news favorable to the cause of the United States
or the Allies; and to publish a considerable amount of news that
is unfavorable. While items of the latter sort appear also in papers
that are conspicuously loyal to the Government, they are balanced
by encouraging news statements and editorial comment. In the
journals that pursue the crooked method which we are now dis-
cussing, no such balance is maintained. The picture is all black.
The evident purpose and the normal effect are to make the readers
1918.] FREEDOM OF SPEECH IN WAR TIME 583
discouraged and dissatisfied over America's participation in the War
—in a word to make the War unpopular.
Obviously, this procedure quite as certainly tends to obstruct
the Government's conduct of the War as does opposition to the
draft law. And it enjoys the distinction of being dishonest and
cowardly. We can have some respect for the War opponent who in
an open, straightforward manner violates the espionage act, and
lands in jail. We can have none for the editor or publisher who
procures personal safety through the tortuous tactics described
above. In any case, the freedom of speech that they exercise, is an
unreasonable freedom and the Government would be quite justified
in amending the law so as to make such abuses of free speech
plainly illegal.
Happily very few Americans believe that our war against
Germany is unjust. The provocation has been too grievous and too
flagrant to permit such a conviction to lodge in the mind of any
man not obsessed with prejudice. Thousands of persons, however,
believe that our entrance into the War was unnecessary. Naturally
these desire to see the conflict brought to a close as soon as possible.
Some of them are demanding that the authorities take immediate
steps toward the reestablishment of peace, not by an abrupt with-
drawal from the War, but by negotiations with the enemy. Does
the public advocacy of this plan come within the limits of reasonable
freedom of speech?
Everything depends upon the terms and spirit of the proposals
and the discussion. In general, private citizens should be permitted
to discuss the question of peace, since this is the only means of
forming public opinion; and public opinion is essential to the en-
lightenment and guidance of the authorities in a democracy. Making
peace is one of the most important problems that can confront the
rulers of a nation. If they deprive themselves of the assistance of
public opinion upon this problem, they may logically neglect it and
regard it as of no account in relation to every other problem of
government. Such a principle is fit for a Prussian autocracy, not
for the United States of America. As a matter of fact, no one has
the hardihood to defend this principle in its full implication. As
the New Republic has pointed out, those persons and journals who
decry discussion of peace terms are not logical and consistent.
They do not condemn all advocacy of peace, but only those propo-
sals in which they do not believe: that peace which would fail to
involve dismemberment of the German Empire. They would permit
584 FREEDOM OF SPEECH /:V WAR TIME [Feb.,
all discussion which assumes that dismemberment is a necessary
prerequisite to peace. But this is not adequate discussion. It pre-
sents only one side of the question concerning a desirable peace
and can create only a truncated public opinion. It deprives the
Government of that degree of assistance from public opinion which
the authorities have a right to be provided with in a democracy.
To state the problem in concrete terms, let us suppose that
a group of persons are of the opinion that our Government should
accept the Pope's letter of last August as a fair basis for immediate
peace negotiations. Their views are, of course, directly opposed
to those contained in President Wilson's reply to the Holy Father.
Would such persons be justified in demanding that they be permitted
publicly to express and advocate their peace-opinions ? I cannot see
that such freedom of speech is unreasonable. It seems to me, that,
with a proviso to be mentioned presently, men and women have a
moral right to advocate Pope Benedict's or any other not palpably
unreasonable programme of peace negotiations. After all, the Pres-
ident is not infallible. His rejection of the Pope's proposals ma}
have been a mistake. In that hypothesis one of the most effective
means of informing and influencing him correctly, is adequate ex-
pression of views by the people. Unless some overpowering reason
appears to the contrary, he ought not to be deprived of the benefit of
such discussion. To be sure, if Congress and the President should
decide that all discussion of peace terms at the present time is gravely
harmful to the nation, and should forbid it by law, the individual
would have no reasonable ground of complaint, since the presump-
tion of correctness of view is, as stated above, on the side of the
governing authority. Should Congress enact into law the propo-
sition not long ago enunciated by Secretary McAdoo, that " every
pacifist speech made in this country at this inopportune and improper
time is in effect traitorous," the private citizen would be morally
bound to submit. He is no more infallible than the President, and
he is less likely to be right than the Government.
Since no law of this sort has yet been placed among the
statutes, the individual has a moral right to advocate any terms
of peace that are not clearly unjust or unreasonable, subject how-
ever to two important conditions. The first of these is that he
should state his views with moderation and modesty, as becomes
a critical phase in the life of the nation, and that he should not tack
on to them lying insinuations about our reasons for entering the
War or our objects in prosecuting it. To intimate that we ought to
1918.] FREEDOM OF SPEECH IN WAR TIME 585
stop the War immediately on almost any peace terms, because we
are merely pulling chestnuts out of the fire for England, or because
\ve are playing the game of the financiers who have loaned money
to the Allies, is to exercise an utterly unjustifiable freedom of
speech. This is obvious. The second condition may not be obvious,
but it is of fundamental importance. It is that no man should
advocate immediate negotiations for peace, or any other terms,
conditions, or circumstances of peace, without at the same time
giving full and positive support to the prosecution of the War. The
peace advocate who is at once honest and patriotic, will take sub-
stantially this position: "I believe that the United 'States ought
to seek peace along such and such lines, but I recognize that until
a truce has actually been declared, the war-making forces of our
country should be kept up to the highest possible mark of efficiency
and activity. I do not want my views on peace to have any influence
towards a relaxation of our capacity to fight."
If an absolutely impartial and competent arbitrator were
available to determine the conditions of peace, our participation
in the War ought to cease this very hour. In that case we could
have confidence that the settlement would be in harmony with
justice. Pope Benedict would be an ideal umpire. But neither Pope-
Benedict nor any other arbitrator, has yet been agreed upon by
the belligerent nations ; and it is practically certain that the terms of
peace will not be fixed by any such supreme authority. We may
regret that this simple and fair method of ending the War does
not approve itself to the belligerents, but if we are to be guided
by realities instead of fond wishes, we must recognize the situation
as it is and shape our course accordingly. If we are to remain true
to the interests of our own country, which are also the interests of
justice, we cannot permit ourselves for an instant to forget that
peace will finally be arranged by negotiations between the parties
to the conflict.
Therefore, the terms of peace will be dictated by the pre-
ponderance of force. If the advantage of the military situation is
with Germany when the negotiators finally come together, the out-
come will be a German peace; if it is with the United States and
the Allies, we shall have the kind of peace that we believe to be
righteous; if neither side enjoys a pronounced military advantage,
the terms of peace will be less favorable to our cause and the cause
of justice than if the enemy were decisively defeated. Such will
be the situation, and such the determining forces of the settlement,
586 FREEDOM OF SPEECH IN WAR TIME [Feb.,
whenever peace is made, whether it be one year or ten years hence.
The terms will be dictated by the stronger party. If we love our
country and wish a just peace, we must desire that the stronger
party at the peace table shall be the United States, not Germany.
Therefore, we must desire and strive to keep our military and naval
forces up to the highest pitch of efficiency and activity, until a truce
is actually declared. Any man who advocates or clamors for peace
without doing his best to safeguard this, the indispensable condition
and guarantee of a just peace, is obstructing the War quite as cer-
tainly and unreasonably as the man who hinders the selective draft.
He is quite as disloyal, and has quite as little right to exercise
freedom of speech.
The position taken by Mr. Morris Hillquit is a good illus-
tration of this principle. In the New Republic, December ist, he
declared that if he were now a member of Congress, he would
refuse to vote for money for military supplies, but would advocate
immediate negotiations with Germany for peace. Should these fail,
he would then be ready to vote for all the munitions and equipment
required for a decisive victory. He makes the situation too simple.
Apparently, he thinks that a peace proposal by the United States
and the answer thereto by Germany, are merely a matter of a few
reciprocal cablegrams. He talks as though the " negotiations"
could be concluded in a day or two. Were this, indeed, the situation
Mr. Hillquit's position would be impregnable. But men who have
the courage and the power to look facts in the face, know that the
formalities involved in even beginning negotiations for peace, and
the preliminaries to a truce, require a considerable amount of time,
and they know that any relaxation of military vigilance and readi-
ness during this interval, is utilized by the enemy to put himself in
a better position to dictate the peace terms. Mr. Hillquit's method
would give Germany full license to take possession of this ad-
vantage. Had he declared his willingness to vote for all the military
supplies demanded by the responsible war authorities, and then
advocated peace overtures, we should compassionately wonder at
his naive assumption that the Socialist-Centrist coalition in the
Reichstag represents and controls the government of the Kaiser,
and at his childlike faith in the honor of the Prussian autocracy,
but we could not accuse him of an ineptitude that is hardly distin-
guishable from unconscious disloyalty.
In passing, one is tempted to remark that the position taken by
Mr. Hillquit and many other leaders of his wing of the Socialist
1918.] FREEDOM OF SPEECH IN WAR TIME 587
party, typifies a fatal limitation of the Socialist mentality. Too
often Socialists seem to think with their feelings instead of their
intellects. They see that an industrial regime of universal coopera-
tion and altruism would be better for mankind than one of com-
petition and selfishness, and they forthwith conclude that a social
order so desirable is likewise feasible. Many of them argue in the
same way about the possibility of getting a just peace from the
undefeated military caste of Germany.
In the foregoing pages I have tried to state the principles of
free speech and their application to war conditions in a purely
objective manner. I have not written with a slanting eye toward
either the present attitude of our Government or the contentions
of pacifists. My purpose has been merely to lay down correct
principles, as I see them. If, now, I am asked whether the advocates
of free speech have been harshly or unfairly treated by public
authorities in the United States since the beginning of the War,
my answer must be that they have not been so treated on the whole.
Certain it is that the Federal Government has done nothing of this
sort. Neither in its laws nor in its enforcement of them has it
encroached upon morally legitimate freedom of speech. It may be
objected that these assertions are contradicted by the treatment of
Senator La Follette. What are the facts ? In his speech at St. Paul,
September 2Oth last, he declared, not by direct assertion, but by
supposition and insinuation that the United States went into the
War to rescue the " House of Morgan," and for the " poor
privilege" of riding in munition ships. I am using the version ot
his remarks which appeared in Current Opinion for November.
Because of these unjustifiable and oblique statements, he was
denounced in the press, and called to account by the Senate. When,
sixteen days later, he made his notable address before the latter
body, he uttered not a word in explanation of or reference to his
offensive remarks in St. Paul. He defended the general right of the
citizen to discuss the war policies of the Government, and the
particular right of Congress to define the war aims and the peace
terms of the nation. Only this, and nothing more. Yet many of
his pacifist admirers are under the impression that his Senate speech
was a triumphant answer to unjust accusations !
That a few state and municipal officials have gone too far in
their prosecution of alleged disloyalty, is quite likely. Possibly the
Governors of Minnesota and Illinois should not have prohibited last
September the meetings of the " People's Council for Democracy
588 FREEDOM OF SPEECH IN WAR TIME [Feb.,
and Terms of Peace." At that time, however, this organization
was not merely talking peace; it was opposing the dispatch of the
conscripted soldiers to Europe. Moreover, many of its leaders were
notoriously pro-German.
Indeed, the cause of the pacifists, so-called, has been dis-
credited from the beginning because of their close alliance with
those persons who want a German victory, even at the cost of an
American defeat. Wherever free speech has been unduly repressed
by minor authorities, it has been more or less closely associated
with disloyal opposition to the War.
Freedom of speech has been tolerated even when it was directly
obstructive of certain war measures. During his recent campaign
for the office of Mayor of New York, Mr. Hillquit declared over
and over again that he would not buy Liberty Bonds, and by
implication at least urged the same course upon his audiences.
He was not molested by the authorities. Should the opponents of
the War decide, as they threatened some time ago, to make a cam-
paign for the election of members of Congress next fall who think
as tihey do, they would, no doubt, be accorded to them as was given
to Mr. Hillquit.
That many of the newspapers have gone far beyond the bounds
Df truth and decency in their denunciation of critics of the War,
is unfortunately a fact, but these journals are not the Government,
and their assertions and arguments can be combated on the platform
and in the press. Men who refuse to utilize this method of. defence
do not show great faith in the power of free speech.
No opponent or critic of the War who is genuinely loyal to his
country need fear that the Federal Government will deny him the
privilege of freedom of speech. For the honest and patriotic critic
will confine his utterances to complaints and proposals that are con-
structive, and that stop short of giving " aid and comfort to the
enemies of the United States." While insisting as strongly as he
likes upon his constitutional and moral rights to contribute to the
process of forming helpful opinion, he will bear in mind that lies
and lying insinuations, direct or oblique opposition to essential
military measures, and peace proposals that would leave Uncle Sam
virtually bound and gagged at the same peace table with the tri-
umphant exponents of Prussian autocracy, are justifiable neither
in law nor in morals. There exists no right to any such abuse of
free speech.
A PAGE OF THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF ENGLISH
LITERATURE.
BY A. G. BRICKEL, S.J.
HAT the treatment accorded to Catholics in the
Cambridge history of English literature would be
insular, was a foregone conclusion ; that in these days
of easily accessible source-books, it would be bigoted,
was not so easily divined. Among the- many pages
marred by bigoted and unfair criticism of Catholic literary men, it
may be profitable to take as a specimen Professor Saintsbury's
assertion about Cardinal Newman. In discussing The Dream of
Gerontius among " minor poetry," the professor goes out of his way
to cast a slur on its author's historical ability. " Newman's mind,"
he says, " was extremely over- furnished with logic, and extremely
under- furnished with the historic sense." This one sentence is
enough to reveal either the bigotry or the ignorance or the mixture
of both displayed by Saintsbury. It should be sufficient to remind
him that he offers no proof of his assertion, and not try to disprove
his words. But since the idea that Newman came to the Catholic
Church from " disappointment or disgust or restlessness or
wounded feeling or undue sensibility or other weakness," is still
prevalent in certain quarters, the refutation of the professor's
statement challenges an attention which he in his own person does
not command. And the method of the refutation is suggested by
the words of Newman : " False ideas may be refuted by argument,
but by true ideas alone are they expelled." I intend to show, then,
by an examination of the data Newman left in his works that he
was highly gifted with the historic sense, and thus present a true
idea of his ability as an historian.
Lord Acton, perhaps the greatest modern historian, says in one
of his letters to Mary Gladstone : " The great object in trying to
understand history, political, religious, literary or scientific, is to
get behind men and to grasp ideas. Ideas have a radiation and
development, an ancestry and posterity of their own." If Newman
be judged by this criterion of Acton's, he is surely well-furnished
with the historic sense. He cares for no fact merely as a phenome-
non, but only in so far as it is the realization in the outer world, of
590 CAMBRIDGE HISTORY [Feb.,
ideas energizing in the minds of those whose history he sketches.
He is a psychological, rather than an objective, historian. Not that
he neglects the objective element, not that he condescends to obscure
or conceal facts that tell against his heroes, but he refuses to
narrate, with the passionless candor of the purely ontological
historian, the great events of Christianity and the characters who
took part in them. And thus he is a greater realist than the merely
objective historian. For the creative ideas of men and their master-
motives are prior to the facts of history and are their true causes.
Even before examining his histories, we might anticipate that
Newman was a good historian, by an inference from the most
characteristic feature in his theory of knowledge, his distinction
between " notional" and " real" assent. His preference for " real"
assent, whose object is the concrete and particular, generated in him
the historic sense. History is, as Aristotle remarks in his Poetics,
the science of the particular. When once Newman's gifted historic
sense is grasped, the cardinal fact of his conversion is seen to be,
not the sentimental thing that Protestant polemic makes it, but the
inevitable issue of reasoning exercised upon the facts of history. He
studied the original documents of the Fathers so exhaustively that
he finally came to the pass where, in his own words, " To be deep
in history is to cease to be a Protestant." Besides, certain volumes
of Newman that we might not, on a hasty examination, place in the
category of history, are seen to belong there, since they narrate the
historical evolution of ideas. Thus The Present Position of Catholics
traces the historical course of Protestant prejudice; the Apologia
and Anglican Difficulties portray the ideas behind the Oxford Move-
ment; Loss and Gain becomes a psychological history only surpassed
by the Apologia. We can distinguish a triple gradation in Newman's
history of the development of ideas; first, their development in
individuals, then in nations of the world and Orders of the Church,
finally in the world at large and in the Church as a world-wide
society. But before exemplifying these three phases of evolving
ideas, it will be illuminating to give his view of the task imposed on
the historian of ideas, by citing a few passages from his Develop-
ment of Christian Doctrine:
" But, when some great enunciation about human nature or
present good or government or religion, is carried fonvard into the
public throng of men, and draws attention, then it is not merely
received passively in this or that form into many minds, but it
becomes an active principle within them, leading them to an ever
1918.] CAMBRIDGE HISTORY 591
new contemplation of itself, to an application of it in various
directions, and a propagation of it on every side. At first men will
not fully realize what it is that moves them, and will express and
explain themselves inadequately. There will be a general agitation
of thought and an action of mind upon mind. New lights will be
brought to bear upon the original statements of the doctrine put for-
ward; judgments and aspects will accumulate. After a time some
definite teaching emerges; and, as time proceeds, one view will be
modified or expanded by another, and then combined with a third;
till the idea to which these various aspects belong, will be to each
mind separately what at first it was only to all together. It will, in
proportion to its native vigor and subtlety, introduce itself into the
framework and details of social life, changing public opinion, and
strengthening or undermining the foundations of established order.
. . . .This process whether it be longer or shorter in point of
time, by which the aspects of an idea are brought into consistency
and form, I call its development, being the germination and matur-
ation of some truth or apparent truth on a large mental field ....
It is indeed sometimes said that the stream is clearest near the
spring. Whatever use may fairly be made of this image, it does
not apply to the history of a philosophy or belief, which on the
contrary is more equable, and purer, and stronger, when its bed has
become deep and broad and full. It necessarily rises out of an exist-
ing state of things, and for a time savors of the soil. Its vital
element needs disengaging from what is foreign and temporary,
and is employed in efforts after freedom wrhich become more
vigorous and hopeful as its years increase. In time it enters upon
strange territory; points of controversy alter their bearing; parties
rise and fall around it; dangers and hopes appear in new relations
and old principles reappear under new forms. It changes with them
in order to remain the same."
With the concept of history we have sketched above Newman
was ever imbued, and it is not surprising that after a lifetime of
study of the personalities of Church history he could crystallize in
pregnant paragraphy the ideas animating any one of them. This is
his characterization of Athanasius, his favorite Father of the
Church : " This renowned Father is in f cclesiastical history the
special doctor of the sacred truth which Arius denied, bringing
it out into shape and system so fully and luminously that he may be
said to have exhausted his subject, as far as it lies open to the
human intellect. But, besides this, writing as a controversialist, not
592 CAMBRIDGE HISTORY [Feb.,
primarily as a priest and teacher, he accompanies his exposition
of doctrine with manifestations of character which are of great
interest and value. The fundamental idea with which he starts in
the controversy, is a deep sense of the authority of tradition. It was
not his way to be fierce, as a matter of course, with those who
opposed him; his treatment of the semi-Arians is a proof of this.
It is the same prudent, temperate spirit and practical good sense,
which leads Athanasius, though the prime champion of the Nicene
Homoousion, to be so loath to use that formula .... It arises from
the same temper of mind that he is so self-distrustful and subdued in
his comments on Scripture; he, the foremost doctor of the Divine
Sonship, being the most modest as well as the most authoritative of
teachers. Erasmus seems to prefer him, as a writer, to all the Fathers
and certainly, in my own judgment, no one comes near him but
Chrysostom and Jerome."1
In a similar brief fashion, but with critically accurate historic
sense, Chrysostom is epitomized : " I consider St. Chrysostom's
charm to lie in his intimate sympathy and compassionateness for the
whole world, not only in its strength, but in its weakness; in the
lively regard with which he views everything that comes before
him, taken in the concrete, whether as made after its own kind, or
as gifted with a nature higher than its own. This specialty, I
conceive, is the interest which he takes in all things, not so far as
God has made them alike, but as He has made them different from
each other.
" I speak of the discriminating affectionateness with which he
accepts everyone for what is personal in him and unlike others.
I speak of his versatile recognition of men, one by one, for the
sake of that portion of good, be it more or less, of a lower order or
a higher, which has severally been lodged in them ; his eager con-
templation of the many things they do, effect, or produce, of all
their great works, as nations or as states; nay, even as they are
corrupted or disguised by evil, so far as that evil may in imagina-
tion be disjoined from their proper nature, or may be regarded
as a mere material disorder, apart from its formal character of
guilt. It is this observant benevolence which gives to his exposition
of Scripture its chief characteristic. He is known in ecclesiastical
literature as the expounder, above all others, of its literal sense.2"
But not only saints and doctors of sacred science pass before
us as we read Newman's historical sketches. Proud and subtle
*5f. Athanasius, vol. ii. tHistorical Sketches, vol. ii.
1918.] CAMBRIDGE HISTORY 593
heresiarchs like Arius, apostate emperors like Julian, sophistical
impugners of the Faith like Abelard are all woven into the texture
of his narrative, are all viewed as the embodiment of some one or
some few leading ideas. Let his portrait of Abelard stand for a
specimen of this power of reducing a seemingly versatile character
to a single master idea : " Great things are done by devotion to one
idea; there is one class of geniuses, who would never be what they
are, could they grasp a second. Men of one idea and nothing more,
whatever their merit, must be to a certain extent narrow-minded;
and it is not wonderful that Abelard's devotion to the new philos-
ophy made him undervalue the Seven Arts out of which it had
grown. He felt it impossible so to honor what was now to be added,
as not to dishonor what existed before. He would not suffer the
Arts to have their own use, since he had found a new instrument
for a new purpose.3" How much of Abelard's life may be under-
stood, especially how many of his misfortunes may be traced
directly to his dominant dialectic, is as evident from this short
selection as from a detailed history.
It would be sufficient to prove the validity of Newman's
historic sense, if we merely showed that he was able to penetrate
into the ideas animating the personalities he describes. But our
contention that he was a good historian will be confirmed by ad-
ducing some typical examples of his ability to characterize what
we may call corporate ideas, the dominant ideas, for instance, of
the religious orders or of various nations that cut across the path of
Church history. That this power of grasping corporate ideas was
Newman's in a high degree, is demonstrated in his story of the
Benedictine schools, in his remarks on the Dominicans and Jesuits,
in his histories of the Turks, Northmen and Normans, the Lom-
bards, the histories of the various heretical bodies, Arians, Luther-
ans, Anglicans.
According to Newman, the idea of conservatism in teaching
theology and Scripture was the striking intellectual characteristic
of the Benedictines. Their genius is thus delineated : " The monk
proposed to himself no great or systematic work, beyond that of
saving his soul. He cared little for knowledge, even theological, or
for success, even though it was religious. Tt is the character of
such a man to be contented, resigned, patient and incurious; to
create or originate nothing; to live by tradition. He does not
analyze, he marvels; his intellect attempts no comprehension of
*Historical Sketches, vol. iii.
VOL. CVI.— 38
594 CAMBRIDGE HISTORY [Feb.,
this multiform world, but on the contrary, it is hemmed in, and
shut up within it. It recognizes but one cause in nature and in
human affairs, and that is the First and Supreme." The monk
was in his theological studies " faithful, conscientious, affectionate,
obedient, like the good steward who keeps an eye on all his
master's goods and preserves them from waste and decay.4"
In other places Newman recognizes that the Dominicans and
Jesuits have their respective corporate ideas as different from each
other and from the Benedictines, as the creative Scholasticism
inaugurated by the Dominicans was different from the conser-
vatism of their predecessors. " St. Benedict," says Newman, " is
the historical emblem of the retreat of the Church from the world,
and St. Dominic of its return."
A collective estimate of the three religious orders is given in the
following paragraph : " Education follows the same lav/ : it has its
history in Christianity, and its doctors or masters in that history.
It has had three periods: the ancient, the mediaeval, the modern;
and there are three religious orders in those periods respectively,
which succeed, one the other, on its public stage, and represent the
teaching given by the Catholic Church during the time of their
ascendancy. Now, St. Benedict has had the training of the ancient
intellect, St. Dominic of the mediaeval; and St. Ignatius of the
modern. Next I proceed to contrast these three great masters of
Christian teaching with each other. To St. Benedict, then, let me
assign for his discriminating badge, the element of poetry; to St.
Dominic, the scientific element; to St. Ignatius, the practical."
Newman has no very extensive commentary on the Dominicans,
so I will conclude this illustration of corporate religious ideas by
citing a paragraph in which the Jesuit idea is delineated : " By
common consent, the palm of religious prudence, in the Aristotelic
sense of that comprehensive word belongs to the School of Religion
of which St. Ignatius is the Founder. That great Society is the
classical seat and fountain of, the school and pattern of discretion,
practical sense, and wise government. Sublimer conceptions or
more profound speculations may have been created or elaborated
elsewhere but, whether we consider the illustrious body in its own
constitution, or in its rules for instruction and direction, we sec that
it is its very genius to prefer this most excellent prudence to every
other gift, and to think little of poetry and of science, unless they
happen to be useful. It is true that, in the long catalogue of its
*Historical Sketches, vol. ii.
1918.] CAMBRIDGE HISTORY 595
members, there are to be found the names of the most consummate
theologians, and of scholars the most elegant and accomplished;
but we are speaking here, not of individuals, but of the body itself.
It is plain that the body is not over- jealous of its theological tradi-
tions or it certainly would not suffer Suarez to controvert with
Molina, Viva with Vasquez, Passaglia with Petavius, and Faure
with Suarez, De Lugo and Valentia. In this intellectual freedom
its members justly glory; inasmuch as they have set their affections,
not on the opinions of the Schools, but on the souls of men.5 "
How Newman can describe the corporate idea of a nation,
may be shown in his portayal of the common characteristic of the
Northmen and Normans : " War was their life. It was almost
their summum bonum; good in itself, though nothing came of it.
His very worship was to do battle; his rite of sacrifice was a pas-
sage of arms. He couched his lance to decide the question of fact,
that his lady was the beautifullest woman in creation; he drew his
sword on the blasphemer to convince him of the sanctity of the
Gospel; and he passed abruptly from demolishing churches and
burning towns to the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre from the unclean
infidel. They destroyed for destroying-sake, because it was good
to destroy ; it was a display of power, and power made them gods.
They seemed as though they were possessed by some inward torment,
which needed outlet, and which degraded them to the madness of
their own Berserkers in the absence of some nobler satisfaction.
Their fearful activity was their mode of searching out something
great, they knew not what, the idea of which haunted them. Hence,
too, when they had advanced some steps in the path of civilization,
from this nature or habit of restlessness they could not bear
neutrality ; they interfered actively in the cause of right, in propor-
tion as they gave up the practice of wrong.6"
Let this exemplification of corporate ideas conclude with the
description of the idea of an ecclesiastical body. The Oxford Move-
ment is thus outlined by Newman : " It has been formed on one
idea, which has developed into a body of teaching, logical in the
arrangement of its portions and consistent with the principles on
which it originally started. That idea, or first principle, was
ecclesiastical liberty; the doctrine which it especially opposed was
the heresy of Erastus, the Royal Supremacy. The object of its
attack was the Establishment, considered simply as such.7"
* Historical Sketches, vol. ii. 'Historical Sketches, vol. iii.
* Difficulties of Anglicans, vol. L
596 CAMBRIDGE HISTORY [Feb.,
After considering the evolution of ideas in individuals and in
nations and bodies, national or ecclesiastical, we arrive at the third
method of viewing ideas. This third method reduces to a higher
unity the ideas of personalities and societies, and investigates them
in the world-wide Church and the world ever in antagonism to it.
The process of the development of ideas from the origin of
Christianity to the present time, was at once the cause of Newman's
conversion and its sufficient warrant. What kept him out of the
Catholic Church so long was his conviction that, while the Anglican
Church had the note of Apostolicity, the Church had only that of
Catholicity. The Anglican always grounded his argument on the
Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus of Vincent of Lerins,
thereby excluding what he called the innovations of Rome. But,
arguing on a partial view of the author quoted, after the manner
of all heretics, he failed to notice another passage in the same
treatise of Vincent of Lerins which hints that doctrine may be so
metamorphosed in course of time, that its later form may be to its
earlier as the full-grown man is to the child : " Ut quamvis unius
ejusdem hominis status habitusque mutetur, una tamen nihilominus
eademque natura, una eademque persona sit."
When Newman retired to Littlemore, the conviction, enforced
by his reading of the Fathers, came upon him irresistibly that what
he had formerly thought corruptions of Romanism, depriving it of
the note of Apostolicity, were in reality only legitimate develop-
ments of the original dogmatic deposit. It must not be imagined,
however, that this process of development was that of the Modern-
ist, a purely subjective one, a sort of bubbling up of dogma from
the inner consciousness of the believer. The objectivity of dog-
matic development could be proved by numerous passages in the
Cardinal's works. Let the following quotation from his speech in
acceptance of the Cardinalate serve as a typical utterance on the
objectivity of dogma : " For thirty, forty, fifty years I have resisted
to the best of my powers the spirit of Liberalism in religion.
Liberalism in religion is the doctrine that there is no positive truth
in religion. It is inconsistent with any recognition of any religion
as true. It teaches that all are to be tolerated, for all are matters of
opinion; revealed religion is not a truth, but a sentiment and a taste ;
not an objective fact, not miraculous, and it is the right of each
individual to make it say just what strikes his fancy."
There is a sentence of Newman's essay on Abelard which con-
tains in embryo the entire Essay on Development: " The oracles
CAMBRIDGE HISTORY 597
of Divine Truth, as time goes on, do but repeat one message from
above which they have uttered since the tongues of fire attested the
coming of the Paraclete; still, as time goes on, they utter it with
greater force and precision, under diverse forms, with fuller
luminousness, and a richer ministration of thought, statement and
argument." For an outline of the argument for development one
of the opening chapters of the Essay on Development will suffice:
" The following essay is directed towards a solution of the difficulty,
as far as it exists, which lies in the way of our using in controversy
the testimony of our most natural informant concerning the doc-
trine and worship of Christianity, viz., the history of eighteen
hundred years. The view oh which it was written, has at all times,
perhaps, been implicitly adopted by theologians, that the increase
and expression of the Christian creed and ritual, and the variations
which have attended the process in the case of individual writers
and Churches, are the necessary attendants on any philosophy or
polity which takes possession of the intellect and heart and has had
any wide or extended dominion; that, from the nature of the
human mind, time is necessary for the full comprehension and per-
fection of great ideas; and that the highest and most wonderful
truths, though communicated to the world once for all by inspired
teachers, could not be comprehended all at once by the recipients,
but, as being received and by minds not inspired and through media
which were human, have required only the longer time and deeper
thought for their full elucidation."
Such is the general plan on which Newman would have worked
out the doctrinal developments which, in his Anglican days, he had
considered unjustifiable additions to the primitive creed. As a
matter of fact, he only partially worked it out, a heavy task, and
left the book in its unfinished state. To complete it was impossible,
as Newman himself says : " It would be the work of a life to apply
the Theory of Development so carefully to the writings of the
Fathers, and to the history of controversies and councils as thereby
to vindicate the reasonableness of every decision of Rome."
In the light of the evidence adduced above, Professor Saints-
bury's assertion of Newman's lack of historic sense, is untenable.
The few examples of his historic sense cited, are enough to show, at
least in outline, that the Cardinal investigated his sources in the
critical and philosophical spirit desired by Lord Acton. Moreover,
is it not extremely improbable that Newman would have considered,
598 SAINTS' GOLD [Feb.,
as a province for slovenly endeavor, one-fourth of his works? Nor
should his modest title of Historical Sketches deceive anyone into
thinking them fragmentary or uncritical since they are really scien-
tific monographs. It should also be remembered that the century
almost spanned by our historian's life was distinguished from its
rationalistic predecessor by the rise of and estimation for scientific
history and the consequent appeal to its testimony in sanction of the
various movements of thought. The Oxford Movement, under the
guidance of Newman, was no exception to this rule. Finally, if we
needed to confirm by authority a conclusion based on the examina-
tion of actual data, we would refer, not to a mere literary critic like
Mr. Saintsbury, but to a historian of the first rank, Dollinger,
who spoke of Newman as " the greatest living authority on the
history of the first three centuries of the Christian Era."
SAINTS' GOLD.
BY JOHN BUNKER.
WHOSO is faithful warden of desire,
And o'er his bosom wields control complete,
Hath deep within his soul a bower meet
For shadowy ease and chaunt of woodland quire ;
Nay, 'tis a sacred region walled with fire,
A sanctuary pure, a calm retreat
Of healing thoughts and claustral silence sweet
Whence all the ills o' the seeming world retire.
But if he should his wild desires unpen
Upon this precious plot and it despoil,
The snake Remorse about his heart shall coil
And this fair garth become a viperous den;
For this is truth, if any truth's to tell,
In man's own breast he bears his Heaven or Hell.
THE MISFORTUNES OF MR. JONES
BY G. K. CHESTERTON.
T is very odd that anyone should have ever said that
an Englishman's home is his castle. For the truth
is that an Englishman is almost the only man in the
Western Hemisphere whose house is not his castle —
a misfortune he shares to a very great extent, I
understand, with the members of the other Anglo-Saxon civilization
across the Atlantic. An Englishman's home is merely a fort of
which he is put in charge by a landlord whose vassal he is. The
French peasant's home is really his castle ; though it is by no means
a romantic castle. The Spanish peasant's house is really his castle ;
and it is by no means a castle in Spain. Even an Irish peasant's
house (under recent and just legislation) is often his castle, if it is
only a castle of mud. But the two people today, apparently, who,
even when they gain profit and security from a house, cannot, as a
general rule, claim this defiant and chivalric possession of it, are
Englishmen proper or else descendants of an originally English
civilization in other lands. The French or Irish peasant might
actually put battlements or drawbridges onto his cottage if he chose;
the Irishman would not do it because he is troubled with a sense of
humor; the Frenchman would not do it because it would cost
money. But they might if they liked; because they now, nearly all
of them, own their own houses. But if the average Englishman
(or American) tried furtively to stick on battlements or to rig up a
drawbridge in the night, he would find his landlord inaccessible to
their romantic outline; and even talking in a dreary way about
depreciating the property.
The average modern Englishman (and again I unwillingly
include the average modern American) has not a home, let alone a
cottage ; the only question that follows is, do they want one ? And
the answer is most certainly, yes. The common Englishman, or
American, if he were making the world to suit himself, would
certainly give himself a personal building and habitation, standing
separate upon a square of earth. In short, he wants a private
house. I concede at once, with enthusiasm, that he also wants a
public house. I agree that he enjoys all the things that Socialism
6oo THE MISFORTUNES OF MR. JONES [Feb.,
can give, the public park, the public library, the public picture
gallery. But no one wants to sleep in a public picture
gallery — at least no one with whom I am personally acquainted.
Along with this idea of privacy goes the idea of property; a man
cannot really lie down and rest except on six foot of ground to
which he has a right. It is useless to discuss this; it is delicate,
because it is deep. You can call the sentiment of ownership mystical,
if you call the fear of death mystical, or the desire of progeny
mystical. All we can say is, that if we dig to the bottom of our
brains, these things are there. The sense of property, for instance,
is one of the very first things which children feel to be just. A
baby of three can appreciate the ultimate idea that a thing can be
sacred to a person and inseparable from him. It may be said that
this moral idea they receive from their elders. Perhaps; but the
interesting thing is that this moral idea they receive with rapture.
They throw themselves into it with an enthusiasm which they do
not show for many of the other most important didactic ideals. We
find none of that difficulty here which really embarrasses us in
explaining to children the social utility of truth or its complicated
limitation by courtesy. Meum and Tuum are to the child as plain as
pancakes; he feels that the person can own objects. But if we tried
to put it by saying that the animate merely rules the inanimate,
even that would not be quite right. Children (and grown-up people
too) have in their ownership an obscure idea even of loyalty to the
thing. A little boy who has gone to bed without his toy gun does
not merely feel that he is sad without the gun. He also feels that
in some transcendental way, the gun is sad without him. And it is no
good calling this fetish-worship and saying that the boy believes the
gun to be alive ; the boy is not such a fool. He has simply a vague
idea that he has left a part of himself somewhere and that part is
not doing itself justice. But if anyone calls it fetish- worship, it is
sufficient to answer that the thing is quite as plain in adults as in
infants. The ordinary grown man has a notion of something
which is, in some dark way, due even to the dead things which he
owns. He says, " I owe it to my roof." He says, " I would not
pollute my sword." He talks of the honor of a rock or the reputa-
tion of a meadow. But above all he feels it about the holy box in
which he lives. Even when he is boasting of his living blood and
progeny, he actually prefers to refer to it in terms of brick and
mortar. His proudest name for the Jones family is " The House
of Jones."
1918.] THE MISFORTUNES OF MR. JONES 601
Now, you may say that Mr. Jones, the average Englishman or
American, can never get back that plain possession of a plain home.
You may say (with some historical plausibility) that he never had
it. Certainly, and especially in the case of 'the English branch of the
Jones family, he never had it perfectly and for any considerable
period; his ownership was always hampered and very frequently
disturbed. It would be a tolerable proposition that an Englishman,
for instance, had never owned. But if you fancy that a man cannot
bewail the loss of something that he has never had, then you have
not begun to be human, or even alive. That is the first and most
fascinating difference between man and the beasts, that man i?
mourning for something which has never been in history, is always
remembering something that is not in his experience. If I printed
in large letters on the book cover " The Horse without Horns," you
would think it an unreasonable expression. If I were to write as a
headline " The Fish who Lost his Legs," you would consider the
phrase for some time with a knitted brow. At last you would point
out that no horses have horns and no fish have legs; so fearlessly
do you face the last discoveries of science. But you would not think
it odd if I called a book " The Man who Lost his Innocence,"
though, in truth, no men have been innocent in all human history.
You would not think it strange to say " The Restless Man," though,
indeed, none of our race have ever really rested on this earth. In
the same way it is not unnatural of a man that he is specially " The
Homeless Man ;" and it is true to say it of our friend, Mr. Jones.
Now, we will say that Mr. Jones was just about to move with
his wife and baby into his little villa, when something suddenly
'vent wrong with the drains ; or some rich creditor foreclosed upon
the property; or for some other reason he was abruptly kept out
of what he already regarded as his own. I can imagine some fine
writer who could combine realism with the fantastic, some writer
like Mr. H. G. Wells, composing a wild and yet most human
romance about it. Jones circles hopelessly round his lost house in
a nomadic state all his life, going first into the street, then into poor
lodgings, then to a too-expensive hotel, then to a middling boarding-
house, then to a workhouse; but never losing hope and always
expecting to get his luggage into his own home at last. So far the
story would be only made out of that plain poetry which is the
stuff of our daily life. But the element of the fantastic (and also
of the allegorical) would enter into the story through this very odd
circumstance; that at every stage of that weary and disjointed
602 THE MISFORTUNES OF MR. JONES [Feb.,
waiting, people assured Mr. Jones that his uncomfortable and
temporary condition was really much better than the home life he
was trying to get. When first he was flung out of his new house
and had to picnic anyhow in the front garden, the passers-by paused
and assured him with public benevolence, that he was now back in
the splendid struggle with Nature, out of which all energies arose.
When he paid rent to a savage and miserly landlady, he was
informed that this keen economic competition between the landlady
and himself, was the origin of all natural wealth. When he went
to the boarding-house, he was told that in that place the higher
vision of brotherhood and sisterhood had superseded the extinct
cultus of the family. When he went to the expensive hotel, he was
told to admire the march of science; and asked if he expected to
have fifteen telephones in the hut which he so weakly regretted.
And when he came ultimately to the workhouse, was fed by the
municipality on cocoa and even worked at times under the threat of
flogging, then he was finally assured that he had entered the
Socialist state which is the only solution of human ills ; in which the
Social Organism is the only true living thing. And yet, such is the
old-world obstinacy of the Joneses, they still want to get back to
their own house.
This is not a farce but a very fair statement of the actual
history of Jones — especially Jones the peasant — or what ought to
have been the peasant. His history has been one permanent pis
alter. And worst of all it has been a pis oiler offered as perfection.
His fate has always been a second best which some fashionable
craze assured him was a first best. He was assured that every
dreary lodging and desolate club he entered, was better than that
impossible private house. Age after age, the colleges and instructed
classes tried to get him to be " contented" and do his duty in that
state of life into which it had pleased them to kick him. Age after
age, they tried (with a tired amiability) not to get Jones what he
wanted, but to get Jones to want what he got. I can give you this,
without carrying the historical summary too far back, in a few
lines.
For our purpose we may roughly leave out of account the
small pagan cities or the clear mediaeval theory, in which property
had a principle right or wrong; the period of which I am talking
began with the rise of modern civilization. It begins at the Renais-
sance, that fountain of inspiration and expansion, that fountain
of complexity and crime; and in England (where we shall especially
1918.] THE MISFORTUNES OF MR. JONES 603
follow the misfortunes of Jones), it begins about the time when
William Shakespeare had discovered how to write romantic
tragedies and Sir John Hawkins had discovered how to enslave
negroes.
From that time onward, through the seventeenth century
especially and largely through the eighteenth, the real growth was
the growth of the large landowners — swollen by the stolen monastic
and common lands. The country became decidedly, and as some
think incurably, an aristocracy; and undoubtedly produced many
great gentlefnen who gave glory to their country. But their basis
was their territorial wealth. Modern romantic writers are never
tired of telling us that being an aristocrat and a gentleman does not
depend upon money. But it does; it does quite decisively if we are
talking about a whole aristocracy. A lord may be poor, just as a
money-lender may go bankrupt. But the principal essence of being
a money-lender, is having money to lend. And the primary essence
of being a lord, is being a landlord. I need not retell the tale which
is now being slowly and reluctantly told by everybody of the bland
and brutal campaign of annexation which for two centuries the
English aristocracy waged against the English people — from the
first seizure of the monastic lands and property — the impudence
of illegal fences and the worse impudence of legal ingenuity in the
seizure of the commons. The decisions of a thousand Justices of the
Peace have been gibbeted in one good rhyme :
You prosecute the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common ;
But leave the larger felon loose
Who steals the common from the goose.
But indeed it is not our point to expatiate on this. Our point
is that something soothed Jones all through his history into a
strange submission to his own enslavement. If the great lords stole
the common from the goose, he must have been a great goose surely
to stand it. Why did he stand it? He stood it because he was even
then told that his despoilers stood for progress, for patriotic
efficiency and for a new order of things. Especially his squire
claimed to stand for Protestant England against the Pope, and for
parliament against the King. He consented to be landlord-ridden
in order not to be priest-ridden; and a " House of Commons" came
at last to be a final substitute for every commoner having a house.
" How much better," he was told, " to follow the young squire in his
604 THE MISFORTUNES OF MR. JONES [Feb.,
protest against Popery (or the poisonous Stuarts), than to have a
mere private house."
The two great movements that have happened since the Re-
formation can but be defined as the solemn sanctification of two
cardinal sins. The aristocratic movement ultimately amounted to
the declaration that pride is not a sin. The Manchester, or Com-
mercial Movement, which followed it. amounted to the assertion
that avarice is not a sin. It is in this dogma alone that the Industrial
Movement differed from mankind. A French peasant may grab
at gold as much as a Manchester or Chicago merchant. But when
a French peasant wants to worship a saint, he does not worship a
man who grabbed at gold, but one who flung it away. But the
industrial or laissez-faire philosophy admired money-grubbing as
well as practised it; it called the thing "enterprise" and "self-
help." Nations not filled with smoke and certain chemical smells,
it described as nations in decay. Its offer to the laborers (who
ought to have been peasants) was simply the discipline of hunger
and hatred with the chance of being a Lord Mayor. All that the
Manchester or Chicago plutocrat did for his workers (as far as I
can make out) was to bang them again and again on the head ; and
then look at them admiringly and call them " hard-headed." And
if again at this stage Jones began to mention a house, he was at
once answered, "Is it not better to have a millionth chance of that
marvelous house which Arkwright built than to have a mere
private house ?"
There was a reaction against the Manchester or laissez-faire
school — but it did nothing towards getting Jones nearer to his
own house. On the contrary, it wanted him to go further away
from it, It wanted him to see his real happiness — it wanted him to
find it somewhere else than where he was. The English Jones was
urged to " colonize ;" the American Jones to " seek his fortune"
out West. The temporary overflow of the population in England
(which was as accidental as a pot boiling over), the temporary
possibility of rapid amassing of wealth in Western America, was
perceived as another opportunity of dividing Jones from his
original foolish dream. Let him go forth and annex the universe —
then he would not annex his own home. " Go forth, heroic Jones,
that little log hut you will build in the wilds, will be far more
glorious than any private house."
The force that now threatens to take the place of that, which
for want of a better word, I shall call imperialism, is like all the
1918.] THE MISFORTUNES OF MR. JONES 605
rest in this, that it has no good word for Jones' house into which
he planned to bring his wife and children long ago. Socialism and
the individualistic philosophy of the Manchester School of laissez-
faire are very nearly the same. They are identical in their funda-
mental conception of daily life. Both imagine that the mass of the
people must be submissive wage-earners. Only the Manchester
individualists told them to submit to inhuman selfishness, while the
Socialist seems to think they will submit to an inhuman idealism.
Both, in short, regard the normal man as an employee . Both forget
that over half the planet, the average man is an employer; a proud
and exacting employer who employs himself. Under Manchester
conditions, for instance, Jones has become separated from his wife,
for whom he had largely planned the house. She had looked,
perhaps, to making the inside of that house her own, to exercise
that omnipotence on a small scale, that was her privilege against the
masculine power on a larger scale. But under the nightmare of
Manchester, she has to go and turn a handle that makes cotton, while
her husband turns another handle that makes jam, neither of them
caring in the least whether it makes green fire or crocodiles. Does
the Socialist propose to alter this sexual separation or this unmean-
ing toil ? Not at all. The Socialist only says : " Think, my dear
Jones, how much better it will be when your wife is a separate
citizen like yourself, has a vote and a fixed rate of wages; how
much finer that will be than that obstinate fancy of yours to own
a Private House, which really . . . . "
I daresay Jones would submit to this as he has submitted to
all the other side-packings of his old and simple desire. The rich
kept his" house to protect it against Popery, they kept it to employ
it for economic progress, and they may perhaps continue to keep it
in order to help in constructing a Socialist society. Jones who has
asked for so little and been offered so much, who has been offered
a new world when he only wanted a small piece of the old, will
probably continue to wander hopelessly round the little house he
wanted and find all the roads up; and the little lanterns burning in
the barricades like the broad swords that prevent a return to
Paradise. When Socialism has been succeeded by some other fad
of the universities, I suppose Tones will still be hanging about,
wondering when he will be allowed to finish his honeymoon.
SURSUM CORDA!— SOME NOTES ON WAR POETRY.
BY CHARLES PHILLIPS.
HE World War is producing poetry — and poetry. We
have, for example, poetry about the War ; and poetry
of the War. Some of the poetry about the War has
been splendid. Where it has truly sung of the reach-
ing of the bloody hand of Mars unto the very hearts
and hearthstones of the people, here at home — or in Europe — it
has been vivid and authentic. Such poems as Mrs. Schuyler Van
Rensselaer's It Is Well With the Child,1 or Katharine Tynan's High
Summer;2 many of the poems of the Vigilantes, known largely
through the daily press; Henry Van Dyke's The Red Flower?
written within sound of the guns: these are authentic, true poems
" of " the War. John Oxenham's The Vision Splendid* though
obvious and at times crude, is saved by its very authenticity. At
rare moments, too, there have been singers (like Robert Haven
Schauffler with his The White Comrade*} whose imagination, fired
by the call to arms, or touched to flame by the hand of anguish and
loss, has swept clear to the actual scene of conflict and pictured
with the consummate power of inspiration the heroisms and horrors
of modern battle. All this is good. It is poetry about the War, and
even, in a degree, poetry of the War. Yet it often happens that the
reader, with a vague instinctive resentment, rejects in his soul the
singer who sings of a war which he still knows only by hearsay or
imagination, or even through the finest sympathy. Such poetry
served well enough in the days when only civilian bards sang war;
but now we have come upon the hour when the common soldier
finds himself articulate. Now, it would seem, the true soldier-song,
the true poetry " of" the War remains the right and prerogative of
the man who goes into the trenches to fight — and who sings while
he fights. He it is who must give us the real poetry " of" the
present conflict.
He is giving it, in remarkable abundance, and of rare quality.
Already between thirty and forty volumes of war poetry, written
^Atlantic Monthly, September, 1917. 'Los Angeles Tidings, November 2, 1917.
*Scribner's, New York. 4George H, Doran Co., New York.
*The Outlook, December 22, 1915.
1918.] SURSUM CORD A! 607
by men who have fought and died, or are fighting and writing still
—or else mending their wounds only to return again to the fray —
have appeared in print in this country and England. Half of these
men at least have gone down in the fight, and only their song
remains. But the song will live — because not only is the quantity of
this poetry surprising in its bulk, but also its quality is high. And
it is likewise not only in great part real literature, as literary stand-
ards go, but documentary history, as well, of the most priceless
value. In the dim future, when wars are so few and far between
as to be almost forgotten — God speed that day, the white dawn of
which these soldier poets of the present are now so heroically build-
ing out of the very fabric of their souls, singing as they build ! —
when treatises on arms and armament are gathering dust on the
shelf with other useless curiosities of antiquity, this poetry of
the World War will remain, a living voice from the dead past,
chronicling as no master strategist, no technician nor historian ever
can, the true story of the titanic struggle.
The War is not only giving us poetry, but is giving birth to
poets (since poets, we remember, must be born) ! It is true, of,
course, that some of these singers whose voices have come up to us
out of the mud and blood of Flanders, or from the hot sands of
Gallipoli, like " the leaping rapture of the lark" (as Robert Service
sings it in his Rhymes of a Red Cross Man6) were trained poets of
name and achievement before ever they went into the conflict; but
out of it they have emerged reborn, beyond all measuring greater
then they entered, because now they have not only seen life, but
have tasted of the bitter tincture of death. " Death is as interesting
to me as life, I have seen so much of it, from Suvla to Strumnitza,
and now in France," wrote Francis Ledwidge, Ireland's " poet of
the blackbird," a few weeks before he fell on the Western Front :
already he was regretting that his first book, Songs of the Fields, a
pre-war production, ever had been published, so far ahead of his old
self had he been swept by the red tides of war. And Patrick
MacGill, stark realist and morbid pessimist of The Dead End in
1914, now comes home wounded and on furlough, the author -of
Soldier Songs7 which reveal him changed to a sane, clear-seeing
singer of hearty courage and manly camaraderie. . . .But others
were not poets at all (except potentially) until they went
down with their loaded rifles into the riven earth to fight and to
•Barse & Hopkins, New York. 'E. P. Button & Co., New York.
608 SURSVM CORD A! [Feb.,
face eternity; or, marching to the transports or the trenches,
touched elbows with their common fellows and came at last to
know life and to sing of it.
The two most famous names so far given us out of the
deadly turmoil of the War, are those of Rupert Brooke8 and Alan
Seeger. Both were poets of high rank; both were killed in action.
Of Seeger, an American, more later. Of Brooke, there can be little
said now to add to the eulogies his fine singing has won. The point
to make is this: That Rupert Brooke, like the majority of his
fellows, was served by the War, in that it enabled him finally to
achieve (again like his fellows) some measure at least of the great-
ness of which previously he had only given promise. He was a poet
of attainments already when the summons came, to which he
responded so characteristically with his " Well, if Armageddon is
on, I suppose I ought to be there!" But he was one who had not
escaped altogether (as some of his poems show) the too often fatal
" ferment of the youth of genius." In the end, and all too soon,
while youth was yet his in full flower, the War hushed his voice
and stilled his hand; but not until it had begun, at least, to work
the inevitable change in him, deepening the waters of his spirit so
that more and more they moved unfretted by surface winds, more
and more obedient to the tidal forces of God and Eternity. The
•finest element in the poetry of Rupert Brooke is its social spirit,
its liberal uprightness, its fairness, its total lack of hatred or ani-
mosity in the midst of a universal clamor of bitterness.
Rupert Brooke's fame was not a little heightened by his lovable
personality, and by reason of the fact that he was the first English
poet to fall in defence of the freedom of the world. He was a
romantic figure, handsome, manly and amiable, and none knowing
him or his work could help regretting deeply his untimely taking off.
But there are those now who wonder if his poetry has in it as much
of the element of permanency as was first credited to it. No such
fears, however assail the critics and appraisers of Francis Ledwidge,
the young Lance Corporal who fell in action July 31, 1917, and
who, according to Lord Dunsany, " would have surpassed even
Burns" had he survived the War; while the dictum of Herbert
Jenkins is that " had he lived, I believe he would have been one of
the world's greatest poets." Ledwidge's likeness, which Lord
Dunsany remarks, to Burns, gives the key to his quality. He was
8 Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke. John Lane Co., New York.
I9i8.] SURSUM CORD A! 609
of the people. Although as Katharine Tynan expresses it,9 he was
" a peasant only by accident" — " all gentlehood, bora refined," and
totally incapable of the " peasant coarseness" which in Bobbie
Burns could inspire such a poem as To a Louse on a Lady's Bonnet
in Church — Ledwidge was still essentially of the people, his songs
heart-songs, and his soul, having come to a spiritual vision far
surpassing the half-lights of Brooke's pagan soul, seeing and sing-
ing of God Himself. It is Lord Dunsany who has brought out Led-
widge's last book, which he has called Songs of Peace,10 because in
the midst of all war's clamor and horror (" It is all like the end of
a beautiful world," Ledwidge told Mrs. Tynan in one of his letters
from the trenches) he sang of peace — of the things the heart and
the soul of man loves and cherishes. " I am always homesick," he
wrote; and yet
Roaming, I am listening still,
Bending, listening overlong,
In my soul a steadier will,
In my heart a newer song.
It was this same " steadier will," this same " newer song," that
the War gave to Julian Grenfell, who died from his battle wounds
in May, 1915. Grenfell was not only a poet but a soldier also
when Armageddon came. He already knew arms and the service,
and was already known in letters. But war, actual participation
in the War of wars, gave him the fuller vision which makes his
poetry now a living thing. It made him write Into Battle,11 com-
posed just before his death, and one of the immortal utterances, it
would seem, of the great struggle. Ranking with Grenfell and
Brooke and Ledwidge, was Lieutenant W. N. Hodgson, who wrote
under the name of " Edward Melbourne," and who fell in the bat-
tle of the Somme. Before Action is his best known poem, full of
high resolute purpose — a soldier's poem which reveals authentically
a soldier's soul facing the final struggle.
The youth of these poets of the War is one of their most
striking and most pathetic characteristics, though theirs is, in
truth, as Emily Hickey says in her poem, Killed: Aged ip, 20, 21:
Bright boyhood sprung to splendor of manhood, still
Keeping the dew of youth
Not cut off in promise unfulfilled,
But bearing autumn's fruit in springtime's leaves.12
THE CATHOLIC WORLD, November, 1917. "Herbert Jenkins, London.
"In Cunliffe's Poems of the Great War. "CATHOLIC WORLD, Sept., 1917.
VOL. cvi. — 39
6io SURSUM CORD A! [Feb.,
Brooke was only twenty-nine. Ledwidge was younger still. Hodg-
son was in his twenties. Alfred Ratcliffe, friend and college mate
of Brooke, was, like him, twenty-nine. And there was Charles
Hamilton Sorley, only twenty-one when he fell, yet already author
of a volume of poems (Marlborough and Other Poems),13 which
is full of big things and bigger promise. His All the Hills and
Vales Among is a real achievement. A month or so before Sorley's
death, Andrew, Viscount Stewart, a lieutenant in the Sixth Royal
Scots Fusiliers, fell in action — another youngster, a poet whom
the War inspired to memorable utterance. Outside of academic
circles he was unknown as a poet before the War. So also was
Robert Sterling, whose poems, since his death " out there " have
already run into a second edition. He was a mere boy, and only
in 1914, the year the War began, won the Newdgate Prize at
Oxford. One of the most popular war poems in England has been
But a Short Time to Live, the work of another mere lad, Leslie
Coulson. Coulson was a sergeant in the Royal Fusiliers, and fell
leading a charge on the Western Front in October, 1916. Before
Flanders, he had served in Gallipoli, Egypt and Malta, and from all
these fields had sent home stirring songs of the War. The poems
of Lieutenant H. Rex Freston from Somewhere in Flanders have
likewise been popular, and attracted wide attention in the British
press. He was an Exeter man, author of The Quest of Truth, and
fellin action two years ago, in January, 1916.
But the Western Front has not claimed all the poets. Brooke
died on a hospital ship in the ^Egean Sea, while journeying to the
Dardanelles, after having served two years in the West. Alexander
Cowie — only a boy of twenty-two, and yet the author of some of
the War's most stirring and graphic poetry — fell in Mesopotamia,
fighting for the relief of Kut. Like Rupert Brooke, he was a
Cambridge man and showed in his writing a decided classical in-
clination. Lieutenant Bumpus, of the Australian Field Artillery, died
in hospital in Cairo from his wounds, and on his deathbed wrote
Passing By, a vivid and pathetic piece, just lightly touched with
humor, and one of the most widely copied poems of the War. It
made a tremendous impression in England, and with its haunting
refrain, " Passing by, passing by," on which the poet rang many
telling changes, will probably have a long life as a popular poem.
Brian Brooke was another who served in the East — in British East
Africa — though he fell at the Somme. In both scenes of the strug-
" Erskine Macdonald, London.
1918.] SURSUM CORD A! 611
gle he lifted up his heart in song. Another poet-victim of the
Somme offensive was Richard Dennys, the very title of whose book
of war poems, There Is No Death,1'1 tells the story of what im-
mortal prize he plucked from the red jaws of Mars.
These soldier poets often reveal much in their titles. The Un-
dying Splendor15 is the name of John William Streets' volume,
fruitage of the mind of a naturally gifted man, all his life a simple
Derbyshire coal miner until the War claimed him, to show him
forth a poet as well as a hero. In the trenches he composed a series
of sonnets which so impressed the distinguished English actor,
Henry B. Irving, that he read them himself before the Poetry So-
ciety of London. " I have tried to picture some thoughts that pass
through a man's brain when he dies," this poet wrote to his pub-
lisher; "but I may not see the end of the poems." Nor did he.
He was reported missing in July, 1916, and on May I, 1917, nearly
a year later, was officially listed among the killed. Of Streets'
poems Galloway Kyle, the successor of Stephen Phillips as editor of
the London Poetry Review, says: " Here Kitchener's men become
articulate."18
Thus the list grows. I do not review my pages to count ex-
actly how many soldier poets I have already spoken of : enough, at
least, to give some idea of what is being done in the production of
genuine poetry " of " the War. Yet there are still others who can-
not be passed over. There was Frederic Manning who, before his
brave death, cried out from the trench :
O God of Sorrows,
Whose feet come softly through the dew,
Stoop Thou unto us,
For we die that Thou livest!17
-*• ^*/i^^:^j?lj^rt£5^ j
There was Thomas Kettle, Irish college professor and gallant
soldier, whose Poems and Parodies18 have just appeared in
America. His quick, free mind focussed the world-conflict at its
very opening, in a glorious indignation that sent him marching off
from the peaceful halls of learning to meet death in the trench.
He wrote for his daughter a memorable sonnet from the Somme
(where he fell in action last September), the concluding lines of
"John Lane Co., New York. "Erskine Macdonald, London.
"Songs of the Fighting Men and More Songs of the Fighting Men, collected by
Galloway Kyle. Erskine Macdonald, London.
"The Dial, May 17, 1917. "Frederick A. Stokes Co., New York.
6i2 SURSUM CORD A! [Feb.,
which answer for all time the questioning of those who would ask
why such men, abandoning everything, went " to dice with death :"
So here, while the mad guns curse overhead,
And tired men sigh with mud for couch and floor,
Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,
Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor,
But for a dream, born in a herdsman's shed,
And for the secret Scripture of the poor.
There was Edward Thomas (" Edward Eastaway "), one of
the most vibrant voices of the war-time choir, a poet of true Cymric
vision, for whom John Freeman, the English poet and essayist, has
recently published a memorial volume. And there was Dixon Scott,
whom Robert Hield, of the London Post, has likewise celebrated in
a memorial.
Nor are all the soldier poets dead. There is James Mackereth,
whose book The Red Red Dawn19 appeared in November; Leo
Ward (son of the late Wilfrid Ward) who, with his Oxford chum,
Innes Stitt — both in active service — has just brought out a joint
volume, Tomorrow and Other Poems;20 " Etienne," a lieutenant of
the Royal Navy, who sings of the sailor at war in Verses from the
Grand Fleet;21 Eric Chilman, whose masterpiece, After Days, ap-
peared recently in the London Poetry Review; and Lieutenant
Mackintosh of the Seaforth Highlanders, whose A Highland Regi-
ment22 celebrates the more obvious side of the martial life. It is
mostly a lusty shout for the glories of gun and blade, and very well
done, of its kind.
These are all British poets (the majority of them, it is readily
noted, either Scotch or Irish) ; but already America, still newly
entered upon the universal struggle, has sounded her singing voice
in the trenches. Alan Seeger23 saw to that, in the very beginning — •
that gifted poet whose " rendezvous with death " was kept indeed, as
he prophesied. There is a tremendous effect of exaltation in
Seeger's Champagne and The Aisne — they have much of the fire
that is the one thing lacking, in a great degree, in all our poetry of
the War; but his / Have a Rendezvous With Death, full of the
premonition which we find voiced sooner or later in the songs of
nearly everyone of these soldier singers, is not only his best known
"Erskine Macdonald, London. "Longmans, Green & Co., New York.
"Erskine Macdonald, London. "John Lane Co., New York.
"ScribneSs, New York.
1918.] SURSUM CORD A! 613
production, but is perhaps the most widely quoted poem the War
has produced, not even excepting Rupert Brooke's The Soldier,
which, like it, is charged with a beautiful and noble melancholy.
These two poems have qualities to outlive the appealing circum-
stances of their publication.
Seeger could not wait for America to take up the challenge
of the common enemy. He volunteered in 1914, and, as is well
known, died two years later from wounds received from a German
shell at Belloyen-Santerre, in July, 1916. He was only twenty-
eight, and practically unknown to the literary world before the
War found him his soul. How keenly he felt about American
participation in the conflict is revealed in his Ode in Memory of the
American Volunteers Fallen for France, written for the Decoration
Day exercises at Paris in 1916. " By the death of these," he cries'
Something that we can look upon with pride
Has been achieved, nor wholly unreplied
Can sneerers triumph in the charge they make
That from a war where Freedom was at stake
America withheld and, daunted, stood aside !
Accents of ours were in the fierce melee,
And on those farther rims of hallowed ground,
Where the forlorn, the gallant charge expires,
And on the tangled wires,
The last wild rally staggers, crumbles, stops,
Withered beneath the shrapnel's iron showers,
Now heaven be thanked, a few brave drops are ours !
One does not say that little he dreamed his own blood would,
soon afterward, color that same "hallowed ground;" for he knew
it, as Rupert Brooke knew it, and Francis Ledwidge, and fully
half the number of their comrade-singers. Seeger will long hold
first place among our American war poets. Yet there has recently
gone from us to the front one who is already Seeger's peer as an
artist, and who, fired by the tremendous experiences that lie before
him, seems destined to achieve immeasurable things. This is Joyce
Kilmer — God send him home again ! — whose two books, Trees and
Main Street, have placed him in the front rank of American poets.
His is one of the clearest, finest voices in our native choir — a voice
that is fresh and buoyant, yet exquisitely attuned to the supernatural.
Another young American poet now in service " out there " is Wil-
liam Alexander Percy, a Midlander from Mississippi, whom we
614 SURSUM CORD A! [Feb.,
have come to know through his magazine verse, and from whom
we doubtless will hear more in the near future.
Neither is all war poetry of death or tragic premonition. Far
from it. There is humor too — most of it American (though Patrick
MacGee, for one, among the British singers, has gone so far ahead,
thanks to the War, as to be capable now of humor). One remem-
bering the virile ballads of Robert Service's Klondike days, need
only be told that this poet has written a book on the battlefield to
be assured that there is humor. Service's Rhymes of -a Red Cross
Man are already known to tens of thousands. The book contains
characterization — Private McPhee, The Man from Athabasca,
Soulful Sam, and 'Erbert 'Iggins — equally as human and amusing
as ever the indomitable Danny McGrcw. Yet it is the same Service
who sings so exquisitely of the lark soaring over the battlefield with
his:
fusillade of melody
That sprays us from yon trench of sky,
A battery on radiant wings
That....
Hurls at us hopes of such strange things
As joy and home and love and peace,
Pure heart of song ! . . . .
Humor likewise is the keynote of Rookie Rhymes?* a book of war
verse by the men of the First and Second Provisional Training
Regiments at Plattsburg. It has been said of this volume that it
contains more " pep " than poetry ; but the poetry is there too — and
always the humor. This is true also, in a degree, of Everard Ap-
pleton's With the Colors: Songs of the American Service™ . . .Who
knows what immortal poetry of the trenches (when these rookies
get " out there ") these little books may not foretell!
Speaking of humor, one cannot resist going out of the field
of our own language to take up that inimitable French war classic,
Le Passion de Notre Frere Poilu, written by Max Leclerc in the in-
genuous dialect of Anjou. In this the wounded and dying soldier
is transported to heaven, there to have a wonderful interview with
God, to Whom he must make a full confession of his life. How
the various saints — "heaps of saints" — intercede for him; St.
Labre, for instance, who, never having himself made it a practice of
washing, steps forth to take the blame for the vermin that drove
"* Harper & Brothers, New York. "Stewart & Kidd Co., New York.
1918.] SURSUM CORD A! 615
poor Poilu to the guardhouse (here is your peasant coarseness with
an exquisite vengeance ! ) ; and how at last, when the Lord smiles on
the simple trembling soldier, the heavens open to reveal the glory
of the angelic hosts — all this is told with inimitable humor and
charm :
And among them, with happy smiles,
Were many poilus,
With coats of sky blue,
That looked as if made to order,
And gold caps they had on.
Our poilu in the crowd
Sang with them with all his heart :
Glory be to God in the highest!
While the angels in the light
Sang in answer from all sides :
Peace on earth to men of good will!
It will repay us to take note of the ending of Leclerc's poem :
it is cheerful, joyous, optimistic; and it has in it not only a spiritual
vision — simple and clear and not at all of the mystical, yet spir-
itual nevertheless — but also, with a prophetic symbolism, it points
to the times that are to come when the last great war is over and
done with, when peace shall reign on earth as well as in heaven.
For, making note of this ending, we really strike the keynote of
practically all the poetry the War has produced in the trenches. Al-
most invariably it is hopeful. Almost invariably it sees, beyond the
red night, a white dawn. " The stricken, tainted soil," says Eric
Chilman in his After Days:
shall be
Again a flowery paradise —
Pure with the memory of the dead
And purer for their sacrifice.
It is indeed remarkable, the feeling with which one rises from the
reading of this already voluminous poetry of the War, born as it
has been of the flaming clamor of the guns, written often in blood
by the very hand of death ! — a feeling of exaltation rather than of
depression. Like the song of the lark indeed, mounting the smoking
skies above the trenches, these soldier's songs rise above all the
horrible din of battle and hate, singing of love and hope; and they
will not be silenced, even by the shattering note of bodily .extinction.
And though they may chant heartbreakingly of pain and suffering
616 SURSUM CORD A! [Feb.,
and loneliness and homesickness, or cry out in flaming righteousness
against wrong and atrocity, still the note of hope persists. The eye
still sees beauty, amid all the horror and ghastly obscenity : beauty
in the hush of the morning, after the dreadful night of pandemo-
nium and blood; beauty even in the very fires of destruction that
play about them all through the night like the luminous lights of
hell; most of all, beauty and nobility in the heroism and patience
and longsuffering of their comrades. To Frederic Manning the
lumbering transport wagons passing him on the moonlit road were
" as the horses of Hippolytus carven on some antique frieze;" and
what could surpass the pathos of Robert Service's crude " Jim "
(who "ain't sentimental a bit") come to visit the grave of his
trenchmate " Bill," his rough hand filled with wildflowers plucked
furtively along the roadside?
Hate is not to be found in this poetry. On the whole it even
seems, in summing up, to be lacking in fire — that white-hot pas-
sion, for example, which makes Claudel's French To the Dead of
the Armies of the Republic, seem to leap at the throat of the com-
mon enemy; as when he sings in the invader's face:
That which pounds your ranks day and night, that which rings
out joyously in face of you, is not all !
There is a vast army noiselessly concentrating in your rear :
From Louvain to Rethel, and from Termonde to Nomeny,
Rough mounds of earth are stirring,
And a great black stain grows larger !
Love is the major note in this poetry of ours: love of God and
country; love of all humanity; even forgiveness — mercy at any
rate — for the merciless enemy. A fine trustfulness in Providence
speaks confidently through it. Those who once questioned and
challenged God, now, having long gazed through eyes dimmed with
tears and pain on the ruined crucifixes of shattered Belgium, accept
Him with all His gifts of grief and suffering and even death, be-
cause they have come to see new horizons beyond the barbed wire
and the trenches' top. They have learned as few other men since
Christ Himself lived and died, what the meaning is of vicarious
suffering. Ledwidge sounds this note with especial strength and
beauty. Unlike Rupert Brooke, he was not willing to
go down with unreluctant tread
Rose crowned into the darkness —
1918.] SURSUM CORD A! 617
because to Ledwidge it was not darkness, but light, to which his
soul aspired. His hands, like Frederic Manning's, were " hungry
for life again;" but it was life eternal he craved, some of whose
radiance he would reach up and snatch away from behind war's
heaven-obscuring curtain of blood and smoke, to bequeath to those
who would come after. And this high spiritual note, so character-
istic of his poetry, is strong in most of the soldier songs of the War.
A tremendously compelling belief in the righteousness of their
cause and an unshaken faith in the future of democracy are also
characteristics of this poetry. This War shall be the last of all wars :
never again may such calamity befall mankind; so do our soldier
poets believe and sing. And, believing that, they are willing to
suffer and even to die, in order to make sure of that glorious con-
summation. Nearly all of them foresee their own death; yet they
accept it as part of the vast dispensation of this crucial hour. They
can sing nobly and resignedly of it; they can even jest in the face of
it. Their manly good humor sustains them; yet they remain rev-
erent; never do they fall to flippancy. They stake their all on the
future, that time when
to our children there shall be no handing
Of fates so vain, of passions so abhorred
But peace. . .the peace which passeth understanding. . .
Not in our time. . .but in their time, O Lord.
Awaiting that time, and fighting for it, they seem to sing out to the
sore-tired world a glorious Sursum Corda! — as Robert Service
does when, amidst these " spacious days of glory and grieving,"
these " sounding hours of lustre and of loss " he valiantly reminds
us that :
The Power that Order out of Chaos fashions
Smites fiercest in the wrath-red forge of war
Have faith ! Fight on ! Amid the battle hell
Love triumphs, Freedom beacons, all is well!
To such a clarion call — to such a Sursum Corda the voice of
all the poets of the War — we cannot but answer a hearty, aye, even
a joyous, Habemus ad Dominum! Therein we can give proof of
the immediate social value of the work being done by these daunt-
less spirits who, fighting our fight for us, with their souls as well
as their bodies, give us such cheer and courage from the trenches
that we cannot resist their challenge to " lift up our hearts."
ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA.
BY EDMUND T. SHANAHAN, S.T.D.
II.
N the Gospel of St. Matthew there is a difficult pair of
verses bracketed together at the end of the sixteenth
chapter. One of these verses declares that " the Son
of Man ' shall ' come in the glory of His Father, and
then shall He render to every man according to his
works;" the other that " some of those standing by shall not taste
death, till they see the Son of Man coming in His Kingdom."1 In
the Greek text the auxiliary verb2 translated into English by
" shall " — in the verse which says, " The Son of Man ' shall ' come
in the glory of His Father " — has the primary sense of " being
about to," and expresses a future on the verge of being brought to
pass. The use of this apparently near- future verb, in a verse de-
scribing the Final Advent, is regarded by grammarians as an accus-
ing fact, a compromising admission. It is sufficient of itself, they
tell us, to warrant one's concluding that the author of the First Gos-
pel believed the Lord about to return in glory, to consummate a
Kingdom scarcely as yet begun.
The presence of this verb in the text creates a serious difficulty.
Some scholars have risen from its reading with the conviction
clearly framed that Jesus never spoke in the manner here recorded,
and that His original utterance is lost beyond recovery in docu-
ments ihat have thus come down.8 Others, less bridled in their
thinking, do not hesitate to charge even the Lord Himself with
the all too common error of His time. What is the basis of these
impressions? Is it an uncriticized state of mind? Or, is it an ob-
jective condition of fact, textually impossible to deny or call in
question? The sequel will show. The difficulties of scholarship
are sometimes its opportunities in disguise. Otherwise the present
series of studies would have nothing new to say or offer on a
question most concerning to the mind and heart of Christendom.
The use of this auxiliary verb connoting nearness is peculiar to
1 Matt. xvi. 27, 28. " St. Matthew " is used throughout for the author or
translator of the First Gospel.
* Theology of the New Testament. Stevens, p. 154.
I9i8.] ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA 619
the author of the First Gospel. He frequently has recourse to it
in cases where the other Synoptic writers employ the indicative fu-
ture instead ; and this persistent literary habit seems to some an ad-
ditional reason for thinking that he shared the false expectancy of
the times. Is it likely, critics ask, that a writer who regarded the
two verses in question as cut off from each other by a long inter-
vening tract of time — is it likely that a writer of this persuasion
would have chosen a verb associated with the immediate future,
when, pen in hand, he sought to give his thought expression? And
yet, that is what St. Matthew apparently does, or rather what bib-
lical critics charge him with having done. It is a charge the truth
or falsity of which investigation alone has the warrant to decide;
and to that impartial, enlightening agency the course of the theme
now turns for a much-needed solution of the mystery.
The author of the First Gospel makes use of the auxiliary
verb in question ten times. He employs it of Herod, as when he
says that the latter shall seek the Child, to destroy Him;4 of the
wrath " to come;"5 of Elias, who " is to " come;8 of the sin which
shall not be forgiven, either in this world, or in the world " to
come ;"7 of the glorious advent of the Son of Man, as when he says
that "the Son of Man 'shall' come in the glory of His Father" — the
verse being the one about which the present inquiry revolves;8 of
the sufferings which the Son of Man " shall " undergo from those
who wreaked their vengeance on the Baptist;9 of the Lord's ap-
proaching betrayal, as when St. Matthew writes that " the Son of
Man 'shall' be delivered up into the hands of men;"10 of the
Saviour's departure for Jerusalem, where suffering and death at-
tend His coming;11 of the chalice which Jesus, in His reply to the
Zebedees, asks them if they can drink, as He indeed " shall;"12 and
finally in the eschatological discourse delivered on Mt. Olivet, in
which the Lord declares to His disciples, " ye ' shall ' hear of wars,
and rumors of wars, but be ye not affrighted, for the end is not
yet."13 A goodly number of instances, surely, in which to have
clung to the use of one expression. What is its meaning, and what
could have been the reason that led the author of the First Gospel
to employ it so frequently?
The most astonishing feature about the persistent employment
of this verb is that nowhere in the ten instances above enumerated
«Matt. ii. 13. »Matt. iii. ?• "Matt. xi. 14. 'Matt. xii. 32.
•Matt. xvi. 27. fMatt. xvii. 12. MMatt. xvii. 22.
"Matt. xx. 17. Some MSS. only. "Matt. xx. 22. "Matt. xxiv. 6.
620 ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA [Feb.,
do we find it used, save in connection with the fulfillment of proph-
ecy! The contexts are all prophetical; and this fact creates the
presumption that the much-debated auxiliary is employed, not in its
primary meaning of a near future, but in its secondary sense of
prophetical necessity, or accordance with the Divine appointment —
a sense which this same verb frequently possesses elsewhere in the
New Testament Scriptures, in the Septuagint, and the classics. In
other words, it is the realization of prophecy, not the expression of
futurity, near or remote, which the writer has in mind throughout.
He is not speaking of something " about to be," but of something
that "is to be," because foreordained of God and foretold of the
prophets. Careful investigation leaves no doubt either as to the
meaning of the expression, or the reason for its repeated recurrence
in St. Matthew's pages. The temptation to read it in the "obvious"
sense of a near future is well nigh irresistible. But when this
temptation is overcome by impartial investigation, the disillusion-
ment which one experiences is exceedingly instructive. .
That the realization of prophecy, and not the expression of fu-
turity, is the idea meant to be conveyed by this favorite auxiliary
may be gathered with surety from all the contexts of its employ-
ment Take the first instance, where it is used of Herod, to ex-
press a contingency which no Jew believed possible — the laying of
violent hands on the Son of the Most High. The evangelist makes
the fulfillment of prophecy most clear. " Behold, an angel of the
Lord appeared in sleep to Joseph, saying : Arise, and take the Child
and His Mother, and flee into Egypt : and be there until I shall tell
thee. For Herod ' is to n4 seek the Child, to destroy Him. And
he arose, and took the Child, and His Mother by night, and re-
tired into Egypt : and he was there until the death of Herod : that it
might be fulfilled which the Lord spoke by the prophet, saying : 'Out
of Egypt, I have called my Son.' "15 The slaying of the innocents
is then described, and after the description comes the citation of an-
other prophecy, this time from Jeremias, and not from Osee, as be-
fore : " A voice in Rama was heard, lamentation and great mourn-
ing; Rachel bemoaning her children, and would not be comforted,
because they are not/ "16 The meaning is plain. Herod " is to "
seek the Child's destruction, that the prophecies concerning Him
may be fulfilled. This first use of the auxiliary is clearly intended
for those who did not believe the Messias subject to persecution.
Matt. ii. 13.
"Matt. ii. 15; Osee xi. i. "Matt. iii. 18; Jer. xxxi. 15.
1918.] ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA 621
It is quite true, from the standpoint of time, that Herod was " about
to " seek the Infant Saviour. But this is a coincidence that cannot
be proved to have been the thought intended. It is not a coming
event, but the reason of its coming, which the author specially
wishes to assert.
The second occasion of its use is likewise in connection with
the fulfillment of prophecy. John has come from the wilderness into
the region round about the Jordan, baptizing, when he notices the
Pharisees and Sadducees approaching to receive the holy rite. " Ye
offspring of vipers," he declares, " who warned you to flee from the
wrath ' to come ?' "17 The incident is introduced by a quotation
from Isaias, in which, as in the text, the word " wilderness " oc-
curs : " The voice of one crying in the wilderness ; make ready the
way of the Lord; make straight His paths."18 The "wrath to
come" is the wrath foretold to befall the city and the genera-
tion.19 The period of prophecy ceased for Israel and the time of
fulfillment began, with the preaching of the Baptist.20 In the phrase
" wrath to come " there was, therefore, a reference to the past of
prophecy, which would not be lost on readers closely acquainted
with the predictions of the Seers. The relation signified by the aux-
iliary verb employed in this instance is not a temporal relation to an
event about to happen, but the relation of necessity existing between
promise and realization, prophecy and fulfillment. From the context
and the citations, it is clearly the latter relation which the author
would have his readers gather. His thought is completely taken up
with the idea that what God foretold, history must fulfill. It is of
prophesied time that he is speaking. Future time, as such, does
not occupy the focus of attention at all.
That this interpretation is not speculative but exegetical be-
comes clearly apparent in the next instance to be examined — the
third — where the construction employed is the very same as that
found in the verse about the Lord's coming in glory — an impor-
tant circumstance to which attention is called in passing. The Lord
is speaking of John; and to the great astonishment of those present,
He identifies him with Elias who is to come. " What was it ye
went out into the desert to see ? A prophet ? Yea, and more than a
prophet. This is he of whom it is written: Behold, I send My angel
before thy face, who shall prepare thy way before thee — For all
" <iirt> TTJ<; neXXo6orj<; &?•&$' Matt. Hi. 7. " Is. xl. 3.
"Matt. xxiv. 2, 21, 34; Luke xxi. 23; i Mac. i. 67; 2 Mac. v. 20; Ps. Sol. ii.
26 ; xvii. 14. 6py^. » Matt. xi. 13.
622 ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA [Feb.,
the prophets and the law prophesied until John. And if ye are will-
ing to receive it, this is Elias, who ' is to come.'21 He that hath ears
to hear, let him hear." The reference is admittedly to Malachias,
where we read : " Behold I will send you Elias before the coming of
the great and dreadful day of the Lord. And he shall turn the
heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children
to the fathers, lest I come and strike the earth with anathema."22
Here the author uses the same auxiliary verb as before, but
this time to classify and designate something that has already
passed over from expectation to reality. Not the slightest indica-
tion can one find in the text or context, that the near future is in
the mind of the writer. The thought is altogether on a different
plane, and moves in a different direction. The relation expressed
by the verb employed in this context is that which exists between
the expected and the fulfilled, not that of the future, whether im-
minent or remote. Were we to read a near future into the Lord's
statement about the Baptist, and interpret it as meaning, " This is
Elias, who is about to come," we should have to change the whole
meaning of the context into the pointless declaration, that some-
thing which has already received fulfillment is on the eve of being
brought to pass. The Master is engaged in proving that the proph-
ecy concerning Elias — the one expected to come before " the Lord's
dread day " — has been actually realized in the coming of John ; and,
consequently, that the people should no longer look to an event still
in the throes of the future, but rather to a fact accomplished, a
prediction already translated into history.
The relation here expressed by the auxiliary is the relation of
this particular event — namely, the coming of John — to the proph-
ecy which it verified. Futurity is not only not implied, it is actually
excluded; and if that be the case in this instance, does it not create
the presumption of its being so in others ? No immediacy of reali-
zation is suggested by the language of this passage. From all the
circumstances it can only mean that the prophetically foretold has
happened; what was to be, has been brought about. The thought
centres on a fulfilled prediction, and no reference is discernible to
a future of accomplishment. This fact alone is enough to shake
the dogmatic confidence of that school of biblical critics who regard
the exegetical problem on which we are here engaged, as fixed and
settled. It is opening up very fast before us, and we hope the
thought is growing in the mind of the reader, that in this question,
* 6 (i&Xuv IpxeoOat. Matt. xi. 14. M Mai. iv. 6; iii. i, 2.
1918.] ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA 623
as in so many others, we have not to do with the rules and limita-
tions of grammar, so much as with the particular religious psychol-
ogy of an exceptionally acute people.
The fourth occasion on which the author summons the same
auxiliary " shall " to the conveyance of his thought is the deeply
interesting passage concerning the sin against the Holy Ghost,
" which shall not be forgiven, either in this ' age ' or in the ' age to
come ' " —nay, the guilt of which will lead to condemnation in the
day of judgment.23 It is the sin of sins in all ages, this blasphemy
of the Spirit, this refusal to recognize the Divine. Why did the
author turn to the participial form of his favorite auxiliary on this
occasion? He must have had a special reason for avoiding the
present participle of the verb " come." What was it? The thought
of the imminence of the new age, or a desire to prove to the Jews
that another historical era was prophesied to succeed the old? A
study of the context shows that the latter consideration governed.
The Gentiles would put their hope in the Messias, even if " He came
unto His own, and His own received Him not." " Behold My
Servant Whom I have chosen, My Beloved in Whom My soul is
well pleased. I will put My Spirit upon Him, and He shall show
justice to the Gentiles. He shall not contend, nor cry out, neither
shall any man hear His voice in the streets. The bruised reed He
shall not break, and smoking flax He shall not quench, till He send
forth judgment unto victory. And in His name shall the Gentiles
hope."24
The purpose of this quotation, especially in such circumstances
as the context immediately following reveals, has no mystery about
it. The author of the First Gospel inserts it to show that an age
of the Gentiles was prophesied to replace the Jewish dispensation.
He prepares the mind of the reader for this announcement by quot-
ing the Lord as predicting it in open speech. When the disciples,
passing through the grain fields of a Sabbath, plucked ears of corn
to appease their famishing, Jesus defended their conduct by declar-
ing to the Pharisees that " One greater than the Temple is here."25
Is not the beautiful quotation from Isaias made part of the text, to
say in quoted speech what the Lord has already said in open ? Nay,
to give prophetic setting to the defiant utterance of Jesus, that
"the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath?" One cannot let these
* ivTq>nAXovrt. Matt. xii. 32. For extension of guilt to the future life,
see verses 36, 37, and compare Luke xii. 9, 10 ; Mark iii. 28, 30. "The roming
age " is not here used in the same sense as in Mark x. 30, or in Luke xx. 34, 35.
14 Is. xlii. 1-5. Matt. xii. 17-21. ** Mat*-, xii. 6.
624 ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA [Feb.,
tributary contextual lights converge, without coming to the conclu-
sion that St. Matthew is here again referring to the Divine necessity
which history is under to follow the course that was of old pre-
dicted. The relation which he is expressing is not that of the pres-
ent to the future, but that of the future to the past of prophecy.
His eyes are filled, not with what is coming, but with what is bound
to come, because foreordained of God. And it is precisely because
the temporal future as such is not in his thought, that he avoids
using the present participle " coming " — the " coming age " — and
has recourse instead to an auxiliary, one of the special functions of
which is to signify the conformity of events with the forecast of
prophecy. The age foretold must come. The Lord's word shall
not be made a mockery through non-fulfillment. Is it not becoming
clearer and clearer how unfounded is the impression that St. Mat-
thew conceived the age of the Gentiles as of short duration, and
that scarcely should the Kingdom come when the consummation
would ensue? And is it not strange that this impression should
have been based, to so large an extent, on the use of a verb that in
this investigation has as yet disclosed no associations whatsoever
with future time as such? Contextual criticism is slowly clearing
up an exegetical situation which textual criticism has long since
come to look upon as not open to review.
The fifth occasion on which the same auxiliary " shall " be-
comes the vehicle of expression is the Lord's declaration that " the
Son of Man ' shall ' come in the glory of His Father," to render to
every man according to his works.26 It is the particular verse
which has occasioned this whole inquiry, and the point to be deter-
mined at its close. Critics say it implies an immediate future, and
that St. Matthew, in making use of it, or its equivalent, registered
his personal belief in the nearness of the Final Coming. Is this
statement exegetical, or beside the fact?
Ah examination of the text and context discloses no real
ground for this impression. Nay, it actually reveals St. Matthew
on another purpose bent. Here as elsewhere in his pages, we find
him making use of his much-misunderstood auxiliary in the sense
of prophetical necessity, and not in the sense of a future soon to
be. " From that time," says the opening verse of the passage,
" Jesus began to show to His disciples, that He must go to Jeru-
salem, and suffer many things from the ancients and scribes and
chief priests, and be put to death, and the third day rise again."27
Y*P 8p%eo0a«. Matt. xvi. 27. "Matt, xvi. 21.
1918.] ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA 625
The words, " began to show " evidently mean that the Lord was
quoting the prophets, and proving to those about Him the pro-
phetic necessity of His death. It was a thing that specially stood
in need of proving. The disciples, as the intervening verses plainly
indicate,28 had never associated membership in the kingdom, much
less the glory of its headship, with so fell a thing as death. They
had shared the expectation of the times, that the resurrected Just
would reign forever with the Messias-King at Jerusalem, in a
world dispeopled of evildoers, on an earth the whole face of which
had been splendorously renewed. Disciples whose thoughts had run
so long in the direction of earthly glory found it hard to adjust
themselves to the new and unaccustomed teaching of the Lord.
They still " savored the things of men, not the things of God," and
their whole viewpoint stood in need of radical reforming. The
Scriptures had to be opened to them anew, and the prophecies re-
interpreted, yet not in such a way that the reinterpretation would
look more like destruction than fulfillment. And so, quite natur-
ally, at the end of the passage, we find the Lord reaffirming the ex-
pectation that He will come in the glory of His Father with His
angels, to render to every man according to His works — a statement
which He immediately supplements by another, to the effect that
some of those present " shall not taste death till they see the Son of
Man coming in His Kingdom."
What was the intention of the writer in putting these two
statements so closely together, and at the end of a context in which
it is question throughout of the necessary fulfillment of the Scrip-
tures?29 Was it to express his own personal views, or to call at-
tention, for some reason or other, to two different prophetical ut-
terances, each of which was under the necessity of being fulfilled?
Both verses are adapted prophetical quotations, and the fact that
they are put so close together in the text is no accident of com-
piling. The twenty-seventh verse, which predicts the coming in
glory, is from Enoch : " On that day My Elect One will sit on the
throne of His glory, and make choice among their deeds .... And
He sat on the throne of His glory, and the sum of judgment was
committed to Him."80 Is it likely that St. Matthew had the near fu-
ture in mind when he incorporated this quotation? Is it likely,
either, that readers acquainted with the literature of prophecy would
* Matt. xvi. 22-26. " Matt. xvi. 21-28.
10 Enoch xlv. 3 ; Ixix. 27. These chapters, of Enoch probably written after 37
B. c.
VOL. CVI.— 4O
626 ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA [Feb.,
receive that impression when their eyes fell on his text? Is it not
the intention of the writer to emphasize the fact that the Son of
Man shall surely one day come in glory, as prophesied, and that
when He does so come, He will render to every man according to
his works? Is there the slightest contextual evidence that the
proximity of the event is at all in mind? And if it was in mind,
why should Enoch be quoted in the twenty-seventh verse, and set
over against the prophetic reference to Daniel in the twenty-eighth ?
There must have been some reason for this reference to different
prophetic sources, which St. Matthew knew his Jewish readers
would readily understand.
Daniel had prophesied that a Kingdom was to be given the Son
of Man,31 when the band of the " holy people " was dispersed and
their power shattered.32 He seemed to imply — perspective is not
a feature of prophetic language — that the resurrection would take
place when the Temple fell,33 and was so interpreted by many, who
must have missed noting his distinct avowal that no insight
had been vouchsafed him beyond the " time of the end."34 Did
the author of the First Gospel here quote Enoch on the " coming in
glory," and Daniel on the " coming in the Kingdom " for the pur-
pose of uniting these two events, or with a view to marking off
their separation in time? Did he think that by placing these two
verses alongside, the false expectations based on Daniel would be
corrected, as they afterwards were in the twenty-fourth chapter,35
where the Lord distinctly warns the disciples against the current
misreadings of that prophet? Is not the purpose exactly the same as
that found governing in the twenty- fourth chapter-— only less ex-
plicitly portrayed? And have we not, in consequence, an addi-
tional reason for concluding that the " shall " of verse twenty-seven
— " the Son of Man ' shall ' come in the glory of His Father " — so
far from being an auxiliary indicative of nearness, is employed to.
exclude that significance altogether, and to convey the totally differ-
ent idea of an event that is to be fulfilled, though not at the time ex-
pected? What Enoch said shall indeed come to pass; but what
the generation shall witness is not the Son of Man returning in
glory, but the Son of Man coming in His Kingdom — a distinction
to which St. Matthew more than once reverts in the remaining por-
tions of the Gospel.
One more consideration before leaving the verse which has led
"Dan. vii. 13, 14- "Dan. xii. 7. » Dan. xii. 2, 3.
"Dan. xii. 8. "Matt. xxiv. 15, 23, 25, 26.
1918.] ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA 627
to this whole inquiry. What has thus far been urged in proof of
the fact that St. Matthew had necessity, not time, in mind, when he
wrote the disputed text about the coming in glory, receives addi-
tional strength and force when linked up with a statement made at
the beginning of the section, namely : " From that time Jesus began
to show that He must go unto Jerusalem," there to be delivered to
contumely and death. We said nothing about the significant verb
" must "36 which appears in the opening verse. It is equivalent to
our English expression, " must needs," and is commonly used in
the New Testament Scriptures to convey the idea of revealed ne-
cessity or accordance with the Divine appointment. It offers sup-
porting testimony to the correctness of the view, for which we have
been all along contending. Its position in the text shows that the
governing thought of this whole section is the necessary fulfillment
of prophecy, not the near future as such. It bids us take all that
is said under it as corrective teaching, not as mere allusion to the
proximity of events. What difference is there, therefore, between
the verb " must " at the beginning and the disputed " shall " at the
close? Is there any? Do not both signify events under the ne-
cessity of coming to pass, because revealed of God? And is not
this the commanding reason of their employment? Nay, are we
not, from every point of view, obliged to conclude that by its use,
the author is here interpreting his own words for us, here revealing
the inner texture of his thought? We shall not dogmatically an-
swer. The investigation is not yet complete.
The instances still awaiting consideration are few, and may
more readily be dispatched than the ones foregoing, because of the
accruing light which has already been shed upon them in advance.
The sixth instance is very damaging to the Near-Future Theory.
The disciples are coming down from the Mount of Transfiguration,
and have just been commanded by the Lord to " tell the vision to
no man, till the Son of Man be risen from the dead." They ask the
Saviour why the Scribes say that Elias must first come. Jesus does
not deny the prophecy, He repeats it saying : " Elias indeed cometh,
and shall restore all things." Then He adds: " But I say to you
that Elias is already come, and they knew him not, but did unto him
whatsoever they would. Even so ' shall >37 the Son of Man suffer
from them." What sense attaches to the auxiliary " shall " which
the author again requisitions in the clause last quoted? Does it
** 8el. Matt. xvi. 21.
Matt. xvii. 12. Compare 8et in verse 10.
628 ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA [Feb.,
signify an event impending, or one prophesied to be, and already
fulfilled?
An examination of the context does not leave us long in doubt.
The idea underlying the whole passage is the necessity of the ful-
fillment of prophecy. Is not this the thought which prompts the
disciples to ask the Lord, Must 38 not Elias first come, that the
Scriptures may be fulfilled? Is not this the thought which lies be-
hind the Lord's answer, when He declares that the prophecy con-
cerning Elias has actually come to realization in John ? "I say to
you, that Elias is already come, and they knew him not, but did unto
him whatsoever they would." And is it not this same thought,
namely — the necessity of fulfilling prophecy — which leads the
Saviour to connect the ignorance and destructiveness of John's
enemies, with the same power which they are to have over Him-
self ? " Even so ' shall ' the Son of Man suffer from them." And
was not this the very reason why the author of the First Gospel did
not use the indicative future in this instance, but had recourse, in-
stead, to a special auxiliary verb — one that he had previously
pressed into service five times, and was to call upon thrice more in
the course of his gospel, because it conveyed the very idea which
he wished to blazon for the Jewish reader, namely, that in being
subject to persecution, suffering, and death, Christ was actually
fulfilling the prophecies concerning the Messias, and proving Him-
self to be in all truth the expected " Son of God ?" The meaning
is not propinquity of time, but correspondence with Revelation.89
Must we not say the same of the seventh and eighth instances ?
" And Jesus ' having '40 to go up to Jerusalem, took the Twelve
aside, and said to them on the way : Behold we go up to Jerusalem :
and the Son of Man ' shall '41 be delivered unto the chief priests and
scribes; and they shall condemn Him to death." These two uses
of the auxiliary occur in a context where corrective teaching is the
fact brought out. We have textual proof of this in the two phrases :
" He took the twelve disciples apart ;" and " Behold, we go up to
Jerusalem "42 — sure signs that not action, but the reason of action
is being reported. The thought is a continuation of the teaching
begun in the fifth instance.43 Jesus is inculcating the unwelcome
** 8et. Matt. xvii. 10.
" St. Mark has : " As it is written of the Son of Man that He must suffer
many things and be despised." Mark ix. u, 13.
40 n^XXwv 81 dva6afvetv. Matt. xx. 17. Some ancient MSS.
41 (jiXXet TOtpaS(Soa6at. Matt. xx. 18.
"Matt. xx. 17, 1 8. «Matt. xvi. 21, 26.
1918.] ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA 629
idea of a suffering Messias. He is showing that His conduct is gov-
erned by prophecy, by the necessity of fulfilling the Word of God
as distinct from the word of men. He is explaining why He has
no freedom of choice with regard to the Divine appointments. And
that is why the author inserts a verb of necessity in the midst of
several future indicatives, to let the stumbling and shocked Jewish
readers see that He is relating the fulfillment of prophecy, not
merely narrating the facts of history. It was a linguistic turn in-
tended primarily for those who were disinclined to think of the
Messias in terms of suffering, defeat, and death.
And the ninth instance : " Can you drink the chalice that I
' shall ' drink ?44 — the question which the Lord puts the Zebedees on
the occasion of their mother's asking Him to give her sons the posts
of favor in His Kingdom — what is the meaning of 'shall' here?
Near futurity, or fulfillment of prophecy? Manifestly the latter,
from all that we have seen. The question which the Lord asks con-
cerning their ability to drink His chalic,e is an adapted quotation
from Jeremias,45 and this fact alone affords sufficient proof that
not the near future, but the fulfillment of prophecy is the idea in-
tended to be conveyed. True, the time of His suffering, betrayal,
and death is near. But that does not determine the sense in which
the auxiliary verb " shall " is used on this or other occasions. The
meaning of this verb has to be gathered from each particular con-
text of its employment, and from the general purpose of the writer,
not from temporal circumstances with which it happens also to be
in accord, unless it first be proven — which no one has yet attempted
—that these are the reasons of its employment, the determinants of
its sense. The point on which the Lord had to instruct His disci-
ples, and on which St. Matthew had to enlighten the Jewish read-
ers, with whom particularly in mind he wrote, was not the immi-
nence, but the prophetical necessity of the Messias' death; he had
to prove, not that the Lord was " about to die " — that would have
been a meaningless thing to assert so frequently — but that in dying,
He was actually fulfilling the prophecies, and proving Himself to be
in very truth the Holy One foretold of God and expected of men.
Can you drink the chalice which I am destined, which I am or-
dained, to drink? Is not this the meaning? Are we not again in-
troduced to the prophetically necessary, not to the temporally near?
Are we not confronted by corrective teaching, rather than by the
icfvetv. Matt. xx. 22.
**Jer. xlix. 12.
630 ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA [Feb.,
empty utterance, that things which are " about to be " will surely
happen soon?
The final instance is before us. The Lord has scarcely begun
His eschatological discourse when He declares to His disciples:
" You ' shall '46 hear of wars and rumors of war. See that ye be
not troubled. For these things must come to pass, but the end is
not yet." Why is the special auxiliary "shall " again requisitioned
as a vehicle of expression? The verse contains allusions to the
wars and rumors of wars foretold by the prophets as signs of the
end — the destruction, namely, of the Jewish Commonwealth; and
the author again makes use of the same auxiliary to indicate the
fulfillment of prophecy. But why is the auxiliary in the future
tense ?47 To call attention to the fact that their hearing of wars and
rumors of wars is related to the past of prophecy, and so must
actually become a personal experience before the Kingdom of Is-
rael falls.48 It is a prophetic, as distinct from a mere temporal,
future; and that is why a form of construction had to be used,
which would point backwards to the preexisting prophecies, and
forwards to their approaching season of fulfillment. There was no
thought of the near future, divorced from the past of prophecy, in
the mind of the author who composed the verse in question. We
have irrefutable proof of this fact in the explanatory phrase im-
mediately following, and introduced by the causative particle
" for "49 — a sure sign that the reason of the previous assertion is
being laid before the reader: " For (these things) must needs come
to pass; but the end is not yet." Both by the " for" and the
" must," we are given plainly to understand that prophetic ful-
fillment, not mere futurity as such, is the meaning of the auxiliary
" shall " in the present verse. The explanatory clause is a personal,
authentic, official interpretation by the author himself of the man-
ner in which his much-used auxiliary should be understood through-
out. Here in the final instance of this grammatical construction, as
previously on another occasion of its use,50 the author relieves the
possible ambiguity of this frequently chosen vehicle of expression,
by the employment of an additional verb so plainly indicating the
necessary realization of prophecy, that a circle of readers conversant
with the Hebrew Scriptures and the turns of language peculiar to
the Greek tongue, would immediately see prophetic necessity, not
48 neXXifjaere 8£ ixo&stv. Matt. xxiv. 6. " {AsXX^asr
48 dbwfj. Jer. li. 46 ; xlix. 14 ; x. 22 ; Dan. xi. 44. dffs\(tx. Ezek. vii. 26.
** 8et -yip Y^vej6«t. "Matt. xvi. 21.
I9i8.] ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA 631
mere imminent futurity, in this verse about the wars. The verb
" must " is here actually put forth as the key to the auxiliary pre-
ceding! Of wars and rumors of war, you ' shall ' indeed hear, for
these things have been foretold of the prophets, and must perforce
pass over into history, lest the word of the Lord be proved an empty
letter. But such things mark the beginnings of a New Age and its
birth-woes; they signalize the ending of the Jewish dispensation,
they do not portend the passing of the world. The thought which
the verse aims at conveying is not that wars are grounded in the
nature of things, and under fell necessity of occurring, but that
they have been foretold as signs of the last days for the City and its
power.
What, then, is the meaning of " shall " in the twenty-seventh
verse of the sixteenth chapter, where it is said that " the Son
of Man shall come in the glory of His Father with His angels;
and then will He render to every man according to his works?"
The investigation just completed makes it a matter of scientifically
ascertained fact, that this verse was never written to express the ap-
proach of Doom. No relation to near time was meant to be conveyed
in the celebrated text of the sixteenth chapter, or in any other, for
that matter, where the same auxiliary is made to function — ten
times in all — by the author of the First Gospel. Fulfillment, not
futurity, is the thought expressed throughout; and with the estab-
lishment of this clarifying fact, the great barrier difficulty to an un-
derstanding of the First Gospel disappears. All the learned surmise
about its foreshortened view of the Kingdom and its Judaic re-
strictions of the Gospel and history, so far as based on this supposed
near-future verb, loses what scientific standing it once possessed
and sinks to unfounded speculation.
In its stead there emerges the simple fact of the purpose of the
writer. He undertook to prove Christ the fulfillment of prophecy, not
to a Western audience like ourselves, but to a Palestinian circle of
readers who could not abide the thought that Herod, or the San-
hedrin, had power of life and death over the Anointed of the Lord ;
whose minds were not open to the sacrificial conception of Messiah-
ship, save through a presentation showing at every step that proph-
ecy required the unexpected turn which events were taking. What-
ever may have been the tongue in which the First Gospel was origin-
ally written, there were but two serviceable verbs in the Greek lan-
guage, through which this idea of prophetical necessity could find
expression; and that one of them should have been employed so
632 ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA [Feb.,
often is not in the least surprising, when we bear in mind the didac-
tic purpose of the author, the mentality of the folk for whom he
wrote, and the unusual number of quotations in his pages. He
could not perpetually repeat the circumlocution : " As it is written;"
and so he called plentifully on the other means of expression that
lay to hand.
What seems unaccountable is not that he should have composed
his gospel in the manner discovered, but that the purpose of his
phrasing should for so long have remained concealed. One thing con-
tributed powerfully to this clouding of perception — the mistaking
of an instrument of corrective teaching for an expression of per-
sonal opinion on the part of the author. Because the facts described
were for the most part near, it seemed " obvious " and unquestion-
able that nearness was the thought intended. The slender likelihood
of this interpretation, whether directly regarded in itself, or in ac-
tual relation to the text, should have made its proponents think
twice before subscribing to its truth. A writer who would go out
of his way for language to emphasize the " obvious " so often
without need, saying, for instance, that Jesus is " about to " suffer,
" about to " drink the chalice of affliction, " about to " be betrayed
into the hands of men, "about to" to do this and "about to" do that,
is a tax upon credulity to conceive. Who could soberly imagine
such a literary abnormality as this, putting pen to parchment?
The Near Future Theory is not only not proved, it cannot even
state itself without creating a greater problem and mystery than the
texts to be explained. St. Matthew might well say, as did Pilate,
and with far more discerning reason: Quod scripsi, scripsi.
THE CARDINAL OF SPAIN.
BY ANNA T. SADLIER.
CERTAIN Church historian remarks, "that from
whatever side the Middle Ages are viewed they
present an aspect of unapproachable grandeur."1 In
reviewing the life and work of the Spanish Cardinal,
Ximenes, there is a continual reminder of this dictum.
Francisco de Cisneros de Ximenes, whose fourth centenary has
just been celebrated, was born in 1436, in Torrelaguna, of a noble
but impoverished family. His own inclinations coincided with that
of his parents that he should study for the priesthood, and for some
six years he defrayed his educational expenses at the University of
Salamanca, by giving lessons in civil and canon law. Thence he
went to Rome. He was attacked on the way by robbers, and was
enabled to reach the Eternal City only through the generosity of
a friend. While there he received from the Holy Father a bull
appointing him to the first vacant benefice in the archdiocese of
Toledo. This the Archbishop, however, refused him, and because
Ximenes maintained the higher authority of Rome, he was arbi-
trarily imprisoned in the strong tower of Uzeda. It was during his
stay there that a holy priest prophesied that he would, one day, be
Archbishop of Toledo; to which forecast the future prince of the
Church replied, with a smile : " Father, such a commencement does
not promise so happy an end."
In the designs of Providence, his sojourn at Uzeda enabled
him to give his whole attention to the study of Sacred Scripture,
to which he was ardently devoted, an excellent preparation for
one of his great works. On his release from confinement, he ex-
changed his benefice for one in the neighboring diocese of Siguenza,
where he became Grand Vicar and administrator, under Cardinal
de Mendoza. Feeling himself called to the cloister, he took the
habit with the Franciscans, in the Convent of the Observantines
and there at Our Lady of Castanar, led a life of wonderful auster-
ity, and of peace and solitude which precisely suited his inclina-
tions.
Soon after he was made Guardian of the Monastery of Sal-
1Alrog, Church History.
634 THE CARDINAL OF SPAIN [Feb.,
zeda and later Provincial of his Order, ever occupying himself with
needed reforms and with the wise direction of his brethren, him-
self always a model religious and ideal son of the Poor Man of
Assisi. Much against his will, he was chosen confessor to Queen
Isabella, an appointment which he reluctantly accepted and solely
on condition that he should live at the convent, and come to court
only when he was needed.
" A man of great sanctity/' wrote one of the courtiers, Alvarez,
to the celebrated Peter Martyr, " has come from the depths of a
lonesome solitude: he is wasted away by his austerities and resem-
bles the ancient anchorites, St. Paul and St. Hilarion." He was
farther described by a contemporary as " equal in wisdom to St.
Augustine, in austerity of life to St. Jerome, and in zeal to St. Am-
brose." During those years, it was his ardent desire to become an
apostle to the Moors, wjiose conversion he had always at heart ; but
a holy woman, one of those called beatce, declared to him that it was
the will of God he should remain in Spain.
In 1495 occurred the death of Cardinal de Mendoza, Arch-
bishop of Toledo. This post was so rich and influential that its in-
cumbent was said to be only second to the King in power and in-
fluence. Its late occupant had recommended Ximenes both to
Rome and to the court as his successor. Hence it was that, when
the Franciscan appeared at the court on Good Friday of that year,
Isabella handed him the Papal bull, which he kissed respectfully;
but when he read the superscription : " To our venerable brother,
Francisco de Cisneros de Ximenes, Archbishop elect of Toledo,"
the strong man turned pale as death and abruptly left the room
without taking leave of his sovereign. He cried out to the friar
who was his companion : " Come, brother, we must leave here with-
out delay." When the Queen sent her chamberlain to inform him
officially of his elevation, he was far on his way to Ocana.
Isabella was obliged to write to the Pope and he, in turn, to
the humble friar, commanding him to accept the post. Ximenes
was at that time sixty years of age and felt the burden of such an
office to be too heavy for him. Unwillingly he obeyed the Papal
mandate, and was consecrated at a convent of his Order at Tarra-
zona in presence of the King and Queen. When, according to cus-
tom, he bent to kiss their hands, the newly-made prelate remarked :
" I come to kiss the hands of Your Majesties, not because they have
raised me to the first see in Spain, but because I hope they will help
me to support the burden they have placed on my shoulders." The
I9i8.] THE CARDINAL OF SPAIN 635
royal pair and all the nobles of the court, then knelt to receive the
blessing of the newly consecrated.
An impressive scene, reflecting all the pomp and stateliness of
the ages of faith, was witnessed when the new Archbishop took his
place for the first time in the Cathedral of what was then the capital
of Spain. The chroniclers describe the high altar, with massive
carvings and dark panelings, setting off the dull gold of the
retablo; of painted windows, thickly studded with rubies, sapphires
and emeralds, by the munificence of those believing days; of gor-
geous banners unfurled in the twilight gloom of the Cathedral,
relieved by the glow of innumerable waxen tapers ; of the organs on
either side of the choir, thundering forth triumphal strains, as the
Archbishop entered, tall and spare of frame, with his thin face and
high forehead, deeply wrinkled, and his deep set, penetrating eyes
fixed upon the altar. The edifice was thronged with people of every
class, the poor who so loved the holy Franciscan and the wealthy
and powerful, who revered him as a saint and, moreover, took their
cue from the exemplary sovereigns who ruled over them. Thus
began that marvelous career, replete with benefits to the Church, to
the country and to humanity at large. Ximenes continued for his
part to lead so poor and simple a life, that the Pope was obliged to
admonish him that custom demanded from an archbishop, at least
an outward show of pomp and ceremony. Thenceforth, he ap-
peared, on public occasions, in rich garments, but underneath he
wore a hair shirt; he spread, when necessary, a sumptuous table,
but partook himself of the same food as the humblest Franciscan
friar, and invariably slept on a plank. The Pope was constrained,
again, to advise him to moderate his austerities, in view of his
onerous charge. On his wrist he always wore a small crucifix, as
a preservative against sin. It was his pleasure to surround himself
with learned and pious men, with whom he conversed on spiritual
things, and in one corner of his mighty spiritual domain was a
small, dim chapel, his favorite place of prayer, wherein he said
Mass and sang the divine offices. Every year he made his retreat
with his brother friars.
To the clergy at large he was, according to contemporaries, a
real friend and father, though at the synods of Alcantara and Al-
calo, he laid down strict and salutary rules for their guidance, and
introduced wise reforms. Moreover, he made it his first care to
replace unworthy judges by men of tried integrity. In these trans-
actions he did not entirely escape the penalty of greatness. His re-
636 THE CARDINAL OF SPAIN [Feb.,
forms were opposed in some quarters, his motives questioned; but
when urged to punish the offenders, he gave a characteristic reply :
" When a man is in power and has nothing with which to reproach
himself, the wisest course he can pursue, is to permit the people to
enjoy the poor consolation of avenging their fancied wrongs by
words."
Part of his rigid code, as regarded himself, was to acknowledge
no private ties in the distribution of honors or favors. When so-
licited to do so, his answer was, that the Pope might send him back
to the convent whence he came, whither he was willing to go, but
that no personal considerations could influence him in portioning
out the honors of Church or state. Always the devoted friend of
the poor, the palace gates were daily thronged with mendicants,
amongst whom appeared the Archbishop, personally reading pe-
titions and distributing food or alms. He was beloved and revered
by the humblest of his diocesans and his name long remained in
grateful remembrance amongst them.
He was the trusted adviser of their Catholic majesties in the
most intimate affairs of state, and it is certain that his advice con-
tributed to the munificent patronage which Isabella extended to
letters, causing culture, accomplishments and a liberal education,
both for men and women, to be the rule rather than the exception
at her court.
Amid all his multifarious occupations, Ximenes never lost
his early enthusiasm for the conversion of the Moor. He frequently
invited the alfaquis or Moorish priests to the palace where he dis-
cussed religion with them, and not infrequently succeeded in con-
vincing them. Among the Saracens he was known as Alfaqui Cam-
panero, because he had reintroduced into Granada the ringing of
church bells, which had been forbidden during the Moorish occupa-
tion, as contrary to the tenets of Mahomet.
Being now, by virtue of his office, Grand Chancellor, he also
assumed a charge, the idea of which is repugnant in no small degree,
not only to our modern ideas, but to the general teaching and prac-
tice of the Church. He became Grand Inquisitor for Castile. Now
though the Spanish Inquisition appears to people of this twentieth
century, wholly indefensible, such was not the contemporary opin-
ion, nor is it, entirely, that of scholars, who have investigated its
workings : " To be just to the Middle Ages," remarks a learned au-
thor, " we must judge them by the principles and ideas of those times
and not of our own."2 Also must prevailing conditions be taken
•Canon Dalton, preface to Hefele's Life of Ximenes.
1918.] THE CARDINAL OF SPAIN 637
into account, as well as those things which were happening in many
of the principal countries of Europe especially after the Reforma-
tion, when religious wars and the excesses of the reformers and
their followers caused the Spanish tribunal to appear mildness it-
self. " In the Middle Ages," says Alzog, " when the two powers
of Church and state were expected to work in harmony together, a
policy towards heretics was pursued and a personal surveillance
was exercised over them, which led to the establishment of the In-
quisition, an institution which has been the object of more mis-
representation and erroneous judgment than any other known to
history." This is not surprising when it is considered that one of
the chief sources of information upon the subject is the infamous
Llorente, a disgraced and discredited official of that tribunal, who
boasted that he had destroyed all the documents appertaining
thereto. Of course it is generally known how the Popes labored to
mitigate its severity and how often appeals against its rulings were
made to the Papal court, always with success. It seems to have
been, in fine, a religio-political institution devised, in part, for the
protection of the state against the Jews and the Moors, who were
often its dangerous enemies. In any case, big-hearted, just and gen-
erous as Ximenes was, he presided over the destinies of that much
discussed tribunal, in so far as Castile was concerned and, more-
over, believed in its necessity. But even the malevolent Llorente
admits that he " endeavored to lessen the severity of the Inquisition,
deposed bad functionaries, and pardoned many accused persons."
He farther declares that the Grand Chancellor's main object in ac-
cepting that post, was to labor for the conversion of the Moors and
their enlightenment in sound doctrine.
" He adopted," says his German biographer,3 " every expedi-
ent which justice and humanity dictated in order to diminish the
number of judicial cases reserved for the tribunal of the Inquisi-
tion. Llorente4 acknowledges that Ximenes exerted all his energy
to provide for the instruction of converts, for which object priests
were appointed in all the larger towns, with special injunctions to
visit the new Christians in their houses and" warn them not to
commit any act which might make them amenable to the Inquisi-
tion."
On one occasion because of the number of cases and the seri-
ous nature of many of the accusations, the Cardinal convened a
*Hefele, Life of Ximenes. Translation of Canon Dalton, p. 387.
•Llorente, History of the Inquisition, vol. ii.
638 THE CARDINAL OF SPAIN [Feb.,
congress of twenty-two of the most respectable Catholics that could
be found, and that would prove the most impartial judges. As a
result of their investigations, unworthy witnesses were not only dis-
credited but themselves imprisoned, some of the accused were liber-
ated and every effort made to repair injustice. Many other in-
stances are cited to show the rigorous care with which Ximenes
watched over officials and strove to prevent all cruelty or excess
Some of the discredited ones appealed against him to the Holy See,
but always without result. The Cardinal made an effort to have
none but ecclesiastics admitted to the Grand Council,5 thinking thus
to ensure justice and moderation. But the King made answer to
his appeal, that the Grand Council was indebted only to him for its
jurisdiction, and that he had the right of making appointments to
it, as to all other courts of justice. The same biographer goes on
to say that in all the affairs of the Inquisition, Ximenes had always
shown himself the same straightforward and thoroughly just,
though severe, man as in all his other actions. And, he adds, " if
the Inquisition had been in reality what it is frequently depicted,
as an institution more bloodthirsty than the legislation of the times,
a colossus of injustice, all the resplendent virtues and eminent qual-
ities of Ximenes would not have availed to wipe off the stain from
his character."
It is well to remember, too, that the Inquisition took cognizance
not only of religious matters, which then entered into the domain
of law, but of numberless other crimes that were punishable
throughout Christendom, such as sorcery, blasphemy, polygamy,
church robberies, usury, and the grosser forms of immorality. In
reading over some of the provisions of that tribunal, there is mat-
ter for astonishment in the efforts that were made to safeguard the
accused, giving every opportunity for escaping sentence. In the
mildness of those enactments, they compare favorably with those of
almost every other court then existing. The auto da fe, which in
the minds of the ignorant and the prejudiced offers a climax of
horrors, was, in reality, a solemn and usually a joyful occasion. It
meant the releasing of penitents, or those falsely accused, and the
reconciliation of the former with the Church. Such a celebration is
described under the administration of the Archbishop, when four
thousand Moorish converts were baptized, and a fire was, indeed,
kindled, but only to consume piles of volumes containing the de-
lusive doctrines of Mahomet. The great prelate, in fact, devoted
8 Hefele.
1918.] THE CARDINAL OF SPAIN 639
himself, even when at the zenith of his fame, to the conversion of
the Moors, and was to be found, catechism in hand, teaching the
infidel children.
In 1507, Pope Julius II. sent the Cardinal's hat to Ximenes,
with the title of Cardinal of Spain. The news was received with en-
thusiasm by the Spanish people, as well as by the court. Demon-
strations of joy, were everywhere held. But those honors and the
plaudits which they evoked, mattered little to the austere disciple of
St. Francis, who still remained, frugal, self-denying, an ascetic in
appearance and in mode of life.
His public or official work as Grand Chancellor of Spain cannot
be passed over in silence, nor those benefits to his country which
procured for him a memorial upon the walls of the Senate Chamber,
in one of the public squares, and a far deeper and more lasting re-
membrance in the hearts of a grateful people. To the cities, towns
and villages which formed the domain of tne Archbishop of Toledo,
he sent delegates to procure the appointment to all fortresses, castles
or towers of faithful governors and conscientious judges, that there
might be no injustice or oppression of the poor. He fought against
the oppressive commercial tax called the Alcavala, which was a con-
sequence of the wars, and though he could not procure its abolition
—which abolition Isabella, acting under his advice, recommended
in her will — he so modified its exactions and so equitably divided
them that the burden was but little felt. He further succeeded in
ridding the country of the whole tribe of publicans or collectors,
who had made themselves so obnoxious.
" As far as his power extended, he removed all the abuses which
were known to him or brought them to the notice of the just and
generous Queen; he protected the poor and the weak against in-
justice and oppression; he was also in a special manner the terror of
corrupt officials and servants whose illegal acts he denounced to
Isabella." A great blow to the Cardinal was the death of that illus-
trious sovereign, " ruling the world from her sick bed," according
to a contemporary saying. A munificent patron of learning and the
inspirer of learning in others, she pawned her jewels to send Colum-
bus to the conquest of a new world. A Catholic of the old, heroic
pattern, Spain attained under her sovereignty the climax of its
power. Glorious upon land, the very expression, " the Spanish
main," testifying to her domination of the seas, she stands forever
a refutation of the ancient calumny that Catholicism impoverishes
and belittles nations. Spain then at the zenith of her greatness, as
640 THE CARDINAL OF SPAIN [Feb.,
were France and Portugal, began to decline after the so-called Ref-
ormation, when the miscalled liberal principles and internal dissen-
sions were engendered which disrupted states.
Ximenes supported the claims of Ferdinand against Philip, who
had married the heiress to the throne, but contrived to bring about
a reconciliation between them. The death of Philip, followed some-
time afterwards by that of Ferdinand, caused Ximenes to be de-
clared Regent of Castile; for the demented Queen, Joanna, being
still alive, her son, the Archduke Charles, later the Emperor Charles
V., could not be proclaimed King. The latter wrote to the Cardinal,
in relation to that clause in Ferdinand's will by which he was made
Regent :
The most excellent clause in the Testament is that by which
you, Most Reverend Sir, have been, during our absence, en-
trusted with the government of the kingdom and the adminstra-
tion of justice. If this had not been already done, we could not,
considering your integrity, wisdom and zeal for God and our-
selves, have selected for this office a man who would give
greater satisfaction to our conscience and in whose hands the
weal of our kingdom would be safer.
Ximenes was at that time eighty years of age, and he had to
face opposition from many of the chief nobles, an assault upon the
integrity of Spain by the exiled King of Navarre, and intrigues on
the part of France and Portugal. All of which dangers he met
with calmness and fortitude. Also by his firmness and prudence he
put down revolts at Malaga and at Arevalo. He sent an expedi-
tion against Horue-Barbarossa, a daring and successful pirate, who
had aroused the Saracens against Spain. He overcame a rebellion
on the part of certain nobles, headed by the Duke of Alva.
While Ferdinand was still alive he gave the Cardinal command
of an important military expedition against the Moors in Africa,
who were becoming every day more troublesome. He fitted out
an expedition under Navarro. A fleet of eighty vessels sailed from
Carthagena, with the Cardinal on board to hearten the soldiers.
Siege was laid to the town of Oran, a stronghold of the enemy. Be-
fore the attack Ximenes addressed the soldiers, reminding them that
they fought for Faith and country, that it was Christ against Ma-
homet. During the battle, the lion-hearted prelate prostrated him-
self in prayer in the neighboring oratory of San Miguel. When the
town was carried by assault, the Cardinal rode at the head of the
troops, preceded by the clergy, chanting the psalm : " Not unto us, O
1918.] THE CARDINAL OF SPAIN 641
Lord, but unto Thy Name be glory." Three hundred Christian
captives were released from bondage, but Ximenes at sight of the
Moorish dead burst into tears, saying:
" They were, indeed, infidels, but they might have become
Christians. By their death, they have deprived me of the principal
advantages I might have gained over them."
In the conduct of military affairs, his biographers declare
that the Cardinal of Spain possessed all the qualities of a great
general: invincible courage, prudence and a mind fruitful in re-
sources. On his return from Africa he was received with great
honor, to which he showed his usual indifference. The students of
the university, whom he addressed, were astonished to hear him
speak rather of art and learning than of wars and conquest. He al-
ways regarded Oran with deep affection, declaring it to be " a dear
Christian oasis in a desert of infidelity." It is said that long after
h'is death, the Moors had a legend of a gigantic figure in a Francis-
can habit and a Cardinal's hat, who led the Spaniards to victory.
In taking leave of what might be called the public portion of
Ximenes' career relating entirely to Spain, the opinion of a com-
paratively recent biographer is of value. " In the whole history of the
world," says Robertson,8 " Ximenes is the only Prime Minister
who was revered by his contemporaries as a saint, and to whom the
people over whom he ruled ascribed, even while living, the power
of working miracles." A modern Spaniard, Arnao, declares that
" under him Spain passed through the most prosperous and happy
phase of her history. Would," he cries, " that another Ximenes
were born to her in the nineteenth century." One of his bitterest
political opponents, the Duke of Alva, exclaimed at his death,
" that he was one of the most remarkable of men, a true, old Span-
ish, heroic figure."
Apart from his public position, there is a consensus of opinion
amongst his biographers and contemporaries that he was zealous
beyond conception for the advancement of the Catholic Faith, ar-
dently devoted to the Papacy, and as a monk, full of the spirit of
his Order. Irreproachable in morals, he was severe only to him-
self, practicing wonderful austerities amid the splendors of a court.
He was of an abounding generosity of disposition that led him
promptly to forgive all injuries. His character as a priest was
never assailed, even though the bitterest enemies of religion have
written against nim. His charity to the poor knew no bounds, so
• History of Charles V.
VOL. CVI.— 41
642 THE CARDINAL OF SPAIN [Feb.,
that he was beloved by them and revered as a saint. As a statesman,
he organized a noble militia, paid off the national debt, and showed
himself always a friend of liberty, while supporting established
government. He spent twenty millions from his vast revenues in
the service of the country, and at his death left not a farthing to any
private interest.
As he became confessor to the Queen at the very time that
Columbus appeared at the court, it is reasonable to suppose that
he may have advised Isabella to her splendid course of action. Years
later, when he was at the head of the government, he interested
himself actively in the concerns of America, sending thither Las
Casas with three monks of the Jeronymite Order and, later, four-
teen Franciscans, one of whom was brother to the King of Scot-
land, to convert the aborigines. Full of wisdom, justice and fore-
sight were the instructions he gave these evangelists as to the
treatment of the natives. He bade the missionaries impress upon
them that they were objects of the greatest solicitude to the Regent
and the Spanish people. He ordered the erection of villages — close
to the mines, where the savages might be employed — which must
always contain a church and school. He gave very detailed orders
for the protection and good treatment of the children of the forest.
About that time there was a great demand for negro slaves in all
the colonies, and it was suggested to the Regent that, by such a
traffic, he might vastly increase the resources of Spain; but he is-
sued an edict forbidding all traffic in slaves and discountenanced it
in every possible way.
Ximenes took full advantage of the newly-discovered art of
printing, encouraged craftsmen, inviting them into Spain and caus-
ing the circulation of Lives of the Saints, and other works of piety,
amongst the first being a life of Thomas a Becket, to whom he had
a great devotion. He had always been a lover of learning, had
paid great prices for ancient manuscripts, and was ever a munificent
patron of letters. To him is chiefly due the preservation of the Mo-
zarabic liturgy, " so venerable for its antiquity and deep piety."
He collected the manuscripts relating to the rite and founded in his
own cathedral a Mozarabic chapel of rare and curious design, as
also a college of thirteen priests to perpetuate this rite, and for
whose benefit he procured, at great cost, the printing of breviaries
and missals.
There are two great works upon which the fame of the Span-
ish Cardinal rests more than on all else. These are the foundation
1918.] THE CARDINAL OF SPAIN 643
of his university and his world famous Polyglot Bible. The benefits
of both extended far beyond the boundaries of Spain, and the latter
became, and for long remained, the model for biblical scholars.
He chose for the site of his new school of learning the smiling
and peaceful scenery of Alcala on the banks of the Henares, the
ancient Complutum. He had attended the grammar school there,
and no doubt old association had something to do with determining
his choice, no less than the pure air blowing down from the Sierras
and the charm of the surroundings. The College of San Ildefonso,
named from the titular saint of his Cathedral, formed the nucleus
of the foundation, to which were added later the two boarding
schools of St. Eugenius and St. Isadore, where forty-two scholars
were supported free of expense; those of St. Balbina and St. Cath-
erine for students in philosophy; still another for theological stu-
dents and a few medical students, one for scholars who fell ill, this
latter under the invocation of the Queen of Heaven; the Little
School for twelve Franciscan scholars and St. Jerome College of
Three Languages, in which ten students studied Latin, ten Greek
and ten Hebrew. There were thirty-three professors, in honor of
the thirty-three years of Our Lord's earthly life and twelve chap-
lains, in honor of the Apostles. The former wore a picturesque
costume, a long, red, close fitting robe with scarf of the same color,
thrown over the left shoulder and falling in folds to the feet.
By Spaniards this foundation was entitled " the eighth wonder
of the world," and it is related that when Francis I. visited it, he
exclaimed : " Your Ximenes has undertaken and carried out a work
which I could not attempt. The University of Paris, the pride of
my kingdom, is the work of a whole line of sovereigns, but Ximenes
alone has founded one like it." This great work he accomplished
in the short term of eight years, founding besides the Convent of
San Juan, to which he added that of Santa Isabel for poor girls who
were to remain there for a certain time, after which they were free
to marry or embrace the religious life. He was besides chief patron
of the home for widows and orphans. He founded in all four hos-
pitals, eight monasteries and twelve churches. Of the university,
a contemporary declares that it was finished within with great
splendor, particularly its libraries and refectories, and that the whole
city was gradually ernbellished to make it more worthy of such a
seat of learning. The different religious orders presently established
there other houses of study, and by the middle of the seventeenth
century the ten houses of the original foundation had increased to
644 THE CARDINAL OF SPAIN [Feb.,
thirty-five. Sad to say, that noble institute, where everything had
been so nobly planned, even to provision for poor or infirm pro-
fessors, fell under the hammer of the revolution. The party of
the Progressistas destroyed that monument to the liberality and
love of learning, of one who would be now named, perchance, a
" reactionary " Cardinal. Sad commentary on so-called liberty and
progress.
It was at Alcala that Ximenes carried out that darling wish of
his heart, his second monumental work. He had from his
earliest years been passionately devoted to the study of Holy Scrip-
ture, to which end he had learned Hebrew and the Chaldaic tongues.
He began at Alcala, and carried to completion in fifteen years, his
Polyglot edition of the Bible, named from the place at which it had
been accomplished the Complutensian Polyglot. He first secured
the services of a number of foremost scholars, having no regard to
the narrowness of nationality, though Spain at the time was able
to supply him with philologists and men deeply versed in sacred
lore. He obtained valuable assistance from that princely patron of
letters, Pope Leo X., who threw open to him the treasures of the
Vatican, though it has been suggested, in view of the dates, that this
assistance was given while Leo was still a Cardinal.
When the Bible was complete, it presented the Hebrew text of
the Old Testament, the Greek version of the Septuagint, the Latin
version of St. Jerome and the Chaldaic paraphrase of the Penta-
teuch, together with letters, prefaces, dissertations to assist in the
study of the Sacred Books. During the progress of the work, the
Cardinal constantly exclaimed to his helpers : " Lose no time, my
friends, in the prosecution of that glorious task, lest in the casualities
of life you should lose your patron, or I have to lament the loss of
those whose services are of greater value in my eyes than wealth
or worldly honors."
It was a joyful day, for the great man of Spain, when the first
six hundred copies were struck off and the German printer, Arnauld
William Brocar, sent his son, John Brocar, clad in festal gar-
ments and with radiant face, to announce the good tidings to the
Cardinal. The latter cried out : " I give Thee thanks, O Lord, that
Thou hast enabled me to bring to the desired end the great work
which I undertook." And he said later: "Of the many arduous
duties which I have performed for the service of my country,
there is nothing, my friends, on which you ought to con-
gratulate me more than on the completion of this edition of the
1918.] THE CARDINAL OF SPAIN 645
Bible, which now opens to us the sacred fountains of religion, just
when they are most needed." A none too friendly historian, Pres-
cott, describes that Complutensian edition of the Bible as " a noble
monument of piety, learning and munificence, which entitles the au-
thor to the gratitude of the whole Christian world."
This was the last of the Herculean tasks, which the Cardi-
nal of Spain undertook for the service of his countrymen and of
humanity. He died four months after its completion, in the eighty-
second year of his age, and was buried amid the tumultuous grief of
the people. Sobs and tears accompanied him to his last resting place.
He had given orders for a simple and unostentatious funeral, but
in that respect his orders were disobeyed, and his remains were con-
veyed amid the blaze of numberless torches to the monastery of St.
Mary's, where a solemn service was celebrated. Near Burgos, the
students of the university erected a mortuary chapel, where
" bishops, priests and the grandees of Spain assisted at Matins for
the dead." In the Cathedral church which he had illustrated by his
virtues and exalted character, a marble monument was placed over
his remains and fifty-eight years later a magnificent enclosure of
bronze was placed around it, upon which were represented the
chief events of the great man's life.
And there to all time reposes the mortal remains of this noble
son of Spain, the glory of his Order, an ideal priest and prelate,
and one of the most illustrious of those who have worn the Roman
purple. After four centuries his voice still speaks for truth.
THE CASE OF SOCIALISM v. THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND
THE UNITED STATES.1
BY HENRY CHURCHILL SEMPLE, S.J.,
Moderator of the Theological Conference of the Archdiocese of New York.
HIS paper was read in Cathedral College Hall on De-
cember 1 8 and 20, 1917, to Catholic pastors and as-
sistants, presided over by His Most Reverend Emi-
nence John Cardinal Farley. In the discussion which
followed the reading, the paper was approved as
representing the views of those present. This brief puts together
some texts, on the one hand, from Encyclicals of Pope Leo
XIII. and accepted maxims of Catholic jurists and, on the other
hand, from our Declaration of Independence and amendments of
our Federal Constitution and pronouncements of our Federal Su-
preme Court justices interpreting clauses of the Declaration and
amendments. In these authentic texts the reader is enabled to see
with his own eyes that the Catholic Church and the United
States hold the same fundamental principles on the right of private
property as founded on nature and God, and as limited by the ample
authority of the state and its laws made for the general welfare.
Socialism denies that the right of private property is from nature
and God, and is thus seen to be fundamentally anti-Catholic and
anti-American. Given the Catholic and American principle that the
right of private property, although derived from nature and God, is
yet circumscribed by limits imposed on it by the necessities of our
neighbor and the ample authority of the state to enact new laws
suited to new conditions, there is, at least in our country, no excuse
to heed clamors of Socialists or the Socialistic for a reconstitution
of society. It is hoped that the texts here put together, with some
explanations of the meaning of their terms, will help to satisfy
minds now more or less bewildered by dogmatisms which led to the
Reign of Terror, the Paris Commune and the Russian Bolsheviki.
What is meant by the right of private property? It is the
right in private individuals of perfectly disposing of a corporeal
thing unless these individuals are prohibited by the law. This defi-
nition was made by Bartoldi. It is commonly accepted by other
1 Cf. Vermeersch, Quastiones de Justitia, n. 231 et seq. Hannis Taylor, DV.I
Process of Law, p. 491 et seq.
I9i8.] THE CASE OF SOCIALISM 647
jurists and also by the great scholastics such as Molina, Lessius
and Lugo.
Another definition which is widely received is: The right of
disposing, for one's own advantage, of the utility and the substance
of a thing, within the limits placed by a just law. This definition
more clearly distinguishes between the dominion of property and
the dominion of jurisdiction, which latter includes the right to
dispose not for individual advantage but for the general welfare.
It also more explicitly explains what is meant by disposing per-
fectly. It mentions not only the utility but also the substance of a
thing.
With these definitions is in accord a celebrated description of
the right of property by an anonymous Roman jurist: " Jus utendi
et abutendi quatemus juris ratio patitur — the right of using and
abusing in so far as the law allows." Here abusing means consum-
ing, and not abusing in the bad sense, and also refers not only to the
utility but to the substance of a thing. As the reader may have
noted, the definitions accepted by Catholics all limit this right by
laws for the common good.
These definitions do not limit the right of property by the
extreme necessities of others. Such necessities rarely occur. It is
perhaps more prudent not to provide for them in explicit definitions
or laws which might be easily misunderstood or misapplied, and
thus become occasions of dangerous suggestions in practice. How-
ever this limitation, though not expressed, ought to be ever implied.
This article treats of the right of property in the sense of a generic
institution as opposed to communism as a generic institution, under
which no one would have the right of private property. As Lugo
observes, " the concrete manner in which this right exists is not
completely from natural law alone, but depends, at least negatively,
on human law; not only because many ways can be introduced of
acquiring, losing and transferring dominion, and in fact have been
introduced, by merely human law; but also because other ways of
acquiring dominion which seem to have been introduced by natural
law, still, at least negatively, depend on human law, since they could
have been prevented by human law; as, in fact, many individuals
are rendered by human law incapable of acquiring dominion.
Furthermore, we here speak of nature, natural rights, and nat-
ural law, as the remote and not as the proximate moral cause of the
right of property. Thus in our country all the titles to land came
first from the state.
648 THE CASE OF SOCIALISM [Feb.,
The right of property is not a natural right so strictly as the
right to marry, which would exist among men, however few, and
even though not regarded as infected by selfish inclinations coming
from original sin. The right of property must exist among men who
live together in a great number, especially since they are infected by
original sin. In such a condition it would be wrong not to have
some kind of civil government with civil authority. The right of
private property is from nature in the same sense, but would exist
even though no civil government existed.
Let us now hear some of the words of Leo XIII. teaching that
the right of private property is from nature, under God and His
providence.
The following passage is from the Encyclical Quod Apostolici
Muneris, December 26, 1878:
" More wisely and profitably the Church recognizes the exist-
ence of inequality amongst men who are by nature unlike in mental
endowments, and in strength of body, and even in amount of for-
tune : and she enjoins that the right of property and of its disposal,
derived from nature, should in the case of every individual remain
intact and inviolate. She knows full well that robbery and rapine
have been so forbidden by God, the Author and Protector of every
right, that it is unlawful even to covet the goods of others, and that
thieves and robbers, no less than adulterers and idolaters are ex*-
eluded from the kingdom of heaven Moreover, she lays the
rich under strict command to give of their superfluity to the poor,
impressing them with the fear of the divine judgment which will
exact the penalty of eternal punishment unless they succor the wants
of the needy."
The following passages are from the Encyclical Rerum Nova-
rum, May 15, 1891 :
" The Socialists, working on the poor man's envy of the rich,
are striving to do away with private property, and contend that in-
dividual possessions should become the common property of all to
be administered by the state or municipal bodies.
" These contentions are emphatically unjust because they
would rob the lawful possessor, bring state action into a sphere
not within its competence, and create utter confusion in the com-
munity.
" Every man has by nature the right to possess property as
his own.
" Man precedes the state, and possesses, prior to the formation
I9i8.] THE CASE OF SOCIALISM 649
of any state, the right of providing for the sustenance of his
body.
" The limits of private possessions have been left (by God) to
be fixed by man's own industry, and by the laws of individual
races.
" With reason, the common opinion of mankind — little af-
fected by the few dissentients who have contended for the opposite
view — has found in the careful study of nature, and the laws of
nature, the foundations of the division of property; and the prac-
tice of all ages has consecrated the principles of private ownership,
as being preeminently in conformity with human nature, and as
conducing in the most unmistakable manner to the peace and tran-
quillity of human existence. This same principle is confirmed and
enforced by the civil laws — which, as long as they are just, derive
from the law of nature their binding force. The authority of the
divine law adds its sanction, forbidding us in severest terms even
to covet that which is another's : ' Thou shalt not covet thy neigh-
bor's wife: nor his house, nor his field, nor his man-servant, nor
his maid-servant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything which is his.'
' The right of property which has been proved to belong
naturally to individual persons must likewise belong to a man in his
capacity as head of a family : nay, such a person must possess this
right so much the more clearly, in proportion as his position multi-
plies his duties.
" The main tenet of Socialism, community of goods, is di-
rectly contrary to the natural rights of mankind.
" Justice demands that the interests of the poorer classes
should be carefully watched over by the administration, and that
they who so largely contribute to the advantage of the community
may themselves share in the benefits which they create, that, being
housed, clothed and enabled to sustain life, they may find their
existence less hard and more endurable.
" When there is a question of defending the rights of indi-
viduals, the poor and helpless have a claim to special consideration
(from the state)."
What is the theological note of this part of our thesis? What
theological censure would be incurred by him who would deny its
truth ? In our answer we follow Vermeersch, Questions on Justice,
n. 198. That the system of private property is licit, is not unjust,
is clearly contained in Scripture, and is to be held as of Catholic
faith. He who would affirm that this system has its origin from
650 THE CASE OF SOCIALISM [Feb.,
the state and would deny that any right of private property has its
origin in nature, would openly contradict the teaching of Leo XIII.
and incur the censure of temerity, to say the least.
Can a Catholic be a Socialist? Not if he holds the main tenet
of the Socialists, namely, that all individual possessions should be-
come the property of all, to be administered by the state or munici-
pal bodies, or that the right of private property comes from the
state and not from nature and God. The words of the Declaration
of Independence which are in accord with those of Pope Leo, are :
" We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are endowed
by their Creator with certain unalienable rights and that among
these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; and to secure
these, governments have been instituted among men."
The Fifth Amendment of the Constitution says: " No person
shall be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of
law, nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just
compensation."
This Fifth Amendment, ratified in 1791, limited the power of
the Federal government and not of the states. But the Fourteenth
Amendment, ratified in 1868, says: "Nor shall any state deprive
any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law."
This amendment was made in order to limit the power of the
states. The teaching of the Supreme Court on the origin of these
rights is seen in the following words of Justice Field, cited by Mr.
Hannis Taylor in his new work on Due Process of Law, page 491 :
" ' As in our intercourse with our fellowmen, certain principles of
morality are assumed to exist, without which society would be im-
possible, so certain inherent rights lie at the foundation of all
governmental action, and upon a recognition of them alone, can free
institutions be maintained. These inherent rights have never been
more happily expressed than in the Declaration of Independence,
that new Evangel of liberty to the people : " We hold these truths
to be self-evident," that is, so plain that their truth is recognized
upon their mere statement; "that all men are endowed," not by
Edicts of Emperors or Decrees of Parliament or Acts of Congress,
but " by their Creator, with certain unalienable rights," that is
rights which cannot be bartered away, or given away, or taken away,
except for punishment of crime; "and that among these are life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and to secure these," not to
grant them, but to secure them, " governments are instituted among
men. ..." Among these inalienable rights, as proclaimed in that
I9i8.] THE CASE OF SOCIALISM 651
great document, is the right of men to pursue their happiness, by
which is meant the right to pursue any lawful business or vocation,
in any matter not inconsistent with the equal rights of others, which
may increase their property, or develop their faculties, so as to give
them their highest enjoyment.'
" The Fourteenth Amendment was intended to give practical
effect to the Declaration of 1 776 of inalienable rights, rights which
are the gifts of the Creator, which the law does not confer, but only
recognizes." In the same case Justice Swayne said : " Property is
everything which has exchangeable value, and the right of property
includes the power to dispose of it according to the will of the
owner. Labor is property, and, as such, means protection. The
right to make it available is next in importance to the rights of life
and liberty." In Allgeyer v. Louisiana the Court said : " The lib-
erty mentioned in the Fourteenth Amendment means not only the
right of the citizen to be free from the mere physical restraint of his
person, as by incarceration, but the term is deemed to embrace the
right of the citizen to be free in the enjoyment of all his faculties; to
be free to use them in all lawful ways; to live and work where he
will, to earn his livelihood by any lawful calling; to pursue any
livelihood or avocation, and for that purpose to enter into all con-
tracts which may be proper, necessary and essential to carry out to
a successful conclusion the purposes above mentioned."
In Adair v. United States the Court said : " Each right is sub-
ject to the fundamental condition that no contract, whatever its
subject matter, can be sustained, which the law, upon reasonable
grounds, forbids as inconsistent with the public interests, or as
hurtful to the public order, or as detrimental to the common good."
The rights of life, liberty and property are all subject to certain
sovereign powers of the state, such as the taxing power, the power
of eminent domain and the police power. Therefore such rights
are not inalienable in any strictly absolute sense. The state may
rightfully call on a citizen to serve in the army and give his life for
his country and its rights and liberties. The state can rightfully
restrain any men from carrying on a business which is immoral, or
injurious to public morals, or which causes a reasonable suspicion
of immorality, or of injustice, private or public. Any business af-
fected with a public interest may be regulated, provided due con-
sideration be given to vested rights and to prior contracts entered
into by the state. Purely private vocations are as a general rule
not subject to restraint by state power.
652 THE CASE OF SOCIALISM [Feb.,
" However, the most innocent and constitutionally protected
of acts or omissions may be made a step in a criminal plot, and if
it is a step in such a plot, neither its innocence nor the constitution
is sufficient to prevent the punishment of such a plot by law." Thus
Congress passed the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act to prevent
and punish acts tending to monopoly, to forcing prices, to restrain-
ing the free flow of trade by combinations which block free and
fair competition. The Sherman Act has been already upheld by the
Supreme Court as not contrary to the rights of liberty and property
and freedom of contract. State laws imposing a minimum wage
for women or children working in factories, have been upheld by
the Supreme Court as being not arbitrary but reasonable restraints
imposed on capitalists in the use of their property and the exercise
of their liberty. The Sixteenth Amendment to the Federal Consti-
tution, finally ratified in the year 1913, empowers Congress to im-
pose the income tax, and Congress has emphasized by practical
, measures the principle that he who receives more individually, owes
more for the general welfare.
States have made many local laws limiting liberty to dispose
of one's own labor or to exercise other property rights. On appeal
against these laws for alleged violation of rights guaranteed by the
Declaration of Independence or by the Constitution, the Supreme
Court has ever held that these laws are void if they are arbitrary,
but are valid if they are reasonable or not manifestly unreasonable
or arbitrary.
Some countries have no clear-cut written constitution. Our
country is unique not only in having the oldest written Constitution
but also, and especially, in having as the guardian of the Constitu-
tion, a Supreme Court, a Judiciary which is not subordinate but co-
ordinate with the Legislature and the Executive, a Judiciary whose
members hold office during life or good behavior, and can be re-
moved from office only through impeachment by a majority of the
House before the Senate, the more slow and conservative branch of
the Congress. Our Federal Judiciary thus far have little to fear
from the insolence of office and power or from clamors of the multi-
tude. Through the wisdom of Washington and Jefferson and Ham-
ilton and Madison and Pinckney and the other fathers, we have in
our explicit fundamental laws the sane principles of St. Thomas and
Leo XIII. on the right of property as from nature and nature's God,
and on the limitations of this right by the states or the United
States, acting reasonably for the common good, and on their ample
:9i8.] A GREAT MYSTERY 653
authority to introduce social reforms which may be deemed need-
ful or useful in our day of big business with big capital. There is
not and never was a country where the law made property more
sacred and secure. Though the most conservative in this respect,
our country can lawfully be also most progressive on sane lines,
truly Catholic and truly American. There could be no shadow of
an excuse for transplanting to American soil foreign Socialism,
whose main tenet is public ownership and public administration of
all wealth-producing property. Socialism is not only most anti-
Catholic, but, by the fact, also most anti-American. For these
principles, how America should love the Church and the Church
America, nay, how the whole world should love the Church and
America as the two mightiest guardians of principles which are
saviours of society from envy, madness, anarchy, misery and
slavery.
A GREAT MYSTERY.
BY VIOLET O'CONNOR.
NOT for myself this offering. We deem
Mankind's pontifical and rev'rent dole
Gives greater glory to our wondrous goal.
Surrender to each other so extreme,
This signal token of your high esteem,
Is only possible because laid whole
As homage, on the altar of my soul,
For God Almighty — as a gift supreme.
In times gone by the Pascal lamb was slain
To manifest oblation's sovereign power,
To shadow forth the day when Jesus died.
So now in Christian marriage we obtain
A sacramental knowledge of Love's hour,
When Christ shall come and claim His Mystic Bride.
ASPECTS OF RECENT DRAMA IN ENGLISH.
BY KATHERINE BREGY.
II.
THE REALISTS — AND ONE OTHER.
HE aim of the literary pioneers discussed on our last
article was, it will be remembered, to bring back to
the English stage a large and fundamental realism.
" The seizure and presentation of the essential and
distinguishing marks of a character — the exclu-
sion of falsification, of non-essentials " — that was the watchword
of their new theatre of ideas, as Henry Arthur Jones called it; dra-
matic realism, as opposed to the stage naturalism which has now
become associated with the name of Mr. Belasco. But before these
men had finished their work, there grew up a school of younger,
more radical playwrights : psychologists indeed, but before all else,
what one may call photographic realists. John Galsworthy and Ar-
nold Bennett and their coterie would not consider Jones or Pinero
realistic enough — or democratic enough. They might charge, not
without truth, that the older men were interested chiefly in portray-
ing types of a rather sophisticated society, that they introduced *' no
character less imposing than a well-bred butler," and had compara-
tively little sympathy with the great body of plain people.
So these younger dramatists have set about treating the prob-
lems of the poor, of the so-called working people, particularly of the
rebels in all fields whatever. Toward the governing and moneyed
classes their attitude is in the main ironic to the point of antagon-
ism; and implicitly rather than explicitly this antagonism is found
to extend to all idea of authority, whether human or divine. Prob-
ably most largely representative of this whole school is the work
of Mr. John Galsworthy, who has won for himself a notable place
among contemporary dramatists. The Silver Box, his first impor-
tant play, gives us a study of drunkenness and theft — a distressing
story, deftly painted, of corruption among the rich and the poor:
the point of contrast being, of course, that the poor suffer their own
bitter consequences while the prosperous escape. Joy shows the
1918.] ASPECTS OF RECENT DRAMA IN ENGLISH 655
problems of a young girl whose canons of life are shaken by her
parents' infelicity and infidelity. The Pigeon exploits rather cyn-
ically the problems of haphazard philanthropy. In Strife, Gals-
worthy follows with really great power and pathos the conflict be-
tween capital and labor : the crushing, futile months of strike in an
English factory town — months which lead at last to the identical
compromise both sides had at the outset rejected. His most cele-
brated play, Justice, takes up the terrible, the almost insoluble prob-
lem of the punishment of crime. In one sense it is an arraignment
of solitary confinement — as the Ballad of Reading Gaol was an ar-
raignment of capital punishment: but in the last analysis the story
of Falder is an arraignment of our whole punitive system, of what
the author himself calls " the general blindness of justice." Those
who saw Mr. John Barrymore's recent portrayal of the role will not
soon forget the young clerk, crushed, ruined, driven at last to
suicide, by the wholly just but wholly unmerciful sentence passed
upon his first forgery.
" Nobody wishes you any harm," as the broken boy says in the
final act, " but they down you all the same .... I seem to be
struggling against a thing that's all around me. . . .It's as if I was
in a net."
In a net — the words sum up the general sense of frustra-
tion so conspicuous throughout this recent realistic drama — the
human rat-trap, self-made or fate-made, from which no way of
escape is pointed out ! One meets it again in Galsworthy's far more
futile play, The Fugitive, a uselessly depressing picture of the
woman who was " too fine and not fine enough," who " couldn't be
a saint and martyr and wouldn't be a soulless doll " — and who
therefore ended as a self-slain courtesan. The somewhat hackneyed
question as to whether a " gentleman" may — or should — marry a
working-girl whom he has wronged, is treated very tellingly in
Galsworthy's Eldest Son. It is again treated in that morbid but
much-praised provincial play by the late Stanley Houghton, Hindlc
Wakes. And several other rather repulsive aspects of the marriage,
or, more exactly, the sex question, are dealt with in Granville
Barker's minutely realistic and enormously dismal drama of London
tradesmen, The Madras House.
" It is not quite a well arranged world," sighed Audrey, the
Lost Angel of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones. But at least it was a world
with God in it : while to all purpose and intents the confused milieu
of this modernistic drama might just as well be a world with God
656 ASPECTS OF RECENT DRAMA IN ENGLISH [Feb.,
left out of it. It is full of admirable sociology and psychology and
even philanthropy. But it is only saved from absolute hopelessness
because it is so difficult for man — particularly if he be an artist in
any field — to attain absolute godlessness. There can be no question
that in so far as these young writers are treating a great variety of
people, a great variety of problems, they have widened the scope of
the older realists. They have stretched the view, indubitably: one
is far less sure that they have lifted the viewpoint. They stand
very close to their subject matter, sometimes reaching such multi-
plicity of detail that the big, essential problem is quite obscured.
Frequently this would seem to be the result of trying to say every-
thing— of applying the novelist's method to the dramatist's work;
as Mr. Bennett, in spite of some delightful exceptions, does in his
dialogue, and as Mr. Barker does so conspicuously in his endless
stage directions. But there are times when the cause lies deeper:
when it lies, in fact in the dramatist's own disinclination to pass or
even .to admit, any final ethical judgment. It is all very human, very
plausible to explain that Falder's crime was committed to aid the
woman he loved. Shakespeare, in his all-loving comprehension, might
have done that. But when it is further suggested that the legal flaw
which prevented her divorce from an encumbering husband, and
her easy marriage to the young clerk, was somehow responsible
for the whole later miscarriage of justice, the point is obviously
stretched too far. Shakespeare, in his large sanity and lucid vision,
would never have done that ! For obviously, art must choose the big
essentials: art must simplify, not confuse, the verdicts of our
tangled life.
But photographic realism is not concerned with clarifying ver-
dicts, rather with painting life in microscopic and often most un-
lovely detail. Happily for human nature the quick reaction fol-
lows ; a reaction that is apparent not only in the strictly imaginative
contemporary drama but also in much of Galsworthy's own recent
work. For his Bit O'Love, if not as strong as some of the earlier
plays, is shot through with a most tender and engaging idealism —
the struggle of a much-suffering man to reach the universal love
and forgiveness of a Francis of Assisi.
No discussion of recent realistic drama can go far without
pausing before the role played by that ever-dramatic country some-
times described as John Bull's Other Island. Dr. Cornelius Wey-
gandt, who speaks with authority upon his subject, points out that
it was the experimental performance of two new and most dissimi-
1918.] ASPECTS OF RECENT DRAMA IN ENGLISH 657
lar plays — William Butler Yeats' Countess Cathleen and Mr. Ed-
ward Martyn's Heather Field — in Dublin during the May of 1899,
which " inaugurated the drama of the Celtic Renaissance."1 Almost
immediately the play became an integral and arresting factor in that
splendid phenomenon of the Irish Literary Revival which was then
in the process of becoming. During the early 90*3 was organized the
movement later known as the Irish National Theatre Society —
and still later as the Abbey Theatre Company. It was an epoch-
making movement, in spite of the fact that it was largely directed
by professional litterateurs of French and English tincture — for
example, Mr. George Moore — and of the additional fact that its oc-
casionally perverse choice of plays was responsible for alienating a
portion of Catholic Irish sentiment. But the Irish theatre really
achieved: it brought to our contemporary stage acting of a new
realism, and a whole body of vital and significant drama.
Except for the symbolic plays of Mr. Yeats, Lord Dunsany
and a few others, which will come up for appreciation when the
imaginative drama is discussed, these works were mainly studies of
peasant life quite startling in their simplicity and notable in their
realism. Sometimes they were uproariously funny farces like
The Workhouse Ward or Spreading the News, by Lady Gregory.
Oftener they were rather crude domestic tragedies such as Padraic
Colum gives us : the conflict of age and youth, of home and the
•wanderlust, of the family and the individual. Of course the very
masterpiece of these plays, and one of the greatest one-act plays
in the whole range of English literature, is Synge's Riders to the
Sea. Like Loti's Pecheur d'Islande, it sings the eternal enmity
between the sea and the dry land : the tragedy of men who go down
to the sea in ships, and of the women who wait their return —
waiting and watching until the very last of the loved ones is bidden
farewell. There is something worthy of Greek tragedy in the
compact, cumulative heartbreak of its single familiar scene. Old
Maurya, the peasant mother, sits bowed by her turf fire, mourning
the death of her son Michael, and telling her daughters the strange
vision in which she has seen him and the living boy, Bartley, riding
together toward the sea. Quietly the neighbors begin stealing in:
they kneel and cross themselves ominously; then the men draw
near, bearing the body of Bartley covered with its sheet of dripping
sail. Awe-struck, the daughters wait. But old Maurya does not cry
out at all. The woman who has been nine days keening the loss of
1 Irish Plays and Playwrights. By Cornelius Weygandt.
VOL, CVL— 42
658 ASPECTS OF RECENT DRAMA IN ENGLISH [Feb.,
her less loved Michael, kneels quietly by the body of her youngest
son, and her thought is of rest at last. " They're all gone now, and
there isn't anything more the sea can do to me. . . .I'll have no
call now to be up crying and praying when the wind breaks from the
south, and you can hear the surf is in the east and the surf is in the
west, making a great stir with the two noises, and they hitting one
on the other "
Sprinkling the lad's body with holy water, she says her simple
valedictory — the wail of the old, tired mother for all the big and
little children of the old, tired world : " It isn't that I haven't said
prayers in the dark night till you wouldn't know what I'd be saying;
but it's a great rest I'll have now, and it's time surely .... May
the Almighty God have mercy on Bartley's soul, and on Michael's
soul, and on the souls of Seumas and Patch and Stephen and Shawn
— and may He have mercy on my soul .... and on the soul of
everyone is left living in the world...." This, of course, is
much finer than the close of Galsworthy's tragic Justice. It is prob-
ably the greatest bit of drama Synge has given us ; for The Well of
the Saints was marred by its cynicism, and The Playboy of the
Western World, for all its fresh and primitive poetry, was marred
by the deviltry its critics insisted upon taking so seriously.
But it may well be claimed that neither tragedy nor farce is
ever quite so true to the whole nature and idiosyncrasy of a people
as the gentle romance which contains both elements at once. Mr.
Yeats' Land of Heart's Desire does this with true Celtic wistfulness :
and it is done again with delicate realism in that most lovable of all
Lady Gregory's dramas, The Rising of the Moon. Here one finds
an almost perfect example of Irish comedy, for the little one-act
story of the sergeant and the escaped convict plays upon the keys
of patriotism, sly humor, pathos, and that inalienable love of poetry
and adventure which is the birthright of the Gael.
It has never been easy, and it is never going to be easy, to
pigeon-hole Mr. George Bernard Shaw: but probably the least re-
strictive category in which to place him is among the infinite variety
of the Celt. Unless, of course, one cares to remember that he is
perhaps best loved and best hated here in the chaste bosom of the
American theatre ! Neither the critics, the actors, nor the audiences
are at any moment likely to agree about the amazing Mr. Shaw :
but he has admirably contrived that they shall agree to listen to him
and to talk about him, thereby proving at the outset the efficiency of
his genius. One sees in this extraordinary Irishman much of his own
1918.] ASPECTS OF RECENT DRAMA IN ENGLISH 659
John Tanner, and something of Synge's Playboy: a man of per-
verse but quite uncommon ability, a poet today, a satirist tomorrow,
a fanatic occasionally, a philosopher often ; in fine, a dramatist who
dislikes plots and delights in shocking " middle class morality."
Now obviously, this workaday " middle class " morality is about as
vulnerable and tempting a target as clever or merely superficial
irony can lay hold upon. What would have become of the satirists
of the ages if they had not found the hypocrisy of the conventions
to fall back upon? Let it even be admitted boldly that no morality
has more than one leg to stand upon unless it can be explained and
enforced by the spiritual interpretations of a higher thing, Faith.
It so happens that Mr. Shaw has in the main avoided direct ridicule
of the Catholic Church: for some inscrutable reason he has even
confessed a fondness for the feast of Our Lady's Assumption ! But
on the whole, he is manifestly impatient of supernatural dogma as
he is of the practical Ten Commandments. And with an even hand
he juggles metaphysics and ethics, with logic thrown in for good
measure. Therefore his criticism has proved overwhelmingly de-
structive : or rather, it has -proved simply amusing, in a sinister
sense of amusement. For futile and mischievous as the conventions
— more particularly the Anglo-Saxon conventions are often seen to
be, they are at least preferable to the volcanic anarchy of this enfant
terrible of the drama.
As with Henry Arthur Jones — but for a different reason —
the mere chronology of Mr. Shaw's plays is illuminating. As far
back as 1898 came that revolutionary volume of "pleasant and
unpleasant " dramas containing Widowers' Houses, The Phi-
landerer, Mrs. Warren's Profession, Arms and the Man, Candida,
The Man of Destiny, and You Never Can Tell. Two years later
were issued the "three plays for Puritans," The Devil's Disciple,
Casar and Cleopatra and Captain Brassbound's Conversion. Then
followed Man and Superman, 1903 ; John Bull's Other Island, 1904;
Major Barbara, 1905; The Doctor's Dilemma, 1906; Getting Mar-
ried, 1908; The Shewing Up Blanco Posnet and Press Cuttings in
1909; Misalliance and The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, 191.0; Fan-
ny's First Play, 1911; Overruled, 1912; Androcles and The Lion
and Pygmalion, 1914; The Great Katherine, 1916, etc., etc. If this
list proves anything, it proves that Shaw's best plays are not those
of the last ten years. His best plays — Candida for example, or that
scandalously interesting Man and Superman — were written before
the great Shavian secret of paradox and then more paradox had
660 ASPECTS OF RECENT DRAMA IN ENGLISH [Feb.,
been reduced to a system or a trick. Since then there has been a
tendency on Mr. Shaw's part to turn preacher or propagandist
instead of playwright; and in place of the essence of drama, action,
to substitute particularly brilliant or appalling conversation.
George Bernard Shaw has taken a quite brazen pride in apply-
ing realistic treatment to every possible — or impossible — subject:
yet from first to last he has remained superlatively, extravagantly
and incorrigibly imaginative. If he were not, he would be unpar-
donable. But one pardons much to the professional paradox : " as
easy as lying," in Gilbert Chesterton's word, " because it is lying."
So to consider Androcles an attack upon Christianity becomes un-
necessary and a little absurd. An early-Christian farce is not
necessarily an attack upon the Faith : but it is necessarily bad taste
and bad art. It is an anomaly, a false straining after effect, just as
Getting Married or Misalliance are a straining after effect, and just
as The Great Katherine is simply a rather impish lampoon upon
Katherine of Russia. Mr. Shaw laughs at everything: that is
his strength — and it is his weakness too. Fortunately one feels
often that the smile " hurts half the mouth," as Cardinal Manning
used to say. " You've learned something — that always feels at first
as though you had lost something," cries Major Barbara's philo-
sophic lover. And there is scarcely a play that does not throw out
searching human things like that, above and beyond the hard, bright
glitter of Shavian irony. Yet there is not a play which rings, as a
whole, quite true — which convinces of the author's integrity either
in art or in life.
For it takes more than wit, more even than wisdom, to make
a real work of art: what if it be found to take love and belief — in
something? What if no work can be truly human which has not
some fundamental feeling for the divine, nor just to the clay
unless in some dim, implicit way, it is just to the Potter also?
George Bernard Shaw's mind works like a rapier, deftly, dazzingly
at times. But a man may use a good rapier in a poor or foolish
quarrel — and then the rapier is bigger than the man ! There, per-
adventure, will lie the final condemnation of the most brilliant and
notorious dramatist of our contemporary English-speaking theatre.
And many a lesser man will fall by his side.
THE RUSSIAN CHURCH AND THE REVOLUTION.
BY F. AURELIO PALMIERI, O.S.A., PH.D., D.D.
THE EXTREMISTS IN THE RUSSIAN CHURCH.
USSIA'S upheaval reveals to us the chaotic medley
of parties into which the body of the Russian
Orthodox Church has split. A few years ago,
a Russian priest, A. Molozhsky, boldly asserted that
what we designate as " Russian Orthodoxy" had in
fact a meaning quite other than we realize. It is rather a collective
noun embracing the heterogeneous and often opposite religious ten-
dencies of Russia. " We have in Russia," he said, " a score of
orthodoxies which differ from each other in their fundamental
beliefs. Our so loudly boasted, unity of faith is a mere chimera."
In fact, Russian Orthodoxy comprehends the most varied types
of Christian consciousness, the intransigeant of the deepest dye as
well as the anarchists bred in the school of Tolstoi. Russian latitudi-
narianism administers the same sacraments to all the representatives
of the different Russian orthodoxies. The adogmatists, too, who
like the teachers of radical Protestantism, throw overboard the
dogmatic truths of Christian faith, and look upon our Saviour as
the changing spirit of the ceaseless religious evolution of man, are
included among those to whom the sacraments are administered.
Before the Revolution, the Russian Church was entirely under
the sway of the intransigeant wing, which consisted of bishops,
monks, and chinovniki (bureaucrats). The party had their centre
of action in the Holy Governing Synod, which was but little con-
cerned with the religious welfare of Russia, and thought only of
making the Russian Church a servile tool of the civil power.
Monasticism exercised a kind of dictatorship within the Russian
Church. Although its ranks were filled with coarse and ignorant
peasants, it also has had an elite of zealous missionaries, of rectors
of seminaries, of erudite theologians. According to an old custom,
all the candidates for episcopal sees have been obliged to wear the
monastic garb. Since the election of the bishops depended only on
favoritism — or even, at times, on simony — they could not help being
subservient to the bureaucracy of the Holy Synod. Therefore.
662 RUSSIAN CHURCH AND THE REVOLUTION [Feb.,
every attempt at internal reformation of the Church found in them
its fiercest opponents. Their pastoral letters and writings teemed
with praises of the political masters of Russia. Their theologi-
cal treatises discovered and triumphantly reenforced the connection
between the autocratic theory and form of government, and Russian
Orthodoxy. In their opinion, the future of Russia rested on the
granite block of her Byzantine faith, and on the theocratic regime,
inherited also from Byzantium. They found themselves unable to
imagine a Church withstanding the unjust claims of the civil power,
relying only upon spiritual weapons to resist her foes, and to sur-
pass her rivals. They seemed to be of little faith with regard to the
value of the latent energies of their own Church. They preferred
to grope, paralyzed in spiritual inertia, and they reconciled them-
selves to the name of " bureaucrats in cassocks" with which the
liberal press of Russia lashed their servilism.
Of course, their policy was inspired by prudent motives of self-
preservation. They were conscious of their apostolic and intellec-
tual inferiority in respect to Catholicism and Protestantism. They
feared that their Church, stripped of the support of the state, would
lose her influence upon the masses. The cultivated classes, who
practically have deserted the Church, would seek refuge in other
creeds, or content themselves with complete religious indifference.
The Russian peasantry also, when freed from her onerous tutelage,
would enter the ranks of the Stundists, who have gained the upper
hand among the Russian sects. Fear of the triumph of heterodox
proselytism chained the Russian bishops to the car of the Russian
autocracy, and formed the basis for their religious and political
theories. In order to bolster the interests of their own caste, they
became of one mind with Constantine Pobiedonostsev, the most
cynical exponent of the subserviency of the Church to the state.
His policy, which is the policy of the intransigeant wing of the
Russian Church, was thus outlined in a document addressed to the
Evangelical Alliance in 1888: "The Russian Government is con-
vinced that nowhere in Europe do all religions enjoy such liberty
as in Russia. This truth is unfortunately not admitted in Europe.
Why? Solely because in Europe religious liberty is confounded
with an unrestricted right of proselytism. The Western religions
in Russia have always been affected by a mixture of spiritual and
secular motives. Catholicism was impregnated with Polish political
propaganda ; Protestantism, as represented by the Livonian knights,
was equally animated by secular motives. The time for a peaceful
RUSSIAN CHURCH AND THE REVOLUTION 663
cooperation on the part of Christianity of the East with that of the
West has unfortunately not yet arrived, for the Western religions,
so far as Russia is concerned, are not yet free from worldly objects,
and even from tendencies to attack the integrity of the empire.
Russia cannot allow them to tempt her Orthodox sons to depart
from their allegiance, and she therefore continues to protect them by
her laws."
At present, intransigeant Orthodoxy has been overthrown. It
was not able to come to terms with the leaders of the Revolution.
Its cohorts were indebted to the autocratic regime for their caste
privileges, and 'their uncontrolled authority. They were known as
the life-guards of Tsarism, therefore they are not t6 be trusted,
even when they declare that they have gone over to the Revolution.
Their sanction of a form of government which levels all the social
differences, would be regarded as a mere ruse de guerre for the
obliteration of a compromising past. Monasteries were the strong-
holds of the ancient regime. Probably they will be submerged by
the revolutionary wave which is sweeping over all Russia.
It is a recognized fact that the Revolution has assumed an atti-
tude hostile to the hierarchy. The official organ of the Russian
Church is filled with the names of the bishops who have been forced
to resign and to hide within the walls of monastic prisons. It is no
exaggeration to say that half of the Russian dioceses are now
deprived of their bishops. In some instances their resignation was
forced by the revolutionary committees. Such was the case with
Pitirim, Metropolitan of Petrograd; Marcarius, Metropolitan of
Moscow and Antoni, Archbishop of Kharkov, an implacable foe of
Russian liberalism. In other instances bishops have been virtually
deposed by their own priests. This is what has happened to Pal-
ladius, Bishop of Saratov, and Leontius, his Bishop- Vicar. The
diocesan Congress forbade them to deliver political speeches. They
refused to obey the injunctions of their subordinates, who then re-
quested the military committees to expel them forcibly. Notable,
too, is the case of Nikon, Bishop of Jeniseisk. According to a re-
port of the Holy Synod, dated August, 1917, Bishop Nikon declared
that he had lost his illusions as to the Orthodox Faith : consequently,
he felt it would be shameful hypocrisy to abide within the pale
of the Church. For this reason, he asked the Holy Synod to dis-
charge him from his episcopal duties, and to expunge his name from
the records of the Orthodox Church of Russia. The Holy Synod
-complied with his request, and in accordance "with the sixty-second
664 RUSSIAN CHURCH AND THE REVOLUTION [Feb.,
canon of the Apostles," issued a decree stating that Bishop Nikon
belongs no longer to the Russian Orthodox hierarchy.
The removal of so many bishops from their dioceses places the
Russian Church in a very difficult situation. Even before the Revo-
lution the lack of bishops was a matter of grievous concern. For a
hundred million souls the Russian Church had scarcely one hundred
and thirty bishops. - At the present time, the Russian episcopate has
lost half of its representatives. Hence it follows that its decaying
influence has received the finishing stroke. The decline of the
episcopate draws after it the collapse of monasticism since the moral
support of the monasteries, which have been regarded by Russians
as the asylums of " flaunting wassailers of high and low degree,"
depended on the bishops who are all monks. Therefore, the intran-
sigeant wing of the Russian Church is beaten off the field. The only
way of restoring its prestige would be the reinstatement of Tsar-
ism. Of course, such an event is not beyond the range of human
possibilities. But so long as the Revolution is able to keep up its
effective direction of Russia's destinies, the Russian hierarchy and
monasticism will pay with the loss of authority for those abuses
attributable to them, and for their sedulous support of the policies of
the Holy Synod.
The defeat of the extreme conservatives has given prominence
to the party of the extreme liberal. The followers of liberal Ortho-
doxy are themselves divided into two branches, the " Cadets" and the
" Bolsheviki," if we may be permitted to call them by the names of
the Russian political parties. Both are imbued with the spirit of the
Revolution. The former aim at a democratization of the Russian
Church on the basis of authority derived from, and granted by, the
people, and not by the hierarchy; while the latter dream of rebuild-
ing the Russian Church on a communistic basis. The former are,
so to speak, the heralds of a type of democratic government in the
Church; the latter are the apostles of an ecclesiastical anarchy.
The liberal extremists are not the sons of the Revolution of to-
day. They came officially upon the stage in 1905, when the Tzerkov-
ny Viestnik, the organ of the white (or secular) clergy, made public
a memorandum written by thirty-two priests of Petrograd. For
reasons easy to understand, the writers of the manifesto remained
anonymous. They advocated full freedom for the clergy, and the
breaking of the chains which had paralyzed their activity. From
their point of view, a Church independent of the civil power, alone
could revive the latent religious energies of Russia.
I9i8.] RUSSIAN CHURCH AND THE REVOLUTION 665
The memorandum gave rise to angry polemics in the Russian
press. The Russian bishops were indignant at it. Its authors were
cursed as champions of Ritschlian rationalism, and corrupters of
the true notion of the Church. As time went on, the storm abated,
and the memorandum sank into oblivion. The priests, however,
who outlined therein their plans of ecclesiastical reform, are still
alive if we are to judge from a new programme, given out on Easter
Sunday of 1917. On this occasion, their confidence in the final
triumph of the Revolution was complete, consequently they scorned
to wear longer the veil of anonymity. I feel that a literal transla-
tion of that important document rather than a few quotations, or a
comment, will best serve to acquaint our readers with the long-
suppressed aspirations of the liberal wing of the Russian Church.
" Never was the great solemnity of the Resurrection of Our
Lord so full of cheer for us, and so near to our hearts, as in this
very year. In Russia our Church trampled upon and severely
wounded, has arisen from her prostration. She had been buried in
the coffin of injustice, violence, and oppression. She was sealed
with a Teutonic seal by the hands of autocrats, who were German
by blood and spirit. She was crushed by German immigrants, by
those immigrants who encircled the Russian throne with a strong
wall, who usurped for themselves the ruling power in this country.
It seemed to us that there was no glimpse of hope for the victory
of truth. But the war broke out against violence. Like an angry
fist, Russia was upraised. Her Teutonic guards fled ignominously
The sun of truth lightens our paths. Christ is risen !
" In these bright, great and joyful days, the thirty-two priests
of Petrograd and their followers from the clergy and laity believe
it necessary to take up again and at once their work, interrupted in
1907. We are the pastors of the great Russian people, which is
now free. We adhere steadfastly to the three fundamental points of
our programme : First : The Church is free and independent of all
forms of civil government whatsoever. The eternal Church is
stronger and more extensive than any temporary and ephemeral
regime: she is stronger and more extensive than any nation. Sec-
ond : The Church is not closed and limited by external boundaries.
She is entirely free so far as her inner organization is concerned,
according to the principles of synodal autonomy which must be
realized in the first cell, the parish, as well as in the highest mani-
festations of her life, the national council. Third : The independence
of the Church from the civil power does not force her to hold aloof
666 RUSSIAN CHURCH AND THE REVOLUTION [Feb.,
from national life, and from all its manifestations. Her sole goal
consists in Christianizing them.
" We bow before these claims. We enthusiastically applaud
the heroic martyrs who shed their blood for the freedom of our
people during the whole period of the great emancipation move-
ment. May their memory last forever, and may the glory, honor
and happiness of those who outlive them be great. Let us applaud,
too, the provisional government, which, to the admiration of all,
has quickly led our country into the salutary paths of triumphant
freedom. While hailing the sun of freedom, we believe, and are
confident, we serenely hope that the same brightness will shine upon
the Church. The Church will appear in the midst of her flock
garbed in freedom. To hasten her victory, it is necessary to sum-
mon at once a national council, a council of the whole Church, a
council composed of bishops, priests, deacons and laymen. We
count upon you, oh pastors of the great Russian Church. The
fallen autocratic regime had enslaved the Church, limited the scope
of our zeal to the deadening of ceremonies. It transformed the
pastors of the Church into servants required to labor for the state.
Instead of preaching the Christian ideals of truth and love, it
exacted of us the gospel of blind obedience, of silence, of servility.
" All that is now a thing of the past. It will always be so.
We ought at present to train another type of pastors for the people.
A free people must have a free priesthood. A people bleeding for
the defence of the truth, needs pastors of their own essence. What
we are to be in these times, we must state in the words uttered by the
people when they arose for the cause of truth. In 1905, in the Cau-
casus region, the faithful said to a certain pastor : ' Until now
you have walked at the head of a procession of the dead : now you
must advance in front of a legion of living warriors.' Let us, then,
go ahead in front of that legion; let us have the spirit of gallantry
and abnegation. Let us act like free Russian citizens, laying foun-
dations of the free life. Long since our people Ny earned for such
pastors. We want to go on with the people, for they, and they
alone, are the pillars of Russia and of the Orthodox Faith."
This message seems, perhaps, somewhat too mild to the
" Bolsheviki" of the Russian Church. In fact, the Democratic
League of the Russian Orthodox Church has directed the following
appeal to Russian Christianity:
" Dearest brethren ! In the great day of the resurrection of
our country, we want to be united with our people, who have ac-
1918.] RUSSIAN CHURCH AND THE REVOLUTION 667
complished the heroic deliverance of our country from the unbear-
able yoke of autocracy. The old regime has mouldered away, and
thanks be to God for ever!
" The Democratic League stands for these principles :
1. We need an ecclesiastical democracy that is, the active par-
ticipation of each member of the Church in all phases of its life.
2. We need a political democracy, that is, the active participa-
tion of the whole people in the government of the country, on
the basis of an absolute equality of rights, and of the freedom
of conscience.
3. We need an economic and social democracy, that is, an
equitable relation between labor and capital, a relation which
rests on the commandments of Christ, and on the acknowledg-
ment of the property rights in land of all the masses of laborers."
I think I am not mistaken in saying that the clergy who sub-
scribe their names to the Democratic League deserve the term of
Bolshemki. In ambiguous words, they advance the same pro-
gramme as the present rulers of Russia. They urge the expro-
priation of landed property, and its division among the peasants.
This claim is in no way strange. Most Russian priests come from
the peasantry. They till the soil like mujiks, and very often the
landed property of their churches does not suffice to earn their daily
bread.
It has been rightly observed that the Russian Revolution has
chiefly economic causes. The lower clergy share in the distress of
the Russian lower classes. They see in the success of the Revolu-
tion an improvement of their economic condition. They struggle
for the emancipation of their caste, stationary in the turmoil of
Russian life. It may be that they are grossly mistaken. As we
have observed in a previous paper, the Russian Revolution is the
offspring of the religious and social radicalism of Tolstoi which
has spread throughout Russia. Now Tolstoism, it is needless to
say, is the antithesis of Christianity. Therefore, in order to be
loyal to its principles and raisons d'etre, the Russian Revolution
must not only struggle against the privileged classes, but against
the Church, alleged to be accountable for the misrule of the auto-
cratic regime. Consequently, instead of finding their condition
ameliorated through the success of the revolutionary movement,
the Russian priests risk going from the frying-pan into the fire.
The Russian mujiks have always longed for the landed property of
668 RUSSIAN CHURCH AND THE REVOLUTION [Feb.,
the Church. It is probable, therefore, that those properties will be
confiscated and that the clergy will be reduced to starvation.
A distinguishing trait of the above quoted document is its
significant silence concerning the role of the bishops in the rebuild-
ing of the Russian Church. It is plain that the extremists of Rus-
sion religious liberalism are carrying their democratic claim very
far indeed. No doubt, they have suffered much from the uncon-
trolled despotism of their bishops. They were treated by them like
serfs attached to the service of the Church rather than priests exer-
cising a divine ministry.
In the writer's La Chiesa Russa, published in 1908, attention
was drawn to the probable consequences of absolutism on the part
of the Russian episcopate. I wrote at that time as follows : "The
misrule of the hierarchy has brought about a kind of dualism among
the clergy. It has sown the seeds of a latent schism, growing
stronger every day, and waiting for a propitious moment to burst
out. The Russian Church is divided into two castes and its unity
is broken. We do not understand why the Russian episcopal sees
must be the monopoly of the monastic caste, careless as it is, even of
appearances, in its moral life. The organization of the Russian
Church today has given rise, on the one hand, to an aristocracy en-
slaved to the civil power (bishops and monks) and, on the other,
to a democracy (the lower clergy) now passive in its hatred of
religious authority but tomorrow likely to revolt against it."1
We are now witnessing the realization of our fears. The
revolutionary movement has clearly defined the opposite aims of the
extremists of the Russian Church. We have only to wait for the
results of their propaganda.
Of course, we do not say that the crucial moment of the crisis
of the Russian Church has arrived. A large part of the lower
clergy wish to cling to the hierarchical constitution of the Church,
while limiting to some extent the authority of the bishops, and
taking from monks their monopoly of the high ecclesiastical digni-
ties. They know that they would inflict a deathblow on their form
of Christianity if they were to destroy the hierarchy. But, on the
other hand, it cannot be denied that the spirit of anarchy has spread
over the lower ranks of the Russian Church, and poisoned the blood
of her body.
As Catholics we are distressed at the calamities of the Russian
Church, even though we feel that she has deserved her just punish-
*Lo Chiesa russa. By A. Palmieri, Florence, 1908, p. 688.
1918.] RUSSIAN CHURCH AND THE REVOLUTION 669
ment, either for her base acquiesence in the encroachment of the
civil power, or for her complicity in the religious persecutions of the
former regime. Our pity is also not entirely free from appre-
hension. Alexis Lebedev, the great historian of Eastern Christian-
ity, wrote that for two centuries the Russian Church had been
swinging between Catholicism and Protestantism. The Synodal
regime was a product of Protestant influence. As is well known,
Theophanes Prokopowicz, the compiler of the Spiritual Regulation,
was so imbued with the tenets of Protestant theology, that he denied
sacred tradition as a source of faith, and the infallibility of the
magisterium of the Church, even when fully represented in the
Ecumenical Councils. The ascendancy, however, of Protestantism
over the Russian Church was short-lived. The hierarchy firmly
kept the traditional teaching of Russian Orthodoxy. They formed,
so to speak, a High Church which did not break the doctrinal link
of connection with Catholic theology, as concerns the fundamental
notion and nature of the Church of Christ. The lower clergy, on
the contrary, trampled as they were under the feet of the bishops,
who, with few exceptions, acted like civil employers of the state,
began to drift towards the Protestant conception of the Church.
Things being so, it will be small wonder if the Russian Revolution
opens the doors of the Russian Church to an infiltration of Protes-
tantism. By refusing their allegiance to a Church hierarchically
constituted, the liberal extremists are also breaking their link of
connection with the Catholic Church. They are embarking on the
stormy sea of Protestant radicalism. The ascendancy of their party
would pervert' the concept and the aims of the priesthood.
Even the elective principle, of which there is so much talk in
the Russian ecclesiastical press, points out clearly the new alignment
of a considerable part of the Russian Church. Not only priests, but
bishops, are being considered as receiving their authority from the
people, as the delegates of the congregation, subservient to the
whims of the mob. Hence it follows that the anarchy which to a
fearful extent is endangering the body politic in Russia, would also
cripple the languid energies of the Russian Church, and accelerate
its process of disintegration. It is to be hoped that our pessimism is
mistaken. We know by experience that God brings good out of
evil, and in the midst of sorrows, prepares the day of joy and glory
for the Catholic Church. The dire calamities of the World War
have made evident the necessity of the restoration of Christian
unity. That restoration cannot be accomplished without the leader-
670 RUSSIAN CHURCH AND THE REVOLUTION [Feb.,
ship and the cooperation of the Catholic Church. Rome, and Rome
alone, has preserved the note of unity. It has been the true Catholic
Church, which according to St. Augustine, preserves religious
unity even when the world is divided by political enmities.2 It may
be that a part of the Russian Church will now recognize the source
of that power which makes one all the members of the Catholic
Church. It is possible that Russian divines feel and realize the
truth of the beautiful words by which St. Basil the Great shows the
road to the healing of the wounds of divided Christianity. In 371
that great luminary of the Greek Church wrote St. Athanasius of
Alexandria : " No one, I feel sure, is more distressed at the present
condition, or rather to speak more truly, the ill condition of the
Churches than Your Excellency; for you compare the present with
the past, and take into account how great a change has come about. •
You are well aware that if no check is put to the swift deterioration
which we are witnessing, there will soon be nothing to prevent the
complete transformation of the Churches. I, for my part, have long
been aware, so far as my moderate intelligence has been able to
judge of current events, that the one way of safety for the Churches
of the East lies in their having the sympathy of the bishops of the
West."3
And among those bishops there is one whose influence in
the past was beneficial to the Eastern Church, and who could re-
store the lost dignity and the full independence of Russian Chris-
tianity, the Bishop of Rome.
* Neque quia et in orbe terrarum plerumque regna dividuntur, idcp et unitas
Christiana dividitur, cum in utraque parte Catholica inveniatur Ecclesia. Contra
Donatistas, 33, P. L., xliii, 417.
8 Ep. Ixvi., P. G., xxxii., 424.
"FAIR MAID OF FEBRUARY."
BY HARRIETTE WILBUR.
Many, many welcomes,
February fair-maid,
Ever as of old-time,
Solitary firstling,
Coming in the cold time,
Prophet of the gay time,
Prophet of the May time,
Prophet of the roses,
Many, many welcomes,
February fair-maid. — Tennyson.
ECAUSE " amid blear February's flaw tremulous
snowdrops peep," and though the distant hills are
bleak and dun, " The virgin snowdrop, like a lam-
bent fire, pierces the cold earth with its green-
sheathed spire," this delicate blossom has won its
pretty nickname:
Fair maid of February ! — drop of snow
Enchahted to a flower, and therein
A dream of April green.
" The snowdrops with their fairy bells have but one chilly
month of beauty," declares Hartley Coleridge in addressing the
plant Everlasting which had caught his fancy, although upon other
occasions he highly praises this brave blossom for " doing its duty
to the almanack :"
Yes, punctual to the time, thou'rt here again,
As still thou art — though frost or rain may vary,
And icicles blockade the rockbirds' aery,
Or sluggish snow lie heavy on the plain.
Yet thou, sweet child of hoary January,
Art here to harbinger the laggard train
Of vernal flowers, a duteous missionary.
Nor cold can blight, nor fog thy pureness stain.
Beneath the dripping eaves, or on the slope
Of cottage garden, whether marked or no,
Thy meek head bends in undistinguished row.
672 . "FAIR MAID OF FEBRUARY' [Feb.,
Blessings upon thee, gentle bud of hope!
And nature bless the spot where thou dost grow —
Young life emerging from thy kindred snow !
Barry Cornwall calls it " the frail snowdrop, born of the breath
of winter, and on his brow fixed like a pale and melancholy star,"
a pretty re-expression of Churton's line, " the snowdrop, shivering
in the icy crown of winter, now grown old." Galanthus nivalis has
many nicknames, being variously known in England, France, Italy
and Switzerland as virgin flower, snow piercer, winter gallant, first-
ling, blackbird flower, little snow bell, little white bell, baby bell,
spring whiteness, white violet, but among the prettiest appellations
bestowed upon this member of the amaryllis family is the one
found in the following stanza :
To behold the snowdrop white
Start to light,
And shine in Flora's desert bowers,
Beneath the vernal dawn,
The Morning Star of Flowers. — James Montgomery.
Over and over again, the poets praise its early rising.
" Along the brook, from leafy mould interred, we saw the snowdrop
shyly peeping through," says Lloyd Mifflin. " When snowdrops
droop over their dying snow," sang James Douglas long ago, in a
ballad of his lady's birthday. Holmes tells us that " at first the
snowdrop's bells are seen;" Norman Gale terms it " the snowdrop,
child of wintry March ;" Thomas Westwood reports that " the
snowdrop pierces 'the snow," and according to another observer, it
is:
The herald of the flowers,
Sent with its small white flag of truce, to plead
For its beleagured brethren; suppliantly
It prays stern winter to withdraw his troop
Of wind and blustering storms, and having won
A smile of promise from its pitying foe,
Returns to tell the issue of its errand
To the expectant host.
While Dr. Holmes speaks of :
The snowdrop, bearing on her patient breast
The frozen trophy torn from winter's crest.
1918.] " FAIR MAID OF FEBRUARY '• 673
" Wavers on her thin stem the snowdrop cold that trembles not
to kisses of the bee." Tennyson records of The Progress of
Spring; Owen Meredith considers the season at least commenced
when " the rich earth, black and bare is starred with snowdrops
everywhere;" George F. Savage-Armstrong feels assured that win-
ter's over because " th' bonnie wee snawdraps ir bloomin' again;"
Sir Joseph Noel Paton notes that with the return of the sunshine
and the swallows, " snowdrops gleam by garden-path and lawn." In
fact, this blossom may with confidence claim to be the first flower of
spring, since " Nature, safe-smiling, draws the snowdrop through
the snow " (Gerald Massey), and :
When winter's sceptre quivers
Within his withered hand,
And from the captive rivers
His crystal chains unband,
Above the sod they shyly peer,
The first-born blossom of the year.
— Samuel Minium Peck.
Because of its early blossoming, the snowdrop is dedicated to
the Feast of the Purification. According to an old floral calendar
rhyme, " The snowdrop in purest white arraie first rears her hedde
on Candelmas daie," in memory of the Virgin's taking Jesus to the
temple and presenting her gift. Therefore, it is one of the flowers
held sacred to the Virgin Mary, and when on the day of the Purifi-
cation her image was removed from the altar, these emblems of
purity were strewn over the vacant place. Hence, the flower is
also dedicated to maidenhood :
A flower that first in this sweet garden smiled,
To Virgins sacred, and the snowdrop styled. — Tickell.
This may account for its being a favorite flower in convent
gardens, and not there alone, but wherever maidens may have a
choice as to the flowers grown.
"A Nun of Winter Sisterhood,"
A Snowdrop in the garden stood,
Alone amid the solitude,
That round her lay.— John B. Tabb.
Demure as downward-gazing nuns,
Frail snowdrops on the border grow
And through their files a light wind runs. — W. C. Thorley.
VOL. cvi.— 43
674 "FAIR MAID OF FEBRUARY' [Feb.,
O loyal vestals in this land of sun,
Your white cheeks flush not, and your virgin eyes
Vouchsafe no lifted look. O where lies
The spell by which your gentleness can shun
These heats ? Is it your hidden zone of gold ?
Or in the emerald whose glimmers show,
Scarce show, beneath your white robes' inner fold?
— " Snowdrops in Italy," Helen Hunt Jackson.
When winter from the seaward range is gone,
By Esthwaite's shore is still a field of snow;
Thousands upon ten thousands snowdrops blow
In virgin sweet community as one, —
Type of the peace that dwells with God alone,
Emblems of angel brotherhood below ;
Their beauty every village child may know
From Hawkshead vale to grey-built Coniston.
— H. D. Rawnsley.
Possessing so much of personal purity, the snowdrop becomes
a modest rival to the lily's right to be used as the standard for stain-
lessness. " White feet ez snowdrops innercent, that never knowed
the paths o' Satan," occurs in Bigelow Papers. In The Princess,
the hero pays tribute to his mother as " some serene creation minted
in the golden moods of sovereign artists; not a thought, a touch,
but pure as lines of green that streak the white of the first snow-
drop's inner leaves." In Tennyson's St. Agnes' Eve hymn is found
the prayer : " Make Thou my spirit pure and clear as .... this first
snowdrop of the year."
She in the garden bower below
Sate loosely wrapt in maiden white,
Her face half-drooping from the sight,
A snowdrop on a tuft of snow. — S. T. Coleridge.
" The snowdrop's tender green and white," is a combination
which delights the eye, and makes it worthy a place in poetry. " The
sweetest snowdrop that I ever knew, it was green and white, when
I put it away, and had one sweet bell and green leaves fair," might
be true of any blossom of the species, and this description, in
Sydney Dobell's A Little Girl's Song, is the snowdrop to perfection.
In a Rossetti sonnet (True Woman), as one of the things most un-
seen, is named " the heart-shaped seal of green that flecks the snow-
drop underneath the snow."
1918.] " FAIR MAID OF FEBRUARY 'J 675
You ask why Spring's fair first-born flower is white !
Peering from out the warm earth long ago
It saw above its head great drifts of snow,
And blanched with fright. — Clinton Scollard.
Legend would have its origin otherwise : After the fall of man
came winter, with its snowy pall for Eden's untimely end. Eve so
mourned over the barren earth, one result of her sinful disobedience,
and so sorely missed the beautiful things of the fields, which had
surrounded her in Eden, that an angel was sent to earth to comfort
her. He seized a flake of falling snow, breathed upon it, and bade
it take form, and bud and blow. Ere it reached the ground it had
turned into a beautiful flower, which Eve caught to her breast with
gladness, for the angel said to her :
This is an earnest, Eve, to thee,
That sun and summer soon shall be.
The angel's mission ended, he departed, but where he had stood
grew a ring of snowdrops. Eve prized this blossom more than all
the other fair plants in Paradise, for not only did it break the spell
of winter, but it also carried assurance of divine mercy. Hence,
the flower means consolation and promise, and in floral language
stands for " Hope."
When the snowdrop goes to town
In her little grandmotherly bonnet,
With only a glimmer of earth
And a magic of heaven upon it,
Look at the rainbow of spring
In the eyes of the happy beholders,
Cares in a covey take wing
And weariness falls from the shoulders. — Norman Gale.
Another poet (anonymous, unfortunately) sees in the blos-
som another meaning :
Like a true-hearted woman,
When all are gone but thee,
Thy blossom stands like Faithfulness
Amid Adversity.
But in many rural communities the pretty blossom is con-
676 " FAIR MAID OF FEBRUARY" [Feb.,
sidered an emblem of death, particularly the first flower of the
season, which is a most unlucky thing to carry into a house, ac-
cording to one f olk-lorist, who tells this anecdote : " Hearing a child
violently scolded for bringing into the house a single snowdrop,
which the mother called a death-token, I asked her why she gave
this pretty flower so bad a name, and was informed that ' it looks
for all the world like a corpse in its shroud, and that it always keeps
itself quite close to the earth, seeming to belong more to the dead
than to the living.' Why she believed that a single one brought
death with it, while she regarded any larger number of them as
harmless, she did not explain."
Thou beautiful new comer,
With white and maiden brow ;
Thou fairy gift from summer,
Why art thou blooming now?
Thou art watching, and thou only,
Above the earth's snow tomb; .
Thus lovely, and thus lonely,
I bless thee for thy bloom. — Letitia E. Landon.
Perhaps the blossom's connection with death is through the
legend that a certain maiden, finding her lover dead, plucked a
snowdrop and placed it on his wounds. It did not rouse him, but
at the touch his flesh changed to snowdrops. This association with
death occurs also in Lord de Tabley's lines :
Let snowdrops early in the year
Droop o'er her silent breast.
It is said that the word means not so much a " a drop of snow,"
but a " snowy drop," fit for wearing as an ear ornament, or other
jewel. This is hinted in the lines already quoted from Cornwall,
Churton, and Holmes, and most fittingly adapted by Wordsworth :
Who fancied what a pretty sight
This rock would be if edged around
With living snowdrops? circlet bright!
How glorious to this orchard ground!
Who loved the little rock, and set
Upon its head this coronet?
One authority suggests that " the snowdrop with airy bell "
1918.] " FAIR MAID OF FEBRUARY " 677
is intended in Spencer's Sonnet LXIV.: "her snowy brows like
budded belamoures;" which is a happy solution to the identity of
the unknown plant, since the snowdrop is not only a " fair love," or
" bel amour," but is a bell indeed.
And quivering bells of snowdrops, pure and white,
Ring music on their stems — breeze-melodies,
Of rustling petals, subtle elfin tunes,
Felt, but not heard.
And the light snowdrops, starting from their cells,
Hang each pagoda with its silver bells. — O. W. Holmes.
Through days of rain and nights of snow,
A flower grew silently and slow,
Till all around was white,
Then clad in robes of tender green,
With faery bells that peep between,
The snowdrop seeks the light. — R. A. MacWilliams.
A large part of the flower's claim to beauty and purity is its
extreme modesty. " From out thy crevice deep white tufts of
snowdrops peep," says Jean Ingelow. " There sweet white snow-
drops soon will peep," prophesies another observer ; " the south
winds stop to kiss the modest snowdrop in the grass," corroborates
a careful eyewitness, while Olive Custance reports that:
Within the woods stand snowdrops, half asleep,
With drooping heads — sweet dreamers so long lost.
But for all its shyness, the snowdrop is not utterly spiritless, and
survives, if not defies, blasts which drive strong humans inside :
— these frail snowdrops that together cling,
And nod their helmets, smitten by the wing
Of many a furious whirl-blast sweeping by. — Wordsworth.
Only a tender little thing,
So velvet soft and white it is ;
But March himself is not so strong,
With all the great gales that are his. — Harriet P. Spofford.
The didactic value of this combination of strength and fragil-
ity, early-blooming and early-decaying, snowy white and leafy
678 " FAIR MAID OF FEBRUARY " [Feb.,
green, makes the snowdrop a favorite flower with the poet for point-
ing a moral. " The snowdrop only, flow'ring thro' the year, would
make the world as blank as wintertide," confesses Tennyson, al-
though he also expresses admiration and affection for the blossom.
Jean Ingelow marks how " the snowdrop blossoms, and then is not
there, forgotten till men welcome it anew," and sees in this ready
forgetting another proof of the fickleness of mankind. The brevity
of life is summed up in these two lines by Katherine Saunders :
I saw the snowdrop at its birth
Felled by spears of rain to earth.
The immutability of nature and the inability of natural objects
to partake of man's woes and perplexities was expressed long ago,
in 1863 in fact, although it is just as applicable today: " A snow-
drop is a snowdrop still despite the nation's joy or shame." In
short, the poet has made figurative, as well as decorative, use of
this generally beloved blossom :
The student snowdrop, that doth hang and pore
Upon the earth, like Science evermore. — Sidney Lamer.
Twelve times the snowdrop o'er the snow
Hath shivered. — Alexander Smith.
She seemed like a snowdrop breaking,
Not wholly alive nor dead ;
But with one blind impulse waking
To the sounds of the spring overhead. — Austin Dobson.
And I believe the brown earth takes delight
In the new snowdrop looking back at her,
To think that by some vernal alchemy
It could transmute her darkness into pearl. — J. R. Lowell.
Books*
POEMS OF CONFORMITY. By Charles Williams. New York :
Oxford University Press. $1.40.
An English soldier in France, closing, at " lights out," the
book in which he had been reading of Robert Bridges, put it under
his pillow, together with a volume of Browning and Chas.
Williams' Poems of Conformity. And doing so he was moved to
attempt an appraisement of these three poets' relations to Chris-
tianity and to Christ; which relations seemed to be mutually com-
plementary. Bridges follows the counsel of St. Paul : " Whatsoever
things are lovely and of good report, seek after these things" and the
counsel of St. James, " to keep oneself unspotted from the world."
He practises that " fugitive and cloistered virtue " which Milton
said he would not praise, and yet has so praised in // Penseroso as
to lead his modern disciple captive to his own denied conclusion.
Browning's is that more robust virtue which would prove all things
and endure all things.
If so to summarize these two poets is to do them injustice, it
is still harder to do justice to Mr. Williams. With a much more
subtle intellect than Browning's his quest would seem to be to make
the best of both worlds; body and spirit. He seeks no cloistered
virtue, and would prove all things — even prove them to be good, if
so it may be. His chastity and purity are not those of ice and snow,
and though doubtless they are the superior purity of fire, yet his
passion is so much more obviously subtle than it is fierce, that,
rather than any virtue itself, active or passive, one sees in him the
reward of virtue, the fulfillment of the promise, " If you shall
handle serpent, or drink of any dangerous thing, it shall not hurt
you." But to say this is still to leave the truth unsaid. Mr. Wil-
liams' poetry is not concerned with the " sweet reasonableness " and
" lofty ethics " of Christ (not, at least, as the apostles and disciples
of culture see them), and though his poetry is, largely considered,
nothing but Christology, it is not (if I may say so without of-
fence) " devotional." Mr. Williams' delighted intellect deals with
mystery, and so flames into passion (we wronged him if we seemed
to deny him vehemence or intensity of passion). His Jesus is Em-
manuel, " God with us," incarnate once in Palestine, and now for
680 NEW BOOKS [Feb.,
ever sacramentally " with us." He is concerned, as a poet of love,
with Jesus at the Marriage in Cana, with Jesus and the Magdalen,
with Jesus and the woman taken in adultery, with the virgin mother-
hood of Blessed Mary; as a poet of theology, with the Child Jesus
disputing with the doctors in the Temple, and asking them ques-
tions; and, as a poet of politics, with Jesus reibuking the rich and
the Pharisees.
His technique he takes where he finds it, provided only it be
beautiful. The verse is, for the most part, " sheer lyrical," and
if in one poem he seems too much to mimic Mrs. Meynell, and in
another, Francis Thompson; yet when his verse calls up echoes of
Shakespeare's sonnets, or Rossetti's lyrics, or Kipling's at his ro-
mantic best, or Browning's at his loveliest, their tune is his by
grateful adoption and not by servile imitation. As a very lovely
example, take this
Who is this coming,
Turned from the door,
From the high feast, Love's feast,
Feast of the poor?
It is the proud man
Who cannot buy
Of the new food, Love's food : —
Sweet, is it I?
Rough went poor spirits,
In lane or mart,
For the good wine, Love's wine,
Lean at the heart.
Poor men who trudged it,
Ravenous, mired,
At a full board, Love's board,
Sit gay-attired ! . . . .
O then be wise, sweet!
Now let's go bare,
At the poor's feast, Love's feast,
To have place there.
Mr. Williams has the mystical intellect; he is theological,
Christological and, by consequence, moral. In his view this present
World War is but a lover's quarrel on a larger scale : the lovers arc
guilty as the politicians. Conversely, Mr. Williams' Republic (or,
to a less ready optimism, the Coming of the Kingdom) is but the
1918.] NEW BOOKS 681
amity of lovers enlarged. And the Church's Liturgy and the Psal-
ter, and their love-songs, are one and the same, minified and magni-
fied. The Virgin Mother is all womanhood. We are all crucified to-
gether with Christ, and all live again in Him. Mr. Williams follows
St. Paul and Patmore in the assumption of all paganism into Chris-
tianity. He has read Mr. Frazer's The Golden Bough with the in-
tellect of a Christian mystic.
CARDINAL MERCIER: PASTORALS, LETTERS, ALLOCU-
TIONS: 1914-1917. New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons. $1.25
net.
As surely as the figure of Mercier, the hero of 'Belgium and
the champion of human rights, will remain immortal, so will
the record of his matchless words, spoken in the midst of the strug-
gle, stay for all time on the pages of history and literature. The
present volume gives us in their complete form the various pas-
torals, letters, and addresses written or delivered by the Cardinal
from the time of the invasion of his country down to so late a date
as January, 1917. To say that such a book is valuable is stating an
obvious truth. It is invaluable. It is a classic of the War. It
sums up in its content the whole story of the conflict. It opens up
its secret archives to us and shows us state documents that are
more than official papers, because they are written in blood and
tears. It is at once a personal and an impersonal history. Here
letters are exchanged between a reigning prelate and the officials of
"the occupying power;" here records are laid bare, facts cited,
pledges demanded and pledges given. But here also is revealed
the perfidy of a conscienceless invader — pleadings scorned and
pledges broken; a whole people enslaved; and the soul of that
people finding instant utterance in the words of a man who seems
to have verily been raised up by God to fight their battle for them
and convict their oppressors before the eyes of the world.
The reading of this book has a remarkable effect on a man.
Hitherto, no matter how familiar the name and heroic deeds of
Mercier have been, the figure of the intrepid Cardinal has been
more or less vague. We have known him only through the frag-
mentary glimpses the press could give us. But now, from these
pages of his own, by the magic of a wholly unconscious self-revela-
tion, he emerges a living breathing being, whose voice, pleading for
pity and denouncing the oppressors of his people, rings in our ears
until we are stirred to the very depths. No man can be said to have
682 NEW BOOKS [Feb.,
read the history of the World War until he has read this volume.
And no man will take up the book without finishing it, perhaps at
one sitting; for it grips and holds, and by the sheer force of its
compelling language, sweeps one on to the end. The translation is
masterfully done.
THE HOSTAGE. By Paul Claudel. New York: Yale Uni-
versity Press. $1.50 net.
To M. Claudel's growing audience in America which has, up
to the present, had an opportunity of enjoying — and puzzling over
— only two of his books in English translation, this volume will
prove most welcome. The Hostage is an easier drama to read than
The Tidings Brought to Mary ever could be, or Le Repos De Sep-
tieme Jour, or Tete d'Or, were they procurable in English.
Claudel can always be depended on for a surprise. In The
Hostage, with consummate daring, he chooses a theme that per-
haps no other writer, living or dead, would ever .have ventured
upon. He kidnaps a Pope; and on this abduction and its outcome
he rests the fate of a woman's body and soul. George de Coufon-
taine, secret agent for the deposed royalty of France, steals from
his impious keepers the person of the imprisoned Pius VII., not to
free the persecuted pontiff but because, crushed by misfortunes and
tormented by unbelief, he has come to the desperate pass of
challenging the God Whose very existence he would deny. To the
ruined cloister of Coufontaine he brings his august captive in the
dead of the night, placing him in the safe keeping of his betrothed,
his cousin Sygne, the sole survivor left with him to preserve the
name and estates of his family. Sygne is a believer. Her pure soul
reflects the very image of God. Her faith, unshaken by the same
terrific blasts of tragedy and ruin which have blinded the eyes of
George and made of him a defiant atheist, shines forth in patience
and good deeds, in strength and resignation. She has given her
life to the restoration of the Coufontaine estate. With her own
hands she has pieced together the shattered crucifix of the ruined
abbey. Together she and George are yet to mend the broken for-
tunes of their family. And then comes this strange visitor in the
night and a consequent tragedy so dire as to make the former suf-
ferings of the Coufontaines seem as nothing by comparison. An-
other figure emerges out of that fateful night — the uncouth, sharp-
witted renegade Turelure, once a monk in this very cloister of
Coufontaine; now the servant of Sygne — and more than her serv-
1918.] NEW BOOKS 683
ant; for true son of the Revolution that he is, the beast unleashed,
he has in secret conceived an unholy passion for this upright
maiden; and she who fears nothing else and faces disaster with a
smile and a prayer, is afraid of him.
This is the unique dramatic situation to which Claudel brings
us : between the pure love of George and Sygne interposes the lust
of Turelure; and he, possessed of their secret concerning the ab-
ducted Pope, demands the maiden in marriage, else the Supreme
Pontiff will fall into his bloody hands. If she would save the Pope,
Sygne must break her sworn faith with her betrothed, forget her
love and yield herself to a monster.
Claudel handles these intense situations masterfully. A great
poet, whose utterances flow molten from the crucible of his glowing
mind, he is likewise a great dramatist, capable of tremendous effects
of suspense, of pathos, of high tragedy. From a dramatic point of
view The Hostage would be magnificent, overpowering save that
it " overreaches itself and falls on the other." The unities raised so
high fall with a crash the more disastrous because of the height they
had attained. Sygne is a soul of the highest Christian principles,
most unselfish in her love of Christ. Through the most grievous
of temptations she has proved absolutely true and then she fails
and falls — and this on the advice of a priest. Her plighted word is
broken — to save the Pope. She does evil that good may come and
Claudel images this as the acme of sacrifice. This climax is not
the result of " ecclesiastical " morality, as Pierre Chavannes rather
ironically says in his preface: it is due to the poison of the East
imbibed by the gifted Claudel and which, in this instance at least,
has made him forget that Christian mysticism is founded on simple
basic truths and that sacrifice is fulfillment not sterility : that Christ
came to give life and give it more abundantly. There can hardly
be found in all literature a more moving picture of pathos and
crushing tragedy than that of Sygne renouncing her all through
a false notion of sacrifice. Since this false notion is the theme of
the play and the whole action converges towards this scene, we
must term the work, for all its dramatic and literary power, un-
Christian and immoral.
FRENCH WINDOWS. By John Ayscough. New York: Long-
mans, Green & Co. $1.40 net.
It sounds like a contradiction of terms to speak of a charming
war book; yet this is exactly what John Ayscough's new volume is
684 NEW BOOKS [Feb.,
— a book of the War, written in the very heat of the War and out of
its turbulent heart, throbbing with its deepest feelings, and yet
charming beyond words. Here we have the record of a chaplain's
experiences during eighteen months' service at the front, in France
and Belgium — the story of the soldier's heart, as it is revealed in all
its sincerity and simplicity to the man of God as he lives beside
him and walks among the ranks ; and the story, too, of the people's
hearts, as they are laid open in all their suffering before the priest's
compassionate eyes. Whatever of self -revelation the soldier him-
self in this War may write, we can never again quite so penetrat-
ingly see into it as John Ayscough makes us see.
The love of God, finding instant expression in a tender and
compassionate fellowship with men, plays like a light over every
page of this book. There are tears in it, and terror; but humor,
also, smiles glinting through the mists, and beauty shining on the
horizon, however the murk and smoke of ruin or battlefield may
veil the vision.
THE ASHLEY-SMITH EXPLORATIONS AND THE DISCOV-
ERY OF A CENTRAL ROUTE TO THE PACIFIC (1822-29).
The original Journals edited by Harrison C. Dale, Professor
of Political Science in the University of Wyoming. Cleveland :
The Arthur H. Clarke Co. $5.00 net.
This volume contains a fascinating and most valuable account,
at first hand, of the discovery of the central and southwestern route
to the Pacific. The first episode in the finding of the famous over-
land way to California is taken from the journal of William Ashley,
a native Virginian and noted fur trader, who made his way up the
South Platte River in 1824-25, across Northern Colorado to the
neighborhood of the Great Salt Lake. In 1826, Jedediah Smith
journeyed through the deserts of Utah and Nevada, thence over
the Sierras to San Gabriel and San Diego, in California, the first
American to reach that state by land. The Smith narrative is given
chiefly from the original manuscripts of Harrison Rogers, Smith's
clerk on the expedition to California. They contain interesting
accounts of their visit to some of the early Spanish missions on
the Western Coast, notably that of San Gabriel in Southern Cali-
fornia, where the explorers met with the kindest hospitality.
The book is a material contribution to the history of the
American and British fur trade, and contains the earliest known
description of Yellowstone National Park. Aside from its histori-
1918.] NEW BOOKS 685
cal importance, as compiled from original manuscripts, it is an in-
teresting and entertaining tale of the adventures of two of our most
important explorers. Unfortunately only seven hundred and fifty
copies of this book have been printed, and the type distributed, so
there will be no other edition.
THE HONAN HOSTEL CHAPEL, CORK. By Sir John R.
O'Connel, M.A., LL.D. Cork : Guy & Co., Ltd.
In this monograph of less than sixty pages, designed as a sou-
venir of the memorial chapel erected for Catholic students at the
University College, Cork, the author has produced a valuable little
treatise on ecclesiastical architecture, and has given us an inter-
esting resume of the development of Irish church building.
We could wish that many pastors and bishops in America
might read this volume. With the exception of a few cathedral
churches, and of California with her ideal Mission type of
church edifice, America has nothing to boast of in the way of sacred
architecture; and she has a good deal to blush at. The raw, barn-
like, meeting-house type of church building is too much with us.
Perhaps it is too early yet to expect us to develop a native archi-
tecture. But it is not too soon to begin to wish for it !
Sir John O'Connel's book lays down some very simple rules for
the building of a church which shall be expressive of the very soil
from which it springs, like a link between earth and heaven; and
forthwith he shows how these rules have been applied and worked
out in the chapel which he describes. Not a little of his work could
serve as a guide to the American pastor who has the building of a
church on his hands. His chapters on church decorations, furnish-
ings, site, and so on, are illuminating and full of common sense.
SOCIALISM AND FEMINISM. With an Introduction on the
" Climax of Civilization." By Correa Moylan Walsh. Vol.
I. — The Climax of Civilization, $1.25; Vol. II. — Socialism,
$1.50; Vol. III. — Feminism, $2.50. The set $4.50. New
York: Sturgis & Walton Co.
Here are three well-written volumes by a man of extensive
knowledge, vigorous intellectual grasp, and keen logical powers;
and if these qualities were all that were needed for the solution of
mankind's problems the present work would deserve high position
indeed. Mr. Walsh is what might be called an historical rationalist;
that is, he has taken all history for his province, and subjecting it to
686 NEW BOOKS [Feb.,
the dry light of reason has propounded certain theories thereon and
examined certain human phenomena by the aid of those the-
ories.
In Volume L, The Climax of Civilization, we have the ground-
plan of his examination. Holding that, not humanity at large, but
the " civilized state is a growing organism, and the advance of civ-
ilization is this growth," he shows by past analogy how the state
like other organisms has its time of growth, maturity, decline, and
finally disintegration. This is the old theory of cycles, but he gives
it a new application by likening the progression of the moments of
civilization to that of a point on the rim of a wheel rolling
uphill.
Believing that we are at " the beginning of the culminating
plane or swell of our cycle, having nearly reached the highest point
of material civilization of which our society .... is capable," and
having shown by historical instance that Socialism and feminism
arise in the culminating period of the civilization cycle and face
toward decline, he has in his two succeeding volumes set himself
the task of proving that both Socialism and feminism contain the
sure germs of decay for the civilization that admits them, " for
beneath each of them is a new morality of sentiment, replacing the
old morality of duty — of selfishness driving out the spirit of self-
sacrifice and willingness to assume obligations."
In Socialism, besides showing its inherent tendencies to deterio-
ration, he proves its utter impracticability; and in Feminism, after
disposing of some of its fundamental assumptions and setting
straight some of its twisted logic, he proceeds to show that " woman
suffragism is individualism run mad and tending to its opposite,
collectivism. .. .a neo- and pseudo-democracy resting on opinion
instead of will." Moreover, Socialism and feminism have this in
common, that they are both striving for an equality — the one an
equality of the poor with the rich, the other an equality of women
with men — which would " violate nature ; for the one is contrary
to the natural constitution of society, and the other to the natural
constitution of the human body."
The amount of thought in these three volumes lifts them above
the average contribution to current philosophy, and by the sheer
force of logic many sophisms are riddled and many sound conclu-
sions arrived at; but it is to be noted that these conclusions are in
the main negative conclusions, and when we come to examine the
positive side of the present work we find at once the weakness it
1918.] NEW BOOKS 687
has in common with all rationalism. Morality becomes little more
than custom, manners (mores); religion a more or less subjective
creation of man to bulwark his spiritual instincts. Hence, au-
thority, rights, duty, are of ambiguous import and without solid
basis. In other words, the capital defect of rationalism is that it
can furnish no sanction for what it recommends, or rather no
sanction outside itself, thus becoming, under an intellectual dis-
guise, simply the old game of trying to lift oneself by the boot-
straps.
MILITANT AMERICA AND JESUS CHRIST. By Abraham
Mitrie Rihbany. Boston : Houghton Mifflin Co. 65 cents net.
In this booklet a well-known Syrian Protestant minister
gathers together some of the New Testament passages and incidents
which show the militant spirit of Our Lord during His sacred life
on earth. As an interpreter of Syrian manners and customs, Mr.
Rihbany has already established a reputation; and there can be no
questioning his zeal and devotion. The trouble with this book,
however, as with all his writings, is that it does not approach Christ
from the full Christian standpoint. In his eagerness to make Our
Divine Saviour the more human and the more understandable to
others, Mr. Rihbany appears to have thrown up a lot of Syrian dust
through which it is not always easy to see clearly the Christ Who is
Divine. His interpretation of Christ lacks authority; the Christ
he pictures for his readers lacks authority. And of what use to sol-
diers or anyone else, to men seeking the light, is a Christ Who lacks
authority, Who cannot lead or command
ANTHOLOGY OF MAGAZINE VERSE FOR 1917. By William
Stanley Braithwaite. Boston : Small, Maynard & Co. $2.00
net.
Whatever his faults as a critic of literature, Mr. Braithwaite
has made an indisputable place for himself as an historian of mod-
ern poetry. This Anthology is the fifth published by him, and the
largest and most important. That it is important cannot be denied,
for, though its estimate of current verse may too often err, it is
nevertheless a record — and the only record, we have, outside of the
files of the magazines themselves — of the poetical utterances of our
twentieth century American singers. With his Anthology as such
we can have no fault to find; on the contrary we are thankful
for it.
688 NEW BOOKS [Feb.,
But such an Anthology must by its very nature be a thing of
bits; the record of one man's judgment only, one man's tastes and
predilections in poetry; and no one could expect from the reading
public an unanimous agreement with its conclusions and decisions.
There is an over-emphasis on the morbid, a leaning toward the sen-
sual and the grotesque, in these selections, when they are summed
up, which is anything but American. It is rather an echo of the de-
cadence which has characterized Continental poetry during the past
generation — a decadence now out of fashion in Paris, though be-
lated in its arrival over here. If, for instance, John Hall Wheelock's
Earth, pagan and pantheistic to the core, is to be taken as a great
American poem, then assuredly we are in a sad, sad state! If Edgar.
Lee Master's dictum — which he puts in the mouth of Shakespeare in
his Tomorrow Is My Birthday — that sex is the be-all and end-all in
human life, is to be accepted, then we are fallen low indeed since the
days of Matchless Will! We cannot accept such utterances, no
matter how felicitously or sonorously voiced, as great or as Ameri-
can; no more than we can comprehend how Mr. Braithwaite could
have passed on such an obviously silly and pointless criticism of the
baptismal service as that implied in Amy Sherman Bridgman's
The Christening. Here we have the poet not only protesting in a
feeble feminine manner against the doctrine of original sin, but even
objecting to the words of the ritual which signify the soul's Chris-
tian soldiership. Surely this is pacifism gone mad! And the
same lack of perception which admitted Miss Sherman's verses to
the Anthology, included Odell Shepherd's A Nun, with its trashy
old-fashioned notion that those who choose the religious life are
disappointed lovers and heart-broken women. When, O when,
will our poets and novelists be done with that nonsensical false-
hood!
Still, we rise from the reading of Mr. Braithwaite's book with
hope rather than discouragement. We agree with him when he
says that " the condition of American poetry is persuasively
healthy " — though one would hardly arrive at that diagnosis from
the reading of his Anthology despite the inclusion therein of a num-
ber of clear-sighted vigorous spiritual utterances. But we disagree
absolutely with him when he declares that as Americans we have at
last struck our poetic stride. We have not — far from it ! We are
still in the stages of creeping and stumbling; and no more convinc-
ing evidence of the fact could be found than Mr. Braithwaite's
rAnthology for 1917.
1918.] NEW BOOKS 689
A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND. By Edward Thomas.
New York: Dood, Mead & Co. $3.00 net.
Well-printed, artistically illustrated, entertainingly written, this
book can be recommended for the pleasant employment of an idle
hour. Making no pretensions to profound criticism or elaborate
description, it may be termed a personally conducted tour through
several of the most picturesque districts of rural England associated
with some of the most distinguished names in modern English liter-
ature. The author has evidently made himself thoroughly familiar
with both places and personages, and the literary gossip he retails is
enlivened or embellished by copious and appropriate extracts in
prose and verse. Though the volume contains some three hun-
dred pages, few of the articles would require more than half an hour
to read.
THE PARTY, AND OTHER STORIES. By Anton Chekhov.
Translated by Constance Garnett. New York: The Mac-
millan Co. $1.50.
The most obvious comment on this volume — the fourth of
Chekhov's tales which Mrs. Garnett has put into English — is its
deliberate joylessness. This perverse murkiness (it goes by the
name of " implacable realism " in modern critical parlance) is found
abundantly in other literature besides the Russian. Only in the
latter, however, does it seem to be uniquely at home. In French or
English letters, " realism " may be viewed as a crowning discovery
or a pathological interruption, according to the viewer's literary
philosophy; it cannot, in either case, be called the law of that lit-
erature. With the Russians it is different. There is a profound
homogeneity in the realistic temper of such of their works, at least,
as have come over into the English, which makes the very differences
between school and school of minor importance. It is the spirit
which inclines naturally, unrebelliously, almost tranquilly, to pes-
simism. Its literary artists prefer black as others prefer crimson
and gold. They are caught in the idea of human helplessness and
frustration. They are hypnotized in quiescence. To them, life
at its best (as in Tolstoi) is strangely lacking in joy; at its worst,
it is a cunningly contrived avenue of seeming significance, leading
inevitably into a cul-de-sac.
In the pages of a blazoned realist like Chekhov, the achieve-
ments and defects of this temperament appear at their plainest.
VOL. cvi. — 44
690 NEW BOOKS [Feb.,
There is the plausible psychology, the mastery of moments, in which
no one has excelled the ablest Russian realists. There is the amor-
phous, impressionistic style of narration, with no trace of the
sharply defined, creative technique which molds the best type of
English and French short story. And there is, finally, the unequivo-
cal statement of the unholy philosophy which broods over all real-
istic literature. There are eleven tales in this volume, and in none
of them is life found anything better than unintelligible. The
sweetness and spirituality have been carefully extracted from life,
and there is left a sort of carnival of sordidness and inconsequence
which is like a nightmare of the soul. It is nothing to say that
these tales are not Christian. They are not even in the nobler tra-
dition of paganism.
LIFE AND LETTERS OF SISTER ST. FRANCIS XAVIER OF
THE SISTERS OF PROVIDENCE OF ST. MARY OF THE
WOODS, INDIANA. Translated from the French by one of
the Sisters. St Louis: B. Herder. $2.25.
Irma Le Fer de la Motte, Sister St. Francis Xavier, was born
in Brittany in the early years of the nineteenth century (1816).
Her immediate ancestors had lived through the Terror with its
agonies and sorrows, and had suffered for the Faith. This home
was a perfect training for the hardest religious life, and when
Irma's call to the American mission came she was ready and joyful
to answer the call. The year 1842 found her in Indiana at the first
home of the Sisters of Providence — St. Mary of the Woods — her
heart's desire fulfilled.
A charming and attractive personality, a sprightly and af-
fectionate disposition, a sympathy which forgot self to enter into
the joys and sorrows of others, made her beloved by all — a host
in herself, a support to her superiors and her sisters in religion.
Her co-laborers are among the heroes and heroines of those pioneer
days in the early history of the Catholic Church in the United
States — Bishops Flaget and Brute; Mother Theodore Guerin with
many others. The last named was her superior for all the years
of her mission life from 1842 till her death in 1856, when Mother
Theodore also went to her eternal reward. Irma's biography is
largely told in her own words, and pictures the ups and downs of
those pioneer days in vivid touches. A sketch of her life, previously
published, was fittingly entitled An Apostolic Woman, a title she
most certainly earned.
1918.] NEW BOOKS 691
THE RIDDLES OF HAMLET AND THE NEWEST ANSWERS.
By S. A. Blackmore, S. J. Boston : The Stratford Co. $2.00.
All students of Shakespeare, and in particular all teachers of
literature, will welcome this interesting and valuable work. The
author's name will not be unknown to them; for already he has
given them his commentary on Macbeth (Macbeth: A Great Soul
.in Conflict), a treatise which has proved helpful and illuminating in
a high degree. This companion volume will again lead them behind
the scenes of Shakespeare's theatre, and indeed further — into the
workshop of his brain and the very domain of his soul.
To apply the touchstone of Christian truth to the works of
the great master — this is Father Blackmore's avowed , purpose in
his Shakespearean studies. The author lays his foundations deftly
and quickly ; and on them builds the structure of his argument with
such persuasive grace and such compelling logic that he not only
solves the riddles of Hamlet, but makes us marvel, in the light of
Christian truth, that they ever were considered riddles. To Shakes-
peare, as Father Blackmore proves, they were not riddles, because
Shakespeare's mind was Catholic, his viewpoint Catholic, his whole
interpretation of life Catholic. Once the reader or spectator of the
tragedy gets this viewpoint, his difficulties vanish.
A work of this nature is bound to achieve much in the cause
of Christian truth. It makes a strong appeal to the non-Catholic
student and critic. It is never captious or bitter, but at every point
so convincing, so strong, so persuasive, that it would be difficult to
measure the good it will do.
INNOCENCE AND IGNORANCE. By M. S. Gillet, O.P. Trans-
lated by J. Elliot Ross, C.S.P. New York : The Devin-Adair
Co. $1.40.
Some five years ago two professors of theology at the Catho-
lic University in Innsbruck issued a book on the question of sex-
instruction for the young which met with much approval from those
of our pastors and educators who were able to read it in its original.
No translation was made; but a demand for such a book was cre-
ated. Since then there has been more than one treatise on this sub-
ject from Catholic writers. The latest to appear in English is
Father Ross' authorized translation of Abbe Gillet's Innocence and
Ignorance.
Abbe Gillet is opposed to the " method of silence " in
treatment of sex-awakening in the young — a method which he
692 NEW BOOKS [Feb.,
declares is still popular with the majority of our educators. But he
is still more opposed to the secular methods, advocated by many, of
so-called " scientific " education in purity. The dangers of promis-
cuous instruction in these delicate matters he makes plain. It is the
middle course, the course of common sense, that the Abbe cham-
pions— the simple Catholic method of first preparing the soul of
the young by strengthening it, before opening its eyes to the.
dangers about it. This preparation must begin at the cradle ; hence
it is the parents who are responsible. His whole work, in fact, is
addressed first of all to parents. The safety of the children lies in
their hands. He shows strikingly how easy it is for the parent
who keeps and fosters the confidence of his children, to lead them
safely through the dark waters of nature's upheaval; how hopeless
the task of that parent who loses hold of his children's hearts.
The value of such a book to Catholic educators and confessors
is very great. We could wish, however, for a more simplified treat-
ise for the use of the average parent — who, after all, is the one who
must be reached, and reached as directly as possible. We are in-
clined to think that an "adaptation " of Abbe Gillet's volume,
rather than what appears to be an almost literal translation, would
have served better. This Father Ross may yet give us, we hope.
LITTLE PILGRIMS TO OUR LADY OF LOURDES. By Mrs.
Francis Blundell. New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons. $1.10.
It is to be hoped that this book will have the effect its author
desires in exciting prayers to Our Lady of Lourdes from many
" little pilgrims " the world over, to the end that peace may come
quickly to the warring world. Certainly the little volume — which
is offered to Our Lady in thanksgiving for a child's marvelous re-
covery— deserves to be read by every Catholic child. It takes the
small reader by stages through the whole story of Bernadette Sou-
birous, closing each short chapter with a naturally drawn lesson on
the traits which Bernadette has shown — humility, modesty, loving
confidence — and on the peculiar graciousness and lovableness of
Our Lady. There is a union of simple devotion and' narrative
charm which makes it attractive reading for even a grown-up. There
is, moreover, no forcing of the little meditations, nor has the
author made the one mistake most fatal and most common in
children's books — that of " stepping down " in the story or over-
simplifying the diction, to fit a mistaken conception of what a child's
mind really is.
1918.] NEW BOOKS 693
"HONEST ABE." By Alonzo Rothschild. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Co. $2.00 net.
This study in honesty is based on the early life of Abraham
Lincoln, whose peculiar integrity attracted the attention of those
with whom he came in contact in both private and public life. Mr.
Rothschild is well known as a student of Lincoln, and has already
treated of him as a "master of men."
This new addition to Lincolniana contains many interesting
anecdotes of his life at the Bar. " The love of money never twined
its sinister roots around the heart of Abraham Lincoln," for
" wealth " he always considered, " simply a superfluity of what we
don't need." Poor as he* was, he would never accept a fee or en-
gage his services in a cause which he did not believe to be intrinsic-
ally right. As he said once after hearing the story of a man who
wished to employ him as his lawyer : " Well, you have a pretty good
case in technical law, but a pretty bad one in equity and justice.
You'll have to get some other fellow to win this case for you. I
couldn't do it. All the time while standing talking to the jury, I'd be
thinking, ' Lincoln, you're a liar ;' and I believe I should forget my-
self and say it out loud."
Lincoln in court was " truth in action," and was in all respects
the ideal advocate with a sensitive and rare standard of profes-
sional ethics.
THE ROYAL OUTLAW. By Charles B. Hudson. New York:
E. P. Button & Co. $1.50 net.
King David is The Royal Outlaw; and this volume sets forth,
in the form of an historical novel, his vicissitudes during the period
of Saul's persecutions until, upon the death of the latter, he is ac-
claimed ruler of Israel.
We gather from the publisher's announcement that the book
was written in response to a hypothetical need of a popular version
of the biblical story which would make the people of those times
" our fellow-beings and friends." Unfortunately, the author ap-
pears to have felt that to accomplish his purpose he must eliminate
from the incomparable romance its inner significance. The hand
with which he has removed the veil of symbolism was curiously
maladroit and lacking in ordinary veneration for a literary master-
piece. The awe-inspiring Samuel is shown attempting to incite
David to treason against Saul, and is rebuked by him with indig-
nation; the mantle of tragic dignity that shrouds the figure of Saul
694 NEW BOOKS [Feb.,
is torn away ; and David is presented as a sort of Robin Hood who
comports himself among his followers with a 'bonhomie that some-
times approaches buffoonery. In the remark : " God give thee good
sense and a shade less poetry, David," the author lets us glimpse the
psalmist : but of " the man after God's own heart," His prophet
and servant, there is not the faintest adumbration.
IN HAPPY VALLEY. By John Fox, Jr. New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons. $1.35 net.
Those who know Mr. Fox's work know how clear is his eye
for observing, and how genuine is his literary power for recounting
what he has seen. This present volume is a series of tales centring
about the region which he has made peculiarly his own — the moun-
tains of Kentucky. The best story in the collection is His Last
Christmas Gift, a grim little masterpiece softened by a touch that
almost brings tears. The other tales lack somewhat in compactness
and unity, but there is enough interesting material, warmly and
humanly presented, to make them all very good reading.
LIFE OF ROBERT E. LEE FOR BOYS AND GIRLS. By J. G.
and Mary Hamilton. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. $1.25.
This is a biography for young Americans of North and South
alike, and is written by the head of the department of history in the
University of North Carolina. It tells in a bright, informal way
the life of one of our greatest Americans, whose noble, simple
character and steadfast devotion to what he believed to be right,
•need to be more widely known and appreciated in all parts of our
country. The last traces of bitterness between North and South
are now disappearing, when the descendants of the followers of Lee
and the followers of Grant are marching away to battle under the
same flag; for the South has heeded the counsel given by Lee to his
faithful people : " Remember that we form one country now. Aban-
don all these local animosities and make your sons Americans."
This is a book that every boy and girl should own.
THE DWELLING PLACE OF LIGHT. By Winston Churchill.
New York: The Macmillan Co. $1.60.
It is a far cry from Richard Carvel and The Crisis to The
Dwelling Place of Light, Winston Churchill's latest attempt at
modern, realistic fiction. Those earlier books, and others that
immediately followed them, were romances worth reading. His
1918.] NEW BOOKS 695
more recent novels reveal what is, to those who once believed in
him and his promise, a sad spectacle. Undeniably this gifted writer,
whose beginnings predicted the coming of a true romancer of the
highest rank into American letters, has degenerated. We saw this
in Coniston, but tried to blink the fact. It stared at us all the
more insistently in The Inside of the Cup, and last year in a Far
Country. Now with The Dwelling Place of Light as further con-
firmation, we are forced to admit that our author not only has de-
generated, but is rapidly going further down hill.
It is not only as a literary artist that Mr. Churchill disappoints
in this book. His later writings had revealed him as more or less
a student of affairs; he appeared to be achieving a certain social
vision — at any rate he showed the initial symptoms of such a devel-
opment. In view of this it was not unreasonable to expect that he
might eventually come to the stature of a more or less responsible
exponent of things as they are. But here we find him gone so
horribly astray that he actually turns "I. W. W.," radical, specialist
and advocate of the worst things Marx or Engels or Bill Haywood
could espouse — not even excepting free love. What more can be
said?
Frankly, we believe that this novel merits severe condemnation.
It can make no appeal whatever to the American Catholic: it is
equally bad from the religious standpoint, and as a social document.
Any man who, at this stage of our national life, with a war on our
hands and many internal dangers and problems to cope with, will
publish such a defence of the propaganda of syndicalism and mob-
rule, deserves a reprimand.
THE SOUL OF A BISHOP. By H. G. Wells. New York: The
Macmillan Co. $1.50.
To many who have eagerly anticipated the successor to Mr.
Britling Sees It Through, the present novel will bring a disappoint-
ment for which the author's intention is no less responsible than his
limitations. He has virtually made a mere re-statement of God the
Invisible King in the form of fiction. It is the story of Edward
Scrope, Anglican bishop of Princhester, who realizes that he has
shattering doubts both as to his Church's doctrines and its value
and usefulness as an institution. The War brings these misgivings
to a climax of unhappiness. At this juncture he has three visions
which reveal to him the God Who is soon to be worshipped by all
men, save a small minority. Mr. Wells does not so insist, as in the
696 NEW BOOKS [Feb.,
last-named book, that this deity is finite ; he says it does not matter
whether this be so or not. God's essence is simplicity, and but for
" the weakness and wickedness of priests " everyone would under-
stand Him. Except for their theological speculations, the doctrine
of the Trinity would not exist ; except for this doctrine, there would
not be the division of mankind into nations and kingdoms, with the
concomitant issues that lead to war. All over the world men are
awakening to this truth ; a change is imminent ; creeds and differen-
tiations will be abolished, and mankind will dwell in peaceful unity
of allegiance to one invisible King, under whatever name He may
be known.
It has more than once been Mr. Wells' experience to witness
an early verification of something he has foretold. In this instance,
he has shown discretion in admitting that much time may be required
for the fulfillment of this extensive prophecy. It will not be hastened
by this exposition. Seldom has propaganda been less beguilingly
presented. The title fails to justify itself. Mr. Wells falls into the
special error of his time and his school of thought — he identifies
the mental with the spiritual. It is the workings of Scrope's mind,
not his soul, that we follow, even when his native honesty impels
him to abandon his office and his church.
GARDENS OVERSEAS AND OTHER POEMS. By Thomas
Walsh. New York: John Lane Co. $1.25 net.
The mark of distinction and scholarship is stamped on the
writing of Thomas Walsh. He has been called one of the most
scholastic of America's present-day poets, and has long been ac-
corded a place among the intellectuals. A glance at his new volume
confirms this estimate; here we find poetry of the highest grade, of
the finest polish; Spanish poetry and Italian poetry, Russian and
Latin poetry, and songs (these too from the Spanish) out of South
America — all done into faultless flowing English; and finally we
have the poet himself, in his own tongue and his own utterance,
singing of life as he beholds it and would interpret it, with imagina-
tive force and much felicity of expression.
While Mr. Walsh's translations are pleasing and interesting,
and his offering of characteristic verse from Latin America of
much value as a revelation to the North American of the spirit of
his Southern — and strangely unknown — neighbor, it is nevertheless
as himself that we like the poet best — when he sings of Our Little
House and of The Kingdom of the Rose; when he recounts some
I9i8.] NEW BOOKS 697
such lovely legend as The Vision of Fra Angelica or pictures The
Harbor Fog or Moonrise on Manhattan. The latter poem is full of
memorable phrases and striking imagery ; and it is a long day since
we have read lovelier lyrics than Stars on the Water and At Mem-
ory's Casement.
There are, it is true, some verses in the book which we would
have omitted — some that appear forced beside the exquisite grace
of others; there is unevenness and some infelicities — as, for in-
stance, the " brow of the large gray eyes," which mars the opening
poem; but these flaws are only made evident by the beauty of the
work as a whole.
CHARRED WOOD. By " Myles Muredach." Chicago: The
Reilly & Britton Co. $1.25 net.
This "mystery story" contains many familiar elements; the
morgantic marriage of a Grand Duke, the substitution of a living
infant for a dead one, the remarkable likeness between twin sisters,
all bringing about international complications when the pursuit of
a young and willful Grand Duchess extends to this country. With
this there is introduced newer and more original material in the
character of a priest, Father Murray, who feels himself constrained
to maintain silence that brings him into temporary disfavor with his
superiors, causing him to be degraded from the office of Vicar-
General to that of pastor of a small country parish. Thus humbled,
he attains great heights of spirituality, and learns so to love ob-
scurity that when vindication comes, with attendant elevation, it is
a grief and a hardship to him. The title is derived from a line then
read by him : " Ah ! must Thou char the wood ere Thou canst limn
with it?" He is the book's centre of interest, although this is too
frequently obscured by faulty constructions.
MY WAR DIARY. By Mary King Waddington. New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons. $1.50 net.
Vast as will be the accumulation of war literature when the
great struggle is over, Madame Waddington's contribution will
occupy by right a place of distinction, as affording illumination of
a unique character. The entries in her diary cover the first eighteen
months, and record many incidents, scenes, and touches of char-
acter that only her social prominence" could bring in her way. She
gives us glimpses of the men most eminent in French affairs of
state, describes conditions both in Paris and in the country, and
698 NEW BOOKS [Feb.,
tells of the tone of the public mind at various stages of the War's
progress. We learn, too, of the workshop for women, and other
relief work which she was instrumental in organizing. The book
is necessarily personal, yet it is most attractively free from any
touch of self-importance.
A FATHER OF WOMEN AND OTHER POEMS. By Alice
Meynell. London: Burns and Gates, Ltd. 35 cents net.
A new poem by Alice Meynell is always an episode worth
noting, while a new volume is an event. Many readers must, in-
deed, have been waiting with something like eagerness for the poems
which should follow that achingly memorable utterance of the very
first war days, Summer in England. There have been but few fol-
lowers, it would seem, during the three years " Too dark for love
or song;" but all of the sixteen now published are too good to be
foregone by lovers of the fine things in literature. In subject they
range from the tragic nearness of Edith Cavell to the remoteness of
Tintaretto's trick in light and shadow. In form they are at once
reticent and ejaculatory in Mrs. Meynell's characteristic manner.
Always the viewpoint is unique and high, as in the poem which
gives title to the slim volume — a poem of the best and rarest femin-
ism, the daughters of man swift to take up the world's work when
" his sons are dust."
No hand but Mrs. Meynell's, surely, could have devised those
subtle fancies upon sleep, Free Will, and fear in a baby's face, or
that exquisite meditation to A Thrush Before Dawn. And the
hand loses nothing of its cunning, nor the voice of its charm.
HTHE AMERICAN SOLDIERS' AND SAILORS' DIARY
-*• FOR 1918, by Mary Parker Converse, is pubished by E. P.
Dutton & Co. It is handy in size, usefully arranged, and includes
at the top of every page a selected quotation helpful to the soldier.
The little book reprints Cardinal O'Connell's exhortation to the
American soldiers, and at the end has a classical benediction from
John Henry Cardinal Newman.
CISTER ROSE AND THE MASS OF REPARATION, by
^ Mother Mary of the Cross, a work for loving souls whose
sympathy goes out to the Heart that "came unto His own, and whose
own received Him not," comes to us from B. Herder, St. Louis
(20 cents). It is peculiarly suited to these times. Sociology, hu-
I9i8.] NEW BOOKS 699
manitarianism and philanthropy busy themselves with the wants of
the neighbor but are too apt to exile God from His own creation.
We, Catholics, need to be reminded that Our Lord is not loved, not
served, not obeyed ; hence there is need to repair this neglect. The
work of The Mass of Reparation concerns itself with the honor of
God wounded by the willful neglect of the commandment to hear
Mass on Sundays and Holydays, and those who engage in this
work undertake to hear a second Mass, either on Sunday, or during
the week, in reparation for this serious sin of omission.
"PROM Benziger Brothers: The Boyhood of a Priest (50 cents),
by Armel O'Connor, who believes that a healthy, well-balanced
manhood is best fitted for bearing the burden of being an alter
Christus. The author pleads, therefore, for the cultivation of the
natural as well as the supernatural virtues in the youthful hearts of
those destined to stand at the altar of God. Also: Devotion to the
Sacred Heart of Jesus, by Father Ratcliffe, S.J. (45 cents), con-
taining chapters on Jesus Christ, God and Man, and on the Essence,
Characteristics, Advantage and Rewards of devotion to the Heart
burning with love for us. And Thursdays with the Blessed
Sacrament, by Rev. C. McNeiry (60 cents), a collection of touch-
ing and edifying true stories of devotion to Our Lord in the Most
Holy Sacrament.
FOREIGN PUBLICATIONS.
The Journal et Pensees de Chaque Jour of Madame Felix Leseur with an
introduction by Father Janvier, O.P. (Paris: J. de Gigord), is one of those
rare and delightful revelations of a very mortified, interior life faithfully pur-
sued in the midst of numerous social obligations. Elizabeth Leseur was
not holy in spite of these obligations, but by loftiness of motive and aspiration,
made her intercourse with people and her worldly occupations the very fibre
and tissue of her supernatural life: she was "all things to all men to win them
unto Christ." Physically a great sufferer, she set hersef to be " always bright,
with a smile for everyone, to hide my sufferings as much as possible, to forget
myself and to be devoted and charming for others in order that this amiability
may be all for God's honor and glory." " Every soul that uplifts self, up-
lifts the world/' was the motto she gave her sister. Small wonder that she
drew after her to the practice of religion her husband, a prominent journalist
and politician and an avowed free thinker. The Journal has the unconscious
charm of a document never intended for publication.
IRecent Events.
The period covered by the present notes of
Peace Talk. recent events has been devoted almost ex-
clusively to the consideration of war aims
and the consequent terms of peace. In Great Britain, the Marquis
of Lansdowne opened the discussion by his letter expressing the
opinion that the time had come for a negotiated peace, and calling
upon the Government to disclose its terms more particularly than
had been done hitherto. This letter received a certain amount of
support from influential papers, like the Manchester Guardian and
the Westminster Gazette, as well as the daily News, and also from
well-known men, such as Lord Parmoor, Lord Weardale, Lord
Sheffield, Lord Denmar and Lord Gladstone. Even the late Earl Grey
has been mentioned as approving of the step taken by Lord Lans-
downe, and the Earl of Loreburn as well. Mr. Asquith, too, has been
cited as a supporter of his former opponent, but, as a matter of fact,
he did no more than declare his full belief in the honesty of purpose
of the writer of the letter. He declared that the Marquis of Lans-
downe had been misunderstood and that he was a supporter of a de-
cisive war. The letter has produced no definite results, nor changed
the Government's purpose to pursue the War. In substantiation of
this, the Attorney-General of Great Britain, speaking in New York,
asserted that Great Britain's determination to fight to a decisive
issue was unshaken. In pursuance of this policy five hundred
thousand more men have been summoned to the colors, although
this call involves the taking of men from trades essential to the car-
rying on of the War.
Lord Lansdowne's letter was followed by the demand made by
the Russian Government upon its Allies to publish their terms of
peace, with the intimation that their failure to do so would lead
that Government to negotiate with Germany alone a separate peace.
No direct reply was made, as the Bolsheviki ministry has not been
recognized as even a de facto government by any of the Entente
Allies. Indirect replies, however, were made by Mr. Lloyd George
and subsequently by the President. As these contain the more de-
tailed statement of the purposes and aims of Great Britain and the
United States, and as at the Brest-Litovsk Conference the Germans
I9i8.] RECENT EVENTS 701
gave to the Petrograd Government the terms on which the Russians
might obtain peace, it may be well to give a specific summary of the
situation. The German terms may be compared thus with those
demanded by the Western Powers, as France, and presumably Italy,
are in full accord with Great Britain and the United States.
The first condition laid down by President Wilson in his ad-
dress of January 8th may be taken as a vindication of the Rus-
sian Government in its having completely disclosed the treaties of
the Tsar, for the President enunciates as his first condition that
all treaties shall be open covenants of peace openly arrived at, after
which there shall be no private international understandings.
The second condition of Mr. Wilson, is that there should be
absolute freedom of the seas alike in peace and war. This condition
is not actually proposed by any of the four Powers in question. It
would be gladly accepted by Germany, and in fact has been received
with acclaim by some of the German press, but it has been de-
nounced by some of the British press, at least under present condi-
tions of warfare, as depriving Great Britain of a necessary defence.
The third condition of President Wilson calls for the removal
of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of
trade conditions among all the nations consenting to the peace. This
conflicts with the decision arrived at by the representatives of Great
Britain, France and Italy in the Paris Conference, to exclude from
the world's trade Germany and her allies. The President's policy
also fails to meet with the approval of the representatives of five
hundred thousand American merchants who have announced their
intention to boycott German trade after the War. The second and
third conditions of the President are so pleasing to many Germans
that they have ventured to call the President's message a basis for
peace negotiations.
There is small chance, however, that the dominant parties in
Germany will accept the fourth of the President's conditions,
namely " adequate guarantees that national armaments will be
reduced to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety," as this
is equivalent to Germany's renouncing her cherished purpose of the
last forty years of securing world dominance. How far Great Brit-
ain and the others of the Allied States would accept this condition,
depends upon its acceptance by Germany, and no such acceptance is
to be found in the terms of peace disclosed at the Brest-Litovsk
Conference. The same demand was made by Mr. Lloyd George in
his speech which so closely parallels the President's address. Among
702 RECENT EVENTS [Feb.,
the Russian terms, however, there is found a demand for the
gradual disarmament on land and sea, and the establishment of
militia to replace standing armies. It will be remembered that for
several years before the War, the United States and Great Britain
were negotiating treaties having this end in view, treaties which
Germany always opposed. The late Tsar, in the early years of his
reign, initiated a movement towards this end.
The fifth condition: that a free, open-minded and absolutely
impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon the principle
that the interests of the populations must have equal weight with
the equal claims of the Government concerned, is practically the
same as that which Mr. Lloyd George laid down in his speech, when
he declared that the question of the destiny of the colonies must be
determined in harmony with the wishes of the natives; that they
should have a voice in this determination, thereby extending the
American principle of the right of the people to have a voice in the
Government
In the Brest-Litovsk Conference, Germany made a formal de-
mand for the return of her colonies without any conditions, and to
this the Russian delegates agreed.
The sixth condition of the President, for the evacuation of all
Russian territory and such a settlement of all Russian questions as
will secure for her unhampered opportunity for independent politi-
cal development and national policy, is in striking contrast with the
speech of Mr. Lloyd George, in which he washed his hands com-
pletely of any interest in Russia. Russia demands the evacuation
of all Russian territory. Germany wishes to put off this evacuation
until the peace treaty is completed.
The President demands in his seventh condition the evacua-
tion and restoration of Belgium, without any attempt to limit her
sovereignty. Mr. Lloyd George calls for the complete restoration,
political, territorial and economic, of Belgium, with such reparation
as can be made. Russia stipulates for the restoration of Belgium ;
the indemnity, however, to be provided for by an international
fund. Germany agrees to the restoration of Belgium without rep-
aration, and under certain conditions.
In the eighth condition, Mr. Wilson demands the liberation of
all French territory; the restoration of the invaded portions and
the righting of the wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871 in the
matter of Alsace-Lorraine. Mr. Lloyd George in his speech, as
transmitted to this country, was singularly mild in his reference to
1918.] RECENT EVENTS 703
Alsace-Lorraine, for he only calls for a " reconsideration of the
great wrong of 1871." As this has not been criticized in France, it
must be taken that there has been no modification of the pledge
which Great Britain has given to France to stand with her until she
has attained the restoration of the lost provinces. He, of course,
concurs with the demand of the President for the evacuation of
the occupied provinces of France and reparation for injustice done.
Russia demands the settlement of the Alsace-Lorraine question by
a plebiscite with guarantees of perfect freedom to vote. Germany
denies all right to any state to interfere, and reserves to herself the
settlement at the conclusion of the War. Even the Moderates in
Germany refuse to discuss this restoration.
Mr. Wilson's ninth condition is for the readjustment of the
frontiers of Italy along clearly recognizable lines of nationality, and
the Premier of England includes among the British conditions the
satisfaction of the legitimate claims of the Italians for union with
those of their own race and tongue. The Russians support Italian
claims on conditions that a plebiscite is taken; while Germany is
silent on the subject.
In the President's tenth condition he changes his attitude com-
pletely from that taken in the address to Congress at the opening of
the session. In the former address he disclaimed any intention of
making claims for the various nationalities embraced by the Dual
Monarchy. In the address under consideration, however, he asks
for the peoples of Austria-Hungary the freest opportunity for
autonomous development. Mr. Lloyd George concurs in this de-
mand for genuine self-government on true democratic principles for
those Austro-Hungarian nationalities who have long desired it. This
subject is not mentioned by either of the parties represented at
Brest-Litovsk.
The President goes on, in his eleventh condition, to demand
the evacuation of Rumania, Montenegro and Serbia, and for the
latter free access to the sea. This, it will be remembered, was one
of the chief causes of dissension between Austria-Hungary and the
Slav kingdom, and recently it has been disclosed that Italy supported
the demands of the Central Powers that Serbia should be forbidden
such an outlet. The President, however, has made this claim of
Serbia an important point in the settlement of peace. The British
Prime Minister also demands the restoration of Serbia, Monte-
negro and the occupied parts of Rumania. Russia stipulates for
the restoration of Serbia and Montenegro with indemnities; in-
7o4 RECENT EVENTS [Feb.,
eludes the demand for Serbia's access to the sea, and goes on to
demand for Bosnia and Herzegovina autonomous rights. To these
demands Germany makes no reference whatever.
The President makes it a further condition of the War settle-
ment that the nationalities in the Balkans should be placed within
their national boundaries, a task which has baffled the politicians of
Europe for the past fifty years. Mr. Lloyd George is silent on this
thorny topic, but demands for the men of Rumanian blood, in-
cluding, therefore, the Rumanes under Hungarian domination,
justice and speech in their legitimate aspirations. Russia is equally
interested in Rumania and demands that she recover all territory
within her former frontiers, while granting autonomy to the Dob-
rudja and equal rights to Jews. Other contested territory in the
Balkans to have autonomy until a plebiscite is taken. Again, on all
these questions, Germany is perfectly silent.
President Wilson proceeds in his twelfth condition to deal with
the Ottoman Empire. While he leaves it a secure sovereignty, he
exacts for the other nationalities unmolested opportunity for autono-
mous development. This means, of course, that the Armenians
are to be made secure against the cruel rule of the Turks. The
Dardanelles are to be made free for all nations under international
guarantees. Mr. Lloyd George's demands are the same as those of
the President, but more specific. He demands that Constantinople
and the district inhabited by Turks should be retained by the
Turks, while the Dardanelles should be internationalized and neu-
tralized. The Russian delegates demanded autonomy for Turkish
Armenia. Germany makes no reference to these questions.
Of the conditions laid down by the President the most exact-
ing, and the least likely to be accepted by Germany, is the thirteenth,
in which he demands the erection of an independent Polish state,
including the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish popula-
tions, with free access to the sea and with political and economic
independence and territorial integrity internationally guaranteed.
This involves taking from Germany the some five million subjects
which she snatched from the ancient kingdom of Poland, at the
time it was divided between the three empires; includes free ac-
cess to the sea, and the surrender of a part of that province of Ger-
many which is most beloved by the Kaiser. England's Prime Minis-
ter makes a similar demand, requiring an independent Poland,
including all those who desire to form a part of it. Russia calls
for autonomy for Poland and Lithuanian and Lettish provinces.
1918.] RECENT EVENTS 705
This is a more moderate demand than that for an independent
Poland. Germany's demand in regard to Poland is apparently the
adoption of a democratic principle of self-determination for all
peoples, for it stipulates that Poland is to decide its own destiny
by plebiscite, but this plebiscite is to be under the control of the
German army of occupation. Included in it are to be the Russian
provinces of Lithuania, Courland and portions of Esthonia and
Livonia. Among German terms we find included a stipulation
that no forcible annexations of territory, seized during the War,
should be made, but when it comes to a practical application of
this principle, it is seen how incomplete is her acceptance of it, since
the very condition she lays down is that the army of occupation
should remain in Poland and the four named provinces of Russia.
The last of President Wilson's conditions concerns the state of
the world after the War is over, the formation of a league of na-
tions for the preservation of peace. This is well known to be dear
to the President's heart, as it is indeed to that of all who look upon
this War as " a war to end war," but whether it is feasible or not
is a matter still in doubt.
The renouncing of all war indemnities and return of contribu-
tions exacted during the War, is a demand made by Russia alone.
Germany makes a similar stipulation for the renouncing by both
groups of the belligerents of indemnification for war costs and war
damages.
Students of President Wilson's last message to Congress find
that it contains no reference to the stipulation in his message to
Congress at the opening of the session : that a condition of entering
negotiations with Germany must include the formation in Germany
of a government which shall truly represent the voice of the German
people. Whether the omission signifies the abandonment of this
demand is doubted, as the reason for it remains as strong as ever,
and the latter message is not in opposition to the former, but the two
are to be construed as forming one whole.
Germany's peace terms with reference to the four provinces of
Russia, indicate her purpose of keeping Russia under her own eco-
nomic domination, for the possession of these four provinces would
give her the only commercial seaports on the Baltic. Lithuania alone
contains six million inhabitants and about sixty thousand square
miles of territory, and with the three other provinces of which Ger-
many demands the real, although disguised, control would be equal
in extent to the kingdom of Italy. If the German demands were com-
VOL. cvi.— 45
706 RECENT EVENTS [Feb.,
plied with, Poland would be entirely cut off from any outlet to the
s^a, and placed nominally under the control of Austria, which
being under the dominance of Germany, the Germans would vir-
tually rule Poland also, and economically enslave the whole of
Russia. No wonder such terms were rejected even by the Bol-
shevik Government, anxious though it was to make peace upon
almost any terms.
The meetings for the discussion of the peace terms between
the Central Powers and Russia were resumed at Brest-Litovsk, al-
though reluctantly by the Bolshevik Government which wished to
transfer these negotiations to a neutral territory. The delegates,
however, at once found no basis of agreement, and adjourned fur-
ther negotiations to Warsaw, where they are to be re-opened at a
date not specified. These resumed negotiations were for a separate
peace between Russia and Germany, and fell through on account
of the demand made by the Russians that the inhabitants exiled
by the War should return to their homes before any vote was taken.
As the expatriated number some nine millions the demand was cer-
tainly reasonable if the will of the people was really to be ascer-
tained. To it, however, Germany would not consent, and at
present the conclusion of a treaty of peace between the two coun-
tries is in abeyance. When they separated Germany hinted at an
ultimatum to Russia.
Upon the rejection of its terms by the Bolsheviki, the German
Government announced that all peace proposals were at an end, and
that the terms offered had been withdrawn, and that it resumed
complete liberty of action, hence the stipulation of no indemnities
and no annexations is now null and void. At the present time,
Germany is engaged in a general discussion as to what the new
terms of peace shall be, and even the Reichstag resolution of last
July is being called in question, and its revocation is being demanded
by the militaristic party which seems to be again in the ascendancy.
In France the Government of M. Clemenceau
France. still remains in power without any change.
In fact M. Clemenceau may be looked upon
as France's " strong man," for he overcame the opposition made to
the bill for calling out the 1919 quota by threatening to resign if
the bill were not passed. The object of this bill is not so much the
need felt for these very young men, but in order to release from
service the older men who have been so long at the front. That
1918.] RECENT EVENTS
France has been " bled white " is declared by Father Patrice Flynn,
who has been lecturing in this country, to be a calumny. And the
fact that she has been able to send an army to Italy would look as
if she had not suffered so much in loss of man power as has been
frequently stated.
The Committee of Deputies which investigated the accusations
brought against M. Joseph Caillaux, came to a conclusion that there
was sufficient evidence to justify depriving him of the immunity
which was his privilege as a member of the French legislature and
fecommended that this should be done. As he himself made the
same demand it was acceded to almost unanimously. M. Caillaux,
however, was left at liberty, but within the last few days has been
arrested and thrown into prison. The reason for this is not quite
clear, but it is asserted that he had taken steps to negotiate with
Germany a peace upon almost any terms; that he had formed
a plot to arrest leading members of the French parliament, including
M. Clemenceau and other persons of note in France, who might
oppose his plans. As Bolo Pasha is to be tried in the beginning of
February, the treason and treachery which up to this time has
been carried on in secret will soon be disclosed.
Although certain food restrictions had to be introduced in
France, M. Boret, Minister of Relief, declares the country is well
supplied in provisions, and that the restrictions are for the purpose
of an equal distribution of supplies. It is noteworthy that the
restrictions have favored the hard working poor rather than the
rich, for while the latter are allowed only seven ounces of bread a
day, to the former twenty-one ounces are given.
As to the French determination to continue the War, no one
who has visited France is in any doubt. Never has that determina-
tion been so strong or so widespread as at the present moment, al-
though there are, of course, in France as in every other country, the
selfish, the timid and the treasonable.
The position in Russia, as these notes were
Russia. written, may be summed up in the words
of one whose knowledge is full and ac-
curate, the British Ambassador, Sir George Buchanan. " The sit-
uation is so uncertain that nobody can know on one day what will
happen on the next, but the Bolsheviki are in such a strong posi-
tion that no other party at present is able to turn them out." A few
7o8 RECENT EVENTS [Feb.,
weeks ago their fall was anticipated. Some gave them only a few
days, some gave them a few weeks. The means which they have
taken to keep their hold have been such as to rally to their support
large numbers of the propertyless. Such means include confisca-
tion of factories, the distribution of the lands of large proprietors
and the seizure of the banks. Whether the latter proceeding
includes confiscation or not is uncertain. Rumors have been cir-
culated of a repudiation of the debt, not a complete repudiation
now, but of that portion which is due to foreign holders and to the
rich. Small holders of Russian stock will receive a proportion ac-
cording to the smallness of their holdings. The smaller they are, the
larger will be the proportion they are to receive. No means favor-
able to the ends they have in view, are too bad for the Bolsheviki.
In fact open threats have been made of the introduction of the
guillotine, and Petrograd is now in a state of perfect lawlessness.
Houses are pillaged and unfettered violence reigns. All this is done
in the name of the people. In fact the Government call themselves
the commissaries of the people. Sir George Buchanan states that
their power is limited to the northern part of Russia, the south
having severed connection with Petrograd. The Ukraine has de-
clared itself to be a republic; General Kaledines has established a
similar form of government of which he himself is the president in
the Don Cossack region, and swarms, it is stated, of small repub-
lics have been declared in various parts of Russia. Finland's inde-
pendence has been recognized by Germany, and strange to say, if
true, by France. So that it may be said that Russia has ceased to
exist, in any legitimate sense of the word, although some of the
small republics declare their intention to form a federated republic
of the whole.
Among the other violent measures of the Bolsheviki is the
threat openly made to dissolve the Constituent Assembly unless
the delegates elected to it are in agreement with their plans, and as
this, so far, has proved not to be the case, the meeting of the As-
sembly, so long promised, is still in doubt.
It must be remembered in speaking of the endeavor to extend
the Bolsheviki schemes that they repudiate the idea of a national
patriotism, and substitute for it the defence of the supposed inter-
est of the proletariate, that is to say the workingmen, without any
capital, in every part of the world, so that a German workingman
is dearer to the Bolsheviki than a Russian capitalist or landowner.
This is a movement tending to unite practically and effectually all
I9i8.] RECENT EVENTS 709
the workingmen of every country in the world to take what meas-
ures they deem fit to secure to the proletariate the power to govern
each country. They professed in their recent treaty negotiations
with Germany to have passed on an appeal to the German working-
men, and successfully. In fact, on the German admission, they suc-
ceeded sufficiently to cause the German Government to take meas-
ures to prevent the propaganda. What they have done in Ger-
many, they are trying to do in other countries, as well, and to such
a degree have they succeeded in this country that they have been
warned officially to moderate their proceedings.
The spirit of the American people, we are told, is rising and
will brook no such attempts against their Government as are threat-
ened. While improvements t in American social conditions are
needed, they will be attained in the American way, by full discus-
sion and legal enactment, and not by the violence of the mob. Pres-
ident Wilson in his letter to the miners, meeting in the Biennial Con-
vention in Indianapolis, reminds them that the welfare of the coun-
try depends upon them, and so he assures them that all that can be
done for their welfare in return has been and will be done.
The Bolshevik Government has broken with all the traditions
of the past, having published the secret treaties which have been
made by the Imperial Government of Russia, and by entering into
negotiations with Germany for a separate peace it has broken the
treaty made at the beginning of the War between the Entente
Powers not to make such a peace. Its last outrage has been the ar-
rest of the Rumanian Legation. But whatever happens to the Bol-
shevik Government, it appears absolutely certain that a peace with
Germany will be concluded. Any government representing the
Bourgeoise Government would make even greater concessions to
Germany than those proposed by Lenine, so anxious are they for
peace.
Internal conditions in Germany, so far as
Germany. they can be ascertained, indicate political
disagreement caused by the lip-service of-
fered by Germany to a democratic peace. The Foreign Secretary,
Dr. von Kuehlmann, so excited the anger of the military party that
General Ludendorf, who is considered the brains of the party, is
said to have threatened to resign. A regular campaign is now being
carried on against the Foreign Secretary, and at the present time
his resignation may be looked for. All signs point to the triumph
7io RECENT EVENTS [Feb.,
of the militarists, although it is evident the opposing forces are
making a strong fight. Meetings are being held in different parts
of Germany, calling for peace. These meetings, however, are being
rigorously suppressed. The leader of the Minority Socialists, Herr
Haase, in a speech delivered before the Reichstag, declared that
the conditions were far better in Austria-Hungary than in Prus-
sianized Germany. Every kind of discussion by the people of the
terms of peace had been forcibly prohibited by the military au-
thorities, and thereby any expression of the will of the country had
been prevented. From other sources it is learned that a vast major-
ity of the Germans are longing for peace, and that they are con-
strained by main force from expressing their will in the matter.
As to food conditions, reports, as usual, vary, and so command
little credence. In fact, for the army, at least, the sufficiency of food
is secure, so that the want of it cannot be considered a military
factor. Besides want of food, there is said to be a shortage of
steel, so that a number of factories have had to close down, and a
recent report also includes coal among the things lacking.
The Kaiser is still confident in the strength of his army and of
the " iron fist and shining sword." In his New Year's message he
made no mention of peace. Even Herr Maximilian Harden pro-
claims it necessary to continue the conflict until a complete victory
has been obtained. That serious differences really exist are proved
by the earnest exhortations that have recently been given by the
Food Controller, calling upon the inhabitants of both town and
country to put an end to their " unholy misunderstanding." He has
sent from Prussia some seven hundred men to enlighten the people
and to banish that desire for a termination of the War which, he
said, was eating like a cancer into the harmony of the people, and
rendering useless the rivers of blood which had been poured forth.
As to food supplies, there is reason to believe that Austria-
Hungary is in even worse straits than Germany, but, of course, all
information to be had can apply only to limited localities. The
last report is that Vienna has been placed upon a half ration of
bread and that the conditions there are about as bad as can be.
Considerable uneasiness, taking various
Spain. shapes, has existed in Spain since the be-
ginning of the War. There are in that
country many Germans and pro-Germans who would wish an ac-
RECENT EVENTS 7™
tive support to be given to Germany, and one of the leading conserv-
atist statesmen indeed has declared the present to be a suitable op-
portunity for regaining by Spain of the fortress of Gibraltar,
which has been so long in the possession of the British. The de-
fenders of the maintenance of neutrality, however, have succeeded
in keeping the country from taking an active part against the
Entente Allies, and the continuance of this neutrality seems to be
assured. Internal troubles, however, have not been wanting, and
there have been several changes of government. Even the army
entered upon a course of action which was very much like a revolt
on the part of its officers, who felt they were underpaid and that
promotion to office was unfair. When the officers succeeded in
establishing their claims in this way, the non-commissioned
officers felt they had a right to pursue the same course, but they
were not equally successful.
The recent celebration which has taken place at Granada of the
tercentenary of the great theologian, Francis Suarez, recalls to
recollection the time when Spain had, in him, a theologian whose
opinions on the rights of the people were considered so dangerous
by the King of England, that he complained to Philip III. for
allowing such dangerous teaching to be printed, and he himself had
Suarez' books burned by the common hangman because they im-
pugned the divine right of kings. The writings of Suarez had a
great influence upon the formation of that International Law in
defence of which the Entente Allies are fighting, and the assertion
of the divine right of kings made by the King of England in Suarez'
day is in our day assumed by the German Kaiser.
Another revolution has taken place in Por-
Portugal. tugal, causes for which have not been dis-
closed very clearly to the world at large.
Anxiety at first was felt on the part of the Entente as to the effect it
would have upon Portugal's support of the Allies in the War. The
new regime, however, has made it clear that in this respect, no
change whatever has been made, and that the present Government
is as whole-souled in the struggle as was the former.
The year 1918 opened with gloom for the
Progress of the War. Allies. The year 1917, owing to the col-
lapse of Russia and the defeat of Italy,
having witnessed the failure of the great offensive which had been
7i2 RECENT EVENTS [Feb.,
planned, and gave again to Germany the offensive lost in 1916. Dur-
ing the year the British succeeded in obtaining a series of ridges
which gave them commanding positions along their line, but they
made no notable headway, and the French remained much in the
same position at the end of the year as they were at its beginning,
except for some small advances at Verdun and on the Aisne
Front.
The release of troops from the Russian Front made it probable
that Marshal von Hindenburg would concentrate them for a stu-
pendous drive somewhere on the Western Front, and rumors of
their arrival were rife. These rumors, however, proved to be pre-
mature, and there are experts, French, English and American, who
for various reasons, think that such a drive will not be attempted.
Others there are, however, who look upon it as likely to be deferred
only until the spring. The suspension, to say the least, of the nego-
tiations with Russia for peace and the threat recently made by Ger-
many of a new attack on Russia, make it tolerably certain that this
great German offensive will not take place at present. It is the
opinion of some that German efforts in 1918 will be directed either
towards driving the Allied Forces from the neighborhood of Sal-
oniki or to retrieving the loss of Bagdad. Or, possibly, in another
attempt upon Egypt. The Kaiser, it is said, has made a solemn
promise to restore to his brother-in-law, Constantine, the throne
of Greece. It is not impossible, British authorities think, that an
attempt will be made to invade British soil, not a foot of which so
far has been taken by any German invader.
In Italy, the Teutons have failed in their attempt to
reach the Venetian plain, and confidence has been so far restored
that the schools at Venice have reopened. The weather which at
first was favorable to the invaders of Italian soil, has now turned
against them, and hopes are entertained that the Italian troops, with
their British and French allies, may be able to take the offensive
and drive back the Teuton forces before spring comes. Germany
has inflicted upon Italian cities and their inhabitants some of the
barbarities characteristic of her warfare, and by throwing bombs
on Padua has called forth the protest of the Holy Father.
In the neighborhood of Saloniki no notable event has taken
place, unless the resignation of the commander-in-chief, General
Sarrail, may be considered such.
The British have advanced a short distance north of Jerusalem,
while towards the east, in the direction of the Hedjas railway, they
1918.] RECENT EVENTS
have not moved. In fact the Turks are holding the Jordan, as far
as its entrance into the Dead Sea, with considerable force. No
further news has come concerning the expected attempt of General
von Falkenhayn to reach Bagdad. The clearing out of the Germans
from East Africa has not been so complete as was asserted. They
were indeed driven across the boundary into Portuguese Africa, but
some few bands have returned into what was formerly German
territory.
As to the U-boat campaign, the expectation of Mr. Lloyd
George seems to have been somewhat too sanguine, as the number
of vessels lost has considerably increased during the last few
weeks, although the latest returns are encouraging. The British
Premier, too, seems to have been premature in his estimate of the
number of ships to be built, and so at the present time Great Britain
is in considerable straits. There are indications that the ration-
ing of the people, so long deferred, is on the point of being put into
effect. This has been done, for the most part, on the demand of
the working classes, and, although the shortage is one reason for
this measure, it is rather due to a necessity for a more equal dis-
tribution of the existing food supplies.
January 16, 1918.
With Our Readers.
A CCORDING to Catholic teaching man is the highest expres-
•Li- sion of material creation. Under God he is its crown and
glory. With things material and temporal he owns kinship; and
though himself subject to death, he mirrors and reflects in time and
eternity the very image of the Creator Himself. So intimate is this
union of matter and spirit, of body and soul that no man can find
the line of cleavage: to separate one from the other means death.
The material dispossessed of the spiritual suffers, in common with all
other material things, dissolution and decay — but with this difference :
that the material once allied to the spiritual never entirely falls from
its high estate: once the mysterious principle of life is wedded to the
image of the Eternal, it partakes with it of the law of eternal life,
and Faith confidently proclaims : " the resurrection of the body and
life everlasting."
* * * *
AND so Hope becomes a necessary corollary of Faith in the plan
of Divine Love. God creates man to His own image and like-
ness; man effaces that image by sin; God restores it and impresses
it yet more deeply upon the soul by redemption with its infinite con-
sequences and potentialities of grace. Never need man lose Hope
unless he first lose Faith. This is true of that supernatural order to
which God has raised us by His grace as well as of the purely natural
order. Equally true is it that to lose hope in man is to lose faith in
God. Hope, therefore, in more or less measure, is an essential mark
of man, living and working in the field of material creation, and is
dependent on the indissoluble union of soul with body, of matter with
spirit. This is the first point we wish to call to mind ; and the second
is like unto the first, that the supreme function of the soul with re-
gard to the body is to inform, to illumine, to elevate and to immortalize
it; never to repudiate, to lower or to destroy. These two cardinal
principles must permeate every province of man's life.
* * * *
TO attain his Nirvana of inanition, the Eastern mystic postulates the
annihilation of the material nature of man by the spiritual. The
Calvinist, to defend his doctrine, preaches the total depravity of
human nature, and the soul is thus made an arbitrary task-master
flogging into obedience a depraved body.
These and similar teachings have stretched out insidious roots ;
have entered into the thought of man — at times even of Catholics — •
and introduced false notions of sacrifice and the supernatural. Wit-
ness Claudel's The Hostage which exalts the unnatural into the super-
1918.] WITH OUR READERS 715
natural; or again the test which makes that which one does not like
to do necessarily the higher thing to do.
It is a far cry indeed from annihilation, to the Christian philosophy
of elevation, and from the doctrine of total depravity, to the Catholic
dogma of " darkness of the understanding and weakness of the will "
as the results of original sin. Yet a lack of clear thinking along
Catholic lines opens the door to the infiltration of just such foreign and
destructive thought. We are too apt to speak the language and think
the thought of the day without questioning its whence and whither.
* * * *
TT7ORDS are the signs of ideas; they are the material body of our
W thought. Thought and its expression rise or fall together. Deca-
dence in the use of a word indicates decadence in the thought that in-
forms it, or in the human concept of that thought. It is never meaning-
less or void of consequence. The man in whose thought the unnatural
and supernatural are interchangeable terms, consciously or uncon-
sciously denies God to nature and nature to God. He has lost some-
thing both of hope and faith. For the unnatural is as destructive of
the supernatural as of the natural: it is a sin against the higher as
against the lower order of the one divine Lawgiver Whose laws are
complementary not contradictory. So, too, sacrifice must be the con-
secration, the making holy of the whole victim, body as well as soul,
the sealing of the whole with the stamp of God's ownership. A sac-
rifice of the soul which would permit the debasing of the body, its un-
holy use, would not be true sacrifice. When the whole material world
has suffered shock and man is bewildered, thinking of how his race will
be peipetuated and its losses restored, it would be disastrous were he
to lose sight of the truth that sanctity and sacrifice must ever go hand
in hand. Any violation of the laws of God — no matter how specious
the excuse which present necessity may present — would work to no
purpose save that of greater confusion, of wider destruction of a more
complete overthrowing of the foundations on which alone humanity
may endure. We must remember that the word sacrifice has a com-
mon source with " sacring," the anointing of kings which, by the
way, in the ages of Faith, was not the setting up of an omnipotent
ruler over an awestruck people, but the consecration of an instrument
of divine justice to minister to the welfare of peoples.
* * * *
AS the meaning of sacrifice has been misunderstood and perverted,
so also has that divine virtue, charity, suffered eclipse as to its
real meaning. Ozanam pictures charity as a nursing mother with her
child at her breast, and St. Paul says "charity is patient, is kind. . . .
seeketh not her own. . . .thinketh no evil." The very word means love.
Yet by some strange destruction of meaning or perversion of action we
7i6 WITH OUR READERS [Feb.,
have come to hear such expressions as : "I do not want charity," or
" Our soldiers are not objects of charity." The paradox would be
laughable did it not indicate disease at the very heart of life. Have
we forgotten in our exercise of charity that we " are the body of
Christ and members of members," or does a self-satisfied world
find a cold altruism a more vivifying and consoling well-
spring than the divinely human fonts of Christian charity? The ma-
terialistic spirit sins against faith and charity alike by focussing too
closely on material welfare and excluding the love of God from its
service of man, but must we not also confess that ours has not always
been " the charity of God and the patience of Christ ;" that we too
have sinned against charity by presenting her in unlovely guise and
so have played a part in dethroning her in the estimation of the world ?
* * * *
THIS same tendency to divorce spirit from matter draws a line of
cleavage between the " real " and the " ideal " in the common par-
lance of the day. An impassable gulf lies between; they have lost
their point of contact — faith in the divinity of Christ. If naught else
does, the language, the classifications of modern literature betray this.
According to its utterances everything ugly or sordid or sinful, even
the unnatural, is " real :" realism means the painting, the picture, the
presentation of just those things ; while the " ideal " is a far-off, neb-
ulous dream detached from earth and never truly incarnate in man.
This is a subtle denial of the reality of spirit, a loss of faith in man
that betokens loss of faith in God. The natural man must wallow
with the beasts ; he has lost his kinship with the heavens. Hope of his
redemption dies with faith in the divinity of the Redeemer, through
Whom alone he may cry : " Abba, Father." This horrid pessimism
paralyzes endeavor, then seeks to justify the course of least resistance.
It welcomes and accepts the vague idealism of the East and rejects the
Christian Ideal, the Son of God made Man, partaking of human nature,
walking the ways of men, living with sinners, dying for sinners,
" Christ, the power of God " to make them saints. If we lose touch
with Christ's divinity, we are indeed " of all men the most miserable,"
but blessedly the need for God in the present crisis is reviving faith,
the demand for sacrifice and heroism, impossible without Him, is be-
getting hope in Him through Whom we can do all things. To many the
spiritual grows more real, but there is still need to dig deep the foun-
dations of faith and ground them on the basic truths of the divine plan
of creation, redemption and sanctification in the Father, the Son and
the Holy Ghost.
* * * *
A S indicative of the debasing effect upon the body of our thought if
**• the standard of its spirit be lowered, we quote Stearne's apt words
1918.] WITH OUR READERS 717
on the degeneration of wit into satire. Shrewd and sarcastic reflec-
tion upon whatever is done in the world is, he says : " a commerce most
illiteral, and as it requires no vast capital too many embark in it, and
so long as there are bad passions to be gratified and bad heads to
judge — with such it may pass for wit, or at least like some vile rela-
tion whom all the family is ashamed of, claim kindred with it, even
in better companies. Whatever be the degree of its affinity, it has
helped to give wit a bad name ; as if the main essence of it was satire.
Certainly there is a difference between Bitterness and Saltness, that is
between the malignity and the festivity of wit : the one is a mere quick-
ness of apprehension, void of humanity, and is a talent of the devil ;
the other comes from the Father of Spirits, so pure and abstracted
from persons that it willingly hurts no man; or if it touches upon an
indecorum, 'tis with the dexterity of true genius which enables him
rather to give a new color to the absurdity and let it pass. He may
smile at the shape of the obelisk raised to another's fame; but the
malignant wit will level it at once with the ground and build his own
upon the ruins of it."
''TODAY we constantly meet with the prognosis of a " new Chris-
* tianity," a " new religion " as the outcome of the upheaval of the
great World War. It is the old tendency to sweep aside the monument
of Christ, His Church : " to level it with the ground " and build upon it
a new and man-made religion. It is even suggested that the moral
laws must be re-written to fit the needs of a world that will find itself
poor in men and plentiful in women. Here again we have pitiful testi-
mony to loss of faith in Christ's divinity, and the divine sanction
of the moral law. If religion be man-made, if the moral law be man-
written, certainly like all things human it may be subject to change and
to decay. Only the Divine is permanent, immutable. Only a Church
instituted by God as the channel of His intercourse with man; only a
moral law given by God as the reflection in human life of His own
beauty and order, can persist, weathering every storm, meeting every
emergency with a divinely begotten wisdom and prudence. That God
has founded such a Church, we as Catholics know ; that she has faced
and answered problems in the past equal to our own, we know also.
Iconoclasts in every age have sought to destroy her — they have but
shattered her external symbols, leaving her intact upon the "rock " on
which Christ built her. It is not a " new religion," a " new Chris-
tianity " that we need, but a new efflorescence of faith and hope and
love in the age-old Church of Christ: a return to fundamentals in
every department of life: a closer union of body with soul in our
persons, our thought, our speech. This is no new truth to those of the
718 WITH OUR READERS [Feb.,
household of the Faith. In its extension to the " other sheep," so dear
to Christ, lies the hope of the future.
AND this hope does shine in the heavens. Over against the clamor
for the " new " is the trend towards Christ, towards the recogni-
tion of His divinely saving power for the nations, as witness the follow-
ing editorial from The Christian Statesman:
" The nations need Christ. Christ in the life of nations as nations
would answer the long felt want of righteous civil government. This
is the great world need today.
" There must be some basis for national conduct — -the ethics of
Jesus Christ is the highest basis. There must be spiritual sanc-
tions governing nations in their international relationships (else treaties
will mean little) — the teachings of Christ furnish tKe most spiritual
sanctions. The nations must have a fountain in which to cleanse them
of all defilement (else national sins unforgiven will sink them into
oblivion) — Jesus Christ is the fountain of life that both cleanses and
renews the secret springs of national life.
" Democracy must be spiritual as well as material. And it is com-
ing. The signs are ominous. The secular theories of civil government
are speedily finding their way into the intellectual waste baskets of the
men who are guiding the highest thought of our day. The term
' Christian ' as applied to our nation found its way into the preamble
of the concurrent resolution of Congress calling upon our President
to set apart a day for national prayer ' for the success of our armies
and victory for our cause in this great conflict.' Our President did so,
recognizing God as the true object of prayer and One also in heaven
as the ' Supreme Master ' in the affairs of nations. Governor Brum-
baugh of Pennsylvania goes still farther in his call to. the people of
his state to unite in prayer for the same purpose on the same day.
He recognizes God, and also Christ as ' our Divine King^the Lord
and Saviour of mankind/ and ' the teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ,'
and that our prayer be that peace may issue in ' making the kingdoms
of this world the kingdom of Our Lord and of Our Christ.'
" A secular message to our soldier boys facing death does not
suffice, and from the mouths of our national spokesmen come words
of exhortation to our boys at the front, and in training to go to the
front, to read the Word.
" ' Temptations will befall you, but the teachings of our Saviour
will give you strength,' says General Pershing.
" Many voices also in both the religious and secular press are
sounding as never before the note of spirituality for democracy. Gov-
ernment is no longer regarded as a purely philosophical matter, but
also as a psychological matter; not a secular matter only but also a
1918.] WITH OUR READERS 719
religious matter ; not a matter of law only, but a matter of soul as well ;
not a matter of the rights of a sovereign people only, but also of the
rights of a Sovereign God and of His Son Jesus Christ ; not a matter
of a material secular democracy only, but of a spiritual Christian de-
mocracy as well."
* * * *
FROM the full recognition of " the rights of a Sovereign God and
of His Son Jesus Christ;" of the need for the spiritual and the
Christian, in democracy, it is but a step to the recognition of that
Supreme Court for the interpretation of spiritual law, and the ejudi-
cation of Christian claims — the Catholic Church — itself the prototype
of a spiritual Christian democracy.
How closely her teachings are allied to the Constitution of our
own United States may easily be seen in The Case of Socialism v. The
Catholic Church and the United States as stated by Rev. Henry Churchill
Semple, S.J., in this issue of THE CATHOLIC WORLD. In his words:
" How America should love the Church and the Church America, nay,
how the whole world should love the Church and America as the
mightiest guardians of principles which are the saviours of society
from envy, madness, anarchy, misery and slavery ! " The Church does
love America, and we believe and hope that America's love for the
Church is steadily on the increase.
AS an indubitable confirmation of Father Earls' assertion in the
January issue of THE CATHOLIC WORLD, regarding the authorship
of My Unknown Chum, the recent edition of the " Aguecheek " papers,
our readers will be interested in the following letter from a venerable
Boston priest:
REV. DEAR FATHER:
The article, A Yankee Hagiographer: Aguecheek, in this month's number
of THE CATHOLIC WORLD, has given me great pleasure. Were I known to, or
acquainted with the Rev. Father Earls, S.J., I should wish to thank him per-
sonally for his appreciation of my very dear friend, Charles B. Fairbanks, whom
I knew intimately from the time of his baptism till his death. Though only a
lad of sixteen when I saw him last, he was in my opinion (as a good old Irish
woman once said), "a walking saint." He taught me my first prayer to the
Sacred Heart and talked always to edify and instruct me, though brimming
over with humor and innocent fun. With his own hands he gave me a copy of
his book, " Aguecheek," and in my family he was called in friendly familiarity,
by his nom de plume, " Aguecheek."
It has always been a regret, not to say indeed a cause of indignation, that
the foreword of the book called My Unknown Chum makes it doubtful whether
Fairbanks was the author: and reasons given for the doubt show that his
clever assumption of an old man's part was not appreciated. The Boston news-
papers of the day, in their account of Mr. Fairbanks' death, gave ample proof
of his authorship: many of his personal friends were still living when My
Unknown Chum was published, but the businesslike publishers never could find
720 BOOKS RECEIVED [Feb., 1918.]
anyone who knew anything about him. Now that Father Earls has told the
public, in his article, that Charles B. Fairbanks " is none other than the famous
' Aguecheek ' — a name known over half a century ago for those brilliant essays
done under that pseudonym " — it is to be hoped that future editions of My Un-
known Chum will have the honesty to give full credit in an altered foreword to
the sacred memory of Charles B. Fairbanks as the author of " Aguecheek."
It is pitifully amusing to read in the editions I have seen, that the pub-
lishers even doubted how to pronounce the word " Aguecheek " and wondered
what it meant.
Pardon this long expression of my pleasure, and believe me,
Faithfully yours in Dno.
THEODORE A. METCALF.
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Around the World with Children. By F. G. Carpenter. New American
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THE
CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. CVI. MARCH, 1918. No. 636.
THE GUILD IDEA.
BY THEODORE MAYNARD.
N these days when capitalism with all its ugly
attendant evils of commercialism is being viewed
with dismay, or at least apprehension, by those who
are interested in the well-being of our society ; when
fierce and logical souls too often can find no escape
save through the iron doors of a rigid collectivism; when (worst
of all) many subtle minds are ready to be contented with reforms
of a sort which can only make disease orderly — and perpetual —
it can hardly be inopportune to consider if there is no solution for
our desperate difficulties except the academic one or the bureau-
cratic one. Mr. Belloc has given us a powerful piece of steel-cold
criticism and a phrase usually totally misunderstood by those who
use it. "The Servile State" does not mean in his book that
Socialism will oppress men to the point of servile degradation, but
that unless men strongly insist upon property as an absolute in
their economic philosophy, the most well-meaning attempts at
reform will be diverted from the freedom which is their end into
a softening but a strengthening of the plutocracy. There is no
difficulty in seeing that this does actually happen, for recent
bureaucratic legislation while making for increased security in
material things for the mass of our people, does on the other hand
distinctly lessen their spiritual status. Men are to be well housed,
Copyright. 1918. THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY OF ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE
IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK.
VOL. CVI. — 46
722 THE GUILD IDEA [Mar.,
well clothed, well fed — for only by such means can a servile civil-
ization be made endurable — but they are not intended to be more
independent. Such a tendency is only possible because of a false
philosophy among both social reformers and the proletariat. The
capitalists might of course be expected to be prepared to pay the
price of the workmen's security and comfort as an insurance for
their own increased security and comfort — such a bargain would
be extremely welcome to them — but even the philanthropists and
the wage-earners think a man's being sure of his job, more desir-
able than a man's being sure of his soul. They hold, I believe cor-
rectly, that most men in our industralized society, would consider
economic or even political freedom a small matter when set beside
the certainty of regular employment, and a steady supply of beef,
bread-and-butter and beer. The Fabians, if they are not the build-
ers of the temple of social reconstruction, are certainly its archi-
tects. The Socialists have made the Servile State possible.
But even philanthropists are not so ignorant of men as to
imagine that the desire for independence is other than normal to
the human spirit. They are forced to their conclusion, not as to
an ideal but as to a compromise. They have ceased to hope for the
Socialist "nationalization of the means of production, distribution
and exchange," and in order to be rid of the intolerable destitution
incidental to the capitalist system, are willing to accept any kind
of material amelioration of the lot of the working classes, even
though it should bring with it disabilities of another kind. They
do not perhaps at first forget that a man should be free as well as
fat, but hope that embonpoint will be likely to induce a desire and
an aptitude for freedom. They consent to encourage the enregi-
mentation of the poor in the hope that rations and drill will make
soldiers strong enough to shoot their officers. Their psychology
is at fault. The thin soldiers might shoot their masters in the
courage born of desperation ; but there are to be no thin soldiers in
this army.
Since, then, the Servile State is only a bitter compromise, it
is a matter for wonder that the Social Economists have not given
more attention to an institution which though still in process of
development at the time when it fell, yet worked for several gen-
erations to the good of mankind. I refer to the mediaeval guilds.
Brentano the Marxian, and other Socialists who have studied eco-
nomic history, have written of the guilds with sympathy and indeed
admiration, but except in such quarters and among a few notably
1918.] THE GUILD IDEA 723
able minds, they have excited barely more than an archaeological
interest.
What were the guilds? How did they arise? How did they
decay? Upon our realization of the import of these questions and
their answers the whole economic future depends.
Wilda and Brentano have, with characteristic German pains-
taking research, and with not a little of that equally German pom-
pous pedantry, seen their origin in the sacrificial banquets of the
ancient Teutonic tribes; others in an extension and consolidation
of the family idea. That the family was the germ from which
not only the guilds, but the tribe and the state arose is of course
obvious, and that with some form of human association social fel-
lowship would be mixed must be taken for granted. But to insist
too strongly upon the family germ or the feast is to reduce the
guilds to being primeval prototypes of the Ancient Order of Buf-
faloes or the Convivial Company of Crocodiles, and to give an
academic instead of a natural explanation of their rise. With far
greater certainty we may believe, with Mr. March Phillipps, that
the real origin of the guilds was the habit men have of associating
to repel depredation or attack. Such associations would be bound
to feel an intimacy almost amounting to blood relationship. They
would think of themselves as brotherhoods, and their family spirit
would express itself in various social activities. Of definitely
organized guilds in the modern sense, perhaps the earliest of which
we have certain record were those trading corporations and burial
societies which existed from very early times among the Romans,
among the Greeks, and even in India and China. The explanation
of their origin, therefore, must be an universal one — that spirit of
union and solidarity normal and native to the heart of man.
But while this is so, nearly all the writers on the subject have
recognized the enormous influence of the Church upon the devel-
opment of the guilds, and how the Faith informed them and gave
them vigorous life. The distinction which Toulmin Smith and
Brentano have drawn between religious, social and trade fraterni-
ties is one which, though natural to those who do not realize how
completely religion can permeate every detail of human life, did
not exist in fact. For though burial of the dead, loans for poor
members and the provision of dowries for their daughters, sick
benefit, plays and pageants (to mention a few of their secular
activities), might be added to their main purpose as trade societies,
yet suffrages for the dead, communal religious duties, the main-
724 THE GUILD IDEA [Mar.,
tenance of a chantry priest, a lamp before the Blessed Sacrament
and the like were so general as to warrant us in thinking that there
were few religious guilds that did not have some worldly purpose,
no trade guild that did not have its religious functions. The fact
that each craft had its patron saint suffices to show this. And
when the pillage began it was not easy to assign clearly in cate-
gories of "religious " and " secular," the guilds where spiritual
and material matters were so closely mingled. The commissioners
probably quite honestly did their best to make the division, and
failed because men had not divided their lives into separate water-
tight compartments. The Creed had colored everything.
Accordingly, though as industrial corporations the guilds set
themselves to protect their members against unfair competitions,
by disabilities upon traders from abroad or even from other parts
of England, the Christian abhorrence of usury lay at the core of
their being. They regarded not only their rights but their duties.
Now usury did not mean in the ages of Faith merely miser-
liness, the dead accumulation of so much money, but was univer-
sally understood to include any seeking after profit beyond that
which was needful to support a man and his family in their station
in life. He who sought more than this was counted as avaricious,
and the seeking of wealth as an end in itself as a sin. The rich
were but the stewards of their riches, and had certain obligations
towards the poor. Nor was avarice only an offence against
religion; it could be and often was subject to condemnation by the
civil authorities as an offence against the well-being of the state.
The current economic doctrine that "money makes money "
would have been abominable to the man of the Middle Ages. Land
and labor were to him the two forces which in combination could
be creative of wealth, and the dictum of Mr. H. N. Casson,
"money is productive; property unproductive," would have been
shocking to his moral sense. To secure profit through the mere
fluctuations in supply and demand would have been thought
wrong; still more horrible the modernizing of the market. Price
to him was determined by the actual cost of production plus the
maintenance of the producer. The modern theory is put at all
events lucidly by Mr. H. N. Casson, who recently has set up a
" School of Efficiency " in London for the instruction of English
business men in the economics of the devil. We have had the prac-
tice of the thing before, so perhaps it is good, for the sake of char-
ity, to have a confession of its philosophy : " Intrinsic value has
I9i8.] THE GUILD IDEA
little to do with price. In all markets you will find a chaos of
prices. It is not so much what the goods are, that matters. It
is what the buyers are willing to pay."
The condemnation of usury was not, as some would suppose
who cannot understand the mediaeval objection to the system, an
instance of archaic ecclesiastical restriction, but was bred in the
bones of the normal man — an universal hatred for something
loathsome and obscene. Chaucer's Prioress spoke for her age :
There was in Asia, in a greet citee,
Amonges Cristen folk, a Jewerye.
Sustened by a lord of that contree
For foule usure and lucre of vilanye,
Hateful to Crist and to His companye.
Now usury is a word which is but rarely used, more rarely
still with fit abhorrence. Indeed quite recently a great London
newspaper could carry on a controversy as to whether The Mer-
chant of Venice was Semitic or anti-Semitic in intention, and
yet have only one, a belated contributor, who would mention the
thing which the whole play was about. The word usury was not
so much taboo, as forgotten.
Against usury the guildmen set their faces like flints. Did
an individual member of the fraternity attempt to outdo his fel-
lows by cut prices or by shoddy workmanship, by misrepresenta-
tion as to his goods, or by any other means? Then punishment
swift and drastic descended, as when according to their record the
" Pinners " craft heavily fined one of its members for selling
Flemish pins as English. The mysteries had a commercial con-
science and, in the words of Professor W. J. Ashley, " the guild
legislation kept steadily before itself the ideal of combining good
quality and a price that was fair to the consumer, with a fitting
remuneration to the workman."
A word must be said as to price. In the early days of the
crafts, the customer would engage the artificer to do a certain piece
of work, paying him not by the day or hour but for the completed
article, for which the customer would supply the material. Thus
a man who wanted a coat would take his cloth to the tailor and
bargain for the finished article, or the wood to the carpenter who
would undertake to supply a table. Later, with the development
of trade, craftsmen made coats or tables, as they had the time, for
prospective customers, thus maintaining a regular supply of work.
726 THE GUILD IDEA [Mar.,
They began to employ journeymen and indentured apprentices.
For the work done the bill would be made out somewhat as fol-
lows: journeyman's or 'prentice's time (charged at actual cost),
plus master's time (charged at a higher rate than that of his man,
but never at more than double the rate), plus the cost of the
material and other incidental charges. No profit was made upon
material, except some small amount to cover the time spent in pur-
chase, and no profit upon the labor of his journeyman. To do
otherwise would have seemed usurious to the master. Perhaps the
spirit of the crafts may best be described in the words of a procla-
mation issued during the reign of Edward III. : " That so no
knavery, false workmanship or deceit shall be found in any man-
ner in the said mysteries: for the honor of the good folks of the
said mysteries and for the common profit of the people."
As, to quote Brentano, " England must be regarded as the
birthplace of the guilds and London perhaps as their cradle," and
as in England their development was more in the nature of a grad-
ual growth than on the continent where the conflict between the
merchant guilds and the crafts was fierce and complete and, as in
England, too, the effects of the cataclysm are more clearly to be
seen than elsewhere, we can take the English guilds as typical of
all the mediaeval guilds, and study our subject to most advantage
with them before our eyes.
In 1422 when the guilds had as full an organization as they
were ever destined to know, there were in London alone one hun-
dred and twelve separate crafts — brewers, fleshers, tailors, haber-
dashers, girdlers, weavers, fullers, dyers, tapicers, joiners, pew-
terers, braziers, chandlers, hatters, fishmongers, cheesemongers,
mercers, beaders, armorers, vinters, grocers, ironmongers, cut-
lers, cordwainers, goldsmiths, tanners, blacksmiths, barbers,
bakers, carpenters — but it would be tedious to enumerate the en-
tire list. Their story is admirably told in Miss Helen Douglas
Irvine's History of London. The butcher, the baker and the can-
dlestickmaker were worthy of their rhyme.
Though municipal government in England was not so abso-
lutely in the hands of the guilds as it was in many towns on the
Continent, especially in France, yet the laws of the commune and
the crafts were very closely related. So that when in 1351 and
again later in the century, the members of the Common Council
of the city of London were elected by the leading guilds instead of
by the wards, it could be defended as a return to an earlier system.
1918.] THE GUILD IDEA 727
But though the crafts did not usually directly govern, in-
directly they certainly always controlled municipal affairs. Thus
retailers had to be Freemen of the city before they were allowed to
trade in London, and Freemen had to be proposed and elected by
their guilds. Organized and vigorous were these communes, with
a keen sense of political actuality and spirit and determination
enough to make their influence felt. Thus Miss Douglas Irvine
relates how when in 1269 the choice of the aldermen for Lord
Mayor fell upon Phillip le Tayllur, the crafts shouted : " We will
have no mayor but Walter Harvey ! " To the king at Westmin-
ster they went crying : " We are the commune of the city and to us
belongs the election of the mayor of the city and we will that
Walter Harvey be our elected mayor." The struggle was sharp
and blood was shed, but Harvey eventually became mayor.
How closely the town and the trades were connected may be
seen from the frequent custom of " common bargains " where the
mayor had the option of purchasing commodities for the com-
munity. Town fisheries were often run on the same cooperative
principle, and even in some cases a town boat for merchant trad-
ing. A very different affair this from modern " municipal social-
ism " (always procured at the price of an uproarious bargain for
the capitalists) where the purchases never really belong to the
community, but to the financiers who are astute enough to put
their fingers in the pie !
So the guilds grew. In the fourteenth century charters
began to be given to the crafts. Then the Livery Companies arose
with a corporate identity, common property, common liability and
a common seal and with their own legal courts for the correction
of their own misbehaving members. Yet it should not be for-
gotten that below the liveries and the mysteries there lived many
associations still in process of organization which were not yet
recognized by the authorities. They too were animated by the
same strong and solid spirit, and might have developed to full
stature.
If to the world at large the guild brought the certainty of a
fair price and honest workmanship and to its members protection
against the dangers of external competition and internal roguery,
the result was based upon and attained by the principle of master-
ship within the guild. A boy was apprenticed to a craft for seven,
four, three or two years, according to the craft and the stage in
its history, and became upon the expiration of his indenture a jour-
728 THE GUILD IDEA [Mar.,
neyman, which he only remained until, by habits of industry and
thrift or the fortunate chance of a marriage with his master's
daughter, he could set up as a master himself. The relationship
of the master to both apprentices and journeymen was roughly
that of a father to his family. This status was not permanent be-
cause their normal expectation was that, when the legal bond of
the apprentices had expired and capital and experience were
acquired, they too would gain their independence and the full free-
dom of the guild. The modern workmen's economic philosophy
is bounded by tolerable and secure employment and the wage-
envelope on Saturday; to the mediaeval journeyman, wages
marked but a stage towards frugal and honorable independence.
Sometimes there was even more to be gained, and many country
folk of gentility but slender means, sent their sons to seek fortune
and advancement by way of the crafts. Not all turned again as
Whittington, Lord Mayor of London, but many could count upon
finding in the London crafts wealth and influence.
The organization of rural districts was, necessarily, some-
what different to that of the towns, but even here guilds, though
not existing of course for the protection of trade or manufactures,
served many excellent economic purposes. They too had their
guild halls and their parish chests and loans for poor or alms
for sick and disabled members. And as Professor Thorold Rogers
says : " Few parishes were probably without guild lands from
which the aged and the poor were nourished, till on the plea that
they were devoted to superstitious uses, they were stolen under an
act of Parliament by Protector Somerset."
Even feudalism itself is still largely misunderstood. Serfdom
had passed with the Dark Ages, and before the thirteenth century
had arrived, the lord of the manor could only demand his tenants
to work upon the demesne land for a few days a week, with some
extra service at harvest-time and a couple of turkeys at Christ-
mas. Even this (curtailed to a large extent by the holidays en-
forced by the Church) became very generally commutable by a
regular money payment. But in any case the tenants always had
their own holdings and their customary rights to the common
lands.
Unfortunately these rights were too often only customary,
and when it was seen that pasturage was more profitable than
ploughed fields the lords, finding the prevailing system of scattered
strips inconvenient with the change that had come over agricul-
I9i8.] THE GUILD IDEA 729
ture, enforced their rights and enclosed the commons. The legal
question is obscure, for while the people could plead ancient cus-
tom, the lords were able to use the law against a peasantry ignor-
ant of its complexities and of the subtlety of lawyers. The process
began before the Protestant Reformation, though had the Refor-
mation not come it is probable that the movement would have
failed. Certain it is that an immense impetus was given to the
enclosures by the grasping hands of the defenders of the new
faith.
The dissolution of the monasteries meant, that whereas before
the rich owned and controlled barely a third of the land in Eng-
land (the rest being widely though unequally divided among the
mass of the population), they now had in their absolute posses-
sion over one-half. Two points should be noticed. First, that the
owners of the land in days when machinery and fixtures were of
comparatively little value, held infinitely more economic power
with it than they could today. Secondly, that the lords, who when
they held only a third of the land could be kept in check equally by
economic forces and by the power of the Church, now that their
possessions were larger and their purpose more united than those
of the rest of the nation, now that the restraining influence of
religion had disappeared, were able to make extortions of which
they never dared to speak before. The ecclesiastical lands had
been ruled indulgently by the abbeys and had set a standard for
other manors. They now passed to those who had obtained them
by rapine, and who would be prepared to acknowledge few
restraints in their administration.
To the plunder of the monasteries was added the plunder of
the guilds. These corporations being immensely 'wealthy, but
being also in a very real sense religious fraternities, had their
funds and property confiscated to the crown where it could be
shown that they spent money on Masses for the dead or on any
other such " superstitious " object. Edward VI.'s commissions
did in fact honestly attempt to differentiate between secu-
lar and religious societies, and recommended the authorization of
many trade guilds. These recommendations were not always
acted upon, and even where the guilds were allowed to remain,
heavy taxes were levied to their detriment. Such proceeds, and
the rifled wealth of the Church, did not pass in any great extent
to the crown ; few schools or hospitals or almshouses arose in con-
sequence— though this more often happened in Germany and Den-
730 THE GUILD IDEA [Mar.,
mark than in England— but the great lords and the servants of
the king steeped their hands in the blood of the poor, and in what
Mr. Lloyd George now probably regrets to remember he called
" the fat of sacrilege."
Many of the craft guilds lingered on oppressed by heavy tax-
ation. But though the livery companies still remain (in name at
least) in London to this day, the guilds gradually decayed. Econ-
omic forces were too strong for them ; capitalism crude and cynical
had entered into possession, and the mysteries were doomed. In
any case when the bond of their union was taken away their end
was in sight. Religion was proscribed and a new false philosophy
took its place. They keystone of the arch was knocked out, and
the arch fell.
Much has been written by many writers upon the spirit and
organization of the guilds and nearly all of it is sympathetic in
tone. Hardly anyone has done more than Cardinal Gasquet to
make the kindly past live again for us, but even he can find it in
his heart to write: " The system of these voluntary societies would
be impossible and out of place in this modern world of ours."
Everything which that great scholar says is of interest and impor-
tance, but if I cannot agree with him in this opinion, I have for my
comfort the support of the Rerutn Novarum of Leo XIII., which
flings the guilds down as a challenging gage to industrialism :
Some remedy must be found, and found quickly, for the mis-
ery and wretchedness pressing so heavily and unjustly at this
moment on the vast majority of the working classes: for ihe
ancient workingmen' s guilds were abolished in the last century,
and no other organisation took their place. . . .Hence by degrees
it has come to pass that workingmen have been surrendered, all
isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and
the greed of unchecked competition. The mischief has been
increased by rapacious usury, which, although more than once
condemned by the Church, is, nevertheless, under a different
guise, but with the like injustice, still practised by covetous and
grasping men .... So that a small number of very rich men have
been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a
yoke little better than that of slavery itself.
That the idea of the guilds is not dead in current economic
thought, may be seen clearly enough by the eagerness with which
one-time Socialists tumble over each other to declare themselves
free from the taint of Collectivism!
1918.] THE GUILD IDEA 731
Not only do they eschew Marx, but they unashamedly hanker
after the guilds. For though the Guild Socialism (or as it is now
more correctly named "National Guilds") and Syndicalism are
still some distance away from the old intimate and cosy idea of
the mediaeval guilds, they have come a very long way towards it.
Both National Guilds and Syndicalism insist upon the doc-
trine that economic power precedes political power, in Mr. Orage's
fine phrase, " the 'political moon reflecting the light of the econo-
mic sun." They would take care of the economic pence and let
the political pounds take care of themselves. Both unite in de-
nouncing the entanglement of the trade-union movement in par-
liamentary laborism, pointing out with truth that labor has never
been so powerless as when a strong labor party sits in the House
of Commons waiting to be bought by the caucus, the economic
piper who calls the political tune!
In both of these systems the first step towards the abolition
of wagery is "the regimentation into a single fellowship of all
those who are employed in any given industry." The second will
be the refusal of the watertight guild to work any longer for the
profit of the capitalists. Though Syndicalism parts company with
National Guilds here, the one demanding the absolute ownership,
by the men of any given trade, of their particular trade, the other
vesting all ownership in the state and acting merely as the state's
trustee, each would agree that the transition could not take place
" without an intervening period of some form of partnership with
existing capitalism." The guild would never be a mere trade-
union living with certain new rights under the old wage system,
but a corporate body treating directly in business and paying the
members of the guild itself.
There is no space to treat the contents of that brilliant book
National Guilds in detail here. I can only outline its thesis, note
its tendency and offer a criticism.
Though its promoters very properly detest the modern pas-
sion for quantitative instead of qualitative workmanship (the only
good work done to-day, as always, has been executed by men in
small shops regarding themselves as artists rather than as
"hands" ), the elephantine organization of the proposed scheme,
while it would undoubtedly add dignity to labor and economy to
production, could hardly affect quality to a great extent. For that,
direct touch would be necessary between the artist-craftsman and
the customer. Moreover, the officials of a large organization are
732 THE GUILD IDEA [Mar.,
notoriously safer from criticism and control than the officials of
an organization small enough to be open to the eyes of each one
of its members. Then too, a guild, which only recognizes cor-
porate ownership, would not satisfy the nature of man so com-
pletely as a guild such as those of the Middle Ages, which, while
having their corporate identity, also jealously guarded the property
and the individuality of all their members.
Of course no one imagines that the ancient guilds could work
successfully in the modern world without very vital modifications.
They did not die because they had served their day and were con-
quered by the industrial revolution which introduced steam
machinery. They did not die on beds of disease but were slain in
the open air. Had the Faith endured in England and the guilds
with it, the crafts would unquestionably have adjusted themselves
to new needs, using all that invention has introduced, not for
mercenary profit but for human use. Capitalism was not (as the
common theory runs) the child of machinery. The Reformation
was its parent. But machinery coming into a capitalistic society
enormously strengthened it, as it would just as certainly have
strengthened the guild system had it found it then in possession
of the field.
Can the guilds ever return? Well, I think not, until the
world again accepts the Faith. Until then men seem likely to be
ready for a purely materialistic contentment, and unlikely to show
any readiness to sacrifice for the gaining of what is, in the last
analysis, a spiritual idea. The Creed is the only possible salva-
tion for industrialism. The exhaustion of the acquired velocity of
Catholic traditions is increasingly apparent, and we may with
safety predict that unless " some remedy be found and found
quickly " society will inevitably harden itself into the capitalistic
mold, legalizing what has, up to now, been only customary, and
perfecting the Servile State.
If we can only regain the true and ancient philosophy, clarity
of vision and a determination to make our choice effectual, we can
win back a free England and a merry England. The guilds wiH
live, full of their old genial and independent spirit, purified and
strengthened by religion and colored with our lost gaiety. If we
will it, we can have it, and see again the mysteries perform their
their plays on Corpus Christi, and drink perhaps from a loving
cup for which another Catholic archbishop of York has obtained
a hundred days indulgence. In this faith I mean to live and die.
AN ANCIENT VISION AND THE NEWER NEEDS.
BY GEORGE NAUMAN SHUSTER.
OR the average American, Emerson remains, quite
unquestionably, our most original and exalted
thinker. Although the mines of thought which the
man worked are woefully undescribed to most of us,
his acute, angular countenance has become sym-
bolic of the sage. The grammar-texts have it so, and it were pre-
posterous to expect the plain citizen to outdistance them. It would
be folly indeed to use the flaming handiwork of his expression as a
model for the stolid masonry of a business style! And the teacher
has sufficient personal difficulty with the airy forms of the Tran-
scendental Cult without attempting to lead them down the stair-
ways of the child-mind. The neglect of the educated, however, is
even more amazing than this popular indefiniteness. One finds the
Essays in every library, but they are not outworn with fingering.
The reader commonly gets the sensation of stargazing. Emerson
appears to walk different paths from ours ; his very fauna and flora
seem colored with alien light. His ideals taper off into subtleties.
Accordingly we still hear a great deal of the name, but less and
less of the philosophy of our most typical thinker. Emerson clubs
even are scarce, though a club is as easy to nurture as a weed.
Now if Emerson be the genius our criticism has always con-
tended for, this neglect is puzzling. Americans are not indifferent
to philosophy, and though they do prefer imported brands, our
own James, Royce, and also Muensterberg are widely read. The
modern essay traverses every by-way in science, ethics and
religion. There are almost as many moral disquisitions put forth
as works of fiction, and even the latter have acquired an ethical
purpose. Nevertheless, it is quite simple to show that Emerson
cannot lead American thought and that for several plain reasons.
The man was not a philosopher at all, but a poet born accidentally
into the most prosaic pulpit that has ever stood in the name of God.
If, as Paulsen says, " philosophy is the sum of all scientific knowl-
edge," then Emerson had no business with it, for nowhere is he
supremely interested in the past. Moreover, he was so uncon-
cerned with causes that he is entirely separate from the newer life
734 ANCIENT VISION AND NEWER NEEDS [Mar.,
that has followed him. The introspective idealism which he cul-
tured so buoyantly appears flimsy in the tremendous pressure of
contemporary circumstance. The important matter now is to bake
the bread and distribute it; to wager the life of the world, its
dreams of civilization and its heritage of wealth on the game of
temporal power. Never in history has the state been more arbi-
trary. And Emerson would have said with Carlyle : "I will pay
taxes to the House of Hanover only so long as it has the physical
force to collect them." As a critic of religion he neglected to
respect either the Christian tradition or the vogue of the Oriental
cults. His failures everywhere are lapses of thought; his victories
are won by inspiration. Emerson at his best is a poet of the intel-
lect but not of the senses; a worshipper of flame but not of color.
Yet so representative is this man of a certain type of Ameri-
can mind that in following him we seem to be studying a biogra-
phy of the nation. It is even possible to assert that the Declaration
of Independence was never read to the world until Emerson
preached his heretical sermon in the Boston House of Prayer.
For while it may be true that a severance of allegiance, or a refusal
to pay taxes marks the beginning of a free people, yet that people
is never released from bondage till it has presumed to arrange its
institutions in an indigenous manner. If the religious belief itself
does not follow the curves and angles of the rising giant, then that
creed is bound to be cast off. And what was the faith of the
American? Briefly a most repellent form of Calvinism, stanch in
a certain high moral purpose, but cavernous in the odious gloom
that it flung upon the most innocent form of human happiness: a
faith that sprang up naturally in the gardens of a lascivious court,
but was destined to grow unpopular as soon as its adherents them-
selves became kings. The young American with his feet on the
stool of the most opulent natural heritage conceivable, must have
felt indeed that he was of royal blood, and that even the gateways
of the soul must bear the armorial crests of his lineage. Puri-
tanism was doomed and has since gone. But why have the dreams
of Emerson and his like had so little a share in the upheaval?
The failure of Emerson is due for the most part to the limits
of his own personality. I remember seeing an old gentleman's
copy of Prudence in which the title-word had been suggestively
shortened into " Prude." That represents something of the
impression Emerson makes on many modern spirits. The im-
perturbable nicety of his conventions, the smooth- f rocked frugality
1918.] ANCIENT VISION AND NEWER N&EDS 735
of his dicta, are apt to seem a little womanish. Our world is vul-
gar and he is exquisitely refined. What he writes of Napoleon is
correct enough, but he seems incognizant of the shapeless, primi-
tive armies that ploughed up Europe, leaving nothing behind them
but the term " cannon-fodder," and stumbling at last into a scarred
and weatherbeaten peace. What has he to say of a million hungry
mouths and naked backs; what of the gigantic machines of econ-
omy on which the very life of nations seems suspended as on
leathern thongs? Little enough indeed. Emerson harps contin-
ually on the strings of soul and intuition.: the ordinary man is
uncertain of his soul and scornful of spiritual insight. Mystics
still flourish, but even they have been obliged to supply a definite
and substantial telos. Today the individual, of whom the
Transcendentalists made so much, has been merged into the
battalion and that is just so much physical power.
Similarly the Catholic who is a reader of Orestes A. Brown-
son will recall that doughty champion's inveterate dissatisfaction
with the thin air of Concord. What reality, he demanded, have
all these flights of enthusiasm, these ventures on the fleeting wings
of exultation? He considered his own long and feverish pursuit
of truth, the moments of hectic felicity, the lone vigils and the dis-
covery of the Manger which of all things he least expected to meet,
and fancied the jubilant individuality of Emerson a bit puerile.
Brownson was probably as great a man as Emerson, but lie
lacked both humor and poetry and was possessed of an
omnivorous intellectual appetite which the other disavowed.
In short, one was a visionary and the other a critic. Still, were
they together now, it is not unlikely that we should find them
closer. For the Protestant attitude towards the Church has been
altered. Emerson in his address, To the Young American, could
write: " If a humane measure is propounded in behalf of the slave
or the Irishman or the Catholic .... that project will have the
homage of the hero." Such times have happily vanished.
It is probable that Emerson and Brownson would unite in
construction today, just as they both revolted from the Puritan
tradition in the forties. Their gifts and temperaments stood at
odds, but they shared in the desperate spiritual idealism of early
America, a waking force so brilliant and so general that its illus-
tration in their lives is almost typical. The prime quality of Emer-
son is sincerity. Keen, striated brows and cheeks, nostrils tense
and aquiline with thought, eyes limpid as Vermont pools: these
736 ANCIENT VISION AND NEWER NEEDS [Mar.,
things are found only in the Newmans and Emersons, men hungry
for soul food and reckless in their purchase of it. The fleshpots
of Egypt are as nothing to them compared with the halo that
gleams from the Ten Laws on Mount Sinai. Then, too, there is
the splendid clairvoyant optimism so confident in its intuition of
divine existence and human immortality. They feel the surge of
the spirit towards light and follow bravely and triumphantly.
With Emerson, there is also the youthful impatience with set reli-
gious phrases, forms of worship and ritual. He held these usage-
honored bonds as so many apron-strings from which one got noth-
ing but weakness. He would go out of the temples of men into
the living edifice of God; he would hitch his wagon to a star.
Although beauty of diction and symmetrical poise of expres-
sion are as difficult to account for in Emerson's case as they were
in Hawthorne's, still his spiritual growth was as natural as the un-
folding of a flower. Puritan New England ! The austerity of the
ideal with which it began; the reticence consequent on the strug-
gle with nature and the Calvinistic morality; the vigor of an ethi-
cal judgment to which forgiveness was the ultimate impossibility :
all these things were contained in Emerson. He was a quiet,
thoughtful, un-material child coming into this frigidity with a soul
on fire, like a young knight entering into a chamber of lifeless
statuary, and feeling in his blood the fertile thrill of sunlight from
the hills to which he is native. There was never a more gener-
ous and puissant seeking of the Grail than New England saw.
Longfellow with the dim incense of his Gothic memory; Whit-
man with his insight into the miracle of form; Hawthorne,
Brownson, Taylor, Hpwells and Clemens: to everyone of these
men might have been attributed in some measure the ideals of the
exceptionally gifted Emerson. Among them he must have seemed
the lamp of vision.
" Hitch your wagon to a star " is one of the counsels men
remember him by. It is particularly apt because Emerson was the
sort of man who would sit in a wagon rather than a motor-car.
His coat was certain to be spotted with the dust of the road, and
his hands would be roughened by the chill of the upland air. For
him the world of America was not wedged in a street of office
buildings, but stretched from ocean to ocean in an unbroken pano-
rama of sky and field. The older American was always of this
character, and despite the growth of cities we are still. greatly like
him. Another homely fact about Emerson was the profession of
1918.] ANCIENT VISION AND NEWER NEEDS 737
preacher. Nothing so strikingly contrasts our age with the era of
Boston as the difference between William Sunday and Ralph
Waldo Emerson. There was a time when the fine native intel-
lectualism of the latter bade fair to transmute the whole Protestant
organization. Today we are saying the same thing of the tawdry,
ultra-vulgar effusions of the Rev. William !
However, the most important matter in which we are at vari-
ance with Emerson is the essential valuation of human life. To
the Calvinist, no beauty lay in the eyes of existence except the
light of terror. He had no definite concept of the kingdom of
heaven but instead a very realistic impression of hell. Cotton
Mather and Jonathan Edwards almost outdid the imagination of
Dante in the geography of Hades, and certainly the effect wrought
on their audiences must have been overwhelming. Emerson, how-
ever, practically closed his eyes to the nightmare of the damned.
How it must have startled the old doctrinaires of fear and trem-
bling to hear that man held within himself the keys of a great and
enduring mastery; that he alone had been made in the shining
image of God. The young man's revolt was thorough. He had
no patience with the preachers who spoke their feeble phrases Sab-
bath after Sabbath; no admiration for the Hebrew law that
reiterated itself as if it had never been fulfilled. Indeed he went
too far in his eagerness to rid himself of cant. The divinity of
man's origin and destiny seemed so important that he minimized
the Godhead of the Saviour. He was so elated at not finding
himself a slave that he lifted himself into the seat of the Master.
There was about Emerson too much of the Ego and not enough
of the Alter. Even the benevolence of his humanitarianism was
tainted with condescension. Was there anything strange about
this when centuries of antecedent Protestantism had negated the
sanction of divine authority and elevated the poor human intelli-
gence into the position of sole Imperative?
It was in this fashion, then, that the lamp of the Puritan soul,
fed and trimmed by those steady years of virginal abnegation,
brusque morals and frigid emotion came to learn the barrenness
of its habitation amid the splendid dwellings of the land of God.
How shining the optimism with which it proclaimed the discovery !
Because of the long pining and fears the world seemed fresher and
more radiant. While over in Europe Browning sang, " Leave
now for dogs and apes, Man has forever ! " the American said :
"The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of
VOL. cvi. — 47
738 ANCIENT VISION AND NEWER NEEDS [Mar.,
nature and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends : in
yourself slumbers the whole of reason; it is for you to do all, it
is for you to dare all." On the dead bones of Cotton Mather and
the Salem witches stood the Puritan shouting: " I am a man; I am
the child of God!"
And this, I think, is Emerson's essential bequest to American
thought, the assertion that it is not history that matters but man;
that death is unessential and birth all-important; that the ills of
the human race are due not to the fact that a man fears death
but that he is afraid to live. Except in certain craven conditions
of the mind there is no reality in the cringing before death : very
frequently it seems even that the gateways to Lethe are eminently
desirable. But on the other hand, what fears, what halting, what
Pharisaical muffling of ideals when we confront the dread neces-
sity of living! Who has not felt the taut hedging of circumstance
about the flame of the soul; has not seen the hopes of youth go
down like a host of flies in the air of winter? It is this failure
to make life obedient to the impulses which are driven upon the
soul from the divine law that Emerson is constantly bewailing.
Rely upon yourself, let every friend even be to you a " beautiful
enemy." Perhaps this doctrine is all that Emerson actually had
to preach and surely nothing could possibly have suited the trend
of rising America better than this : a young land rising to meet the
future like a stalwart reaper going into the grain.
The years have passed, and we find ourselves proclaiming a
totally different gospel to the world. Puritanism has long since
fallen into decay, and the old pulpits have been made over into
platforms, chairs of sociology and amiable mouthpieces of vague
philosophical emotion. There are no Jonathan Edwards, but also
no Emersons. There is no one to preach of hell, and no one to
describe the kingdom of heaven. We have come over quite gen-
erally to the kingdoms of earth. If the most intellectual men out-
side the Catholic Church have followed any cult at all, it is the
dogma of cosmic materialism. The greatest good of the greatest
number is declared entirely a matter of financial decimal points;
the progress of the world is relative to its organization for
efficiency. A slender and modest being, like an intuition, may have
its place in the universe, but we have no time to seek it out.
There is a variety of essayists in America today, but they
may be divided broadly into two classes, the professor and the
observer. Almost all of our philosophy is now dictated from the
I9i8.] ANCIENT VISION AND NEWER NEEDS 739
lecture-room. James, Ladd, Dewey and Royce are academic
names. The economists like Eastman, Reinsch and Ely, the his-
torians like Woodrow Wilson and the critics like Lounsbury and
Herrick are doctrinaires, every one of them. On the other hand,
the observers are merely journalists of talent and experience, who
write with greater fluency and more wit on the same problems.
Occasionally the essay finds itself in the hands of an artist like
Miss Repplier or a statesman like Mr. Roosevelt. As a general
rule, however, one discovers the social essay dogmatic, and de-
pendent for its appeal upon authority. And nothing could so
sharply distinguish the times of Emerson from those of our own,
as the discovery that the authority is no longer in the hands of the
divine. Except for an occasional Dr. Lyman Abbot who serves
the old sugar-coated platitudes of a vanished generation in the
established sentimental way, the Protestant Church has abandoned
teaching in the name of the Father and the Son. When modern
thought ventures forth in defence of ideals, it bears the insignia of
human science and the garb of natural reason. What matter the
long aisles of eternity when the record of human energy is but the
tick of a kitchen clock to the dial of the ancient sun?
There is no doubt but what Emerson embodied the first
rhythms of that tremendous egotism which has flooded the
modern world. It is quite the same thing if a brain professes its
ability to fathom the Godhead unaided, or decides to do without
the Godhead. The Transcendentalist had faith but neither humil-
ity nor charity. The equally proud scientist has charity but no
faith. It is not so long ago that we dreamed of a world rising on
evolutionary steps from the low-vaulted past. Darwin and
Haeckel, reverting to the ancient theory of Epicurus, proclaimed
the independence of man from moral bonds on scientific grounds;
was Emerson so utterly distant when he shouted : " Non serviam!"
from the hustings of emancipated reason? No, and it is at least
a weird coincidence that in the poetic foreword to Nature is con-
tained the first recognition in American thought of the evolution
theory. For these reasons the failure of both these philosophies
is even more impressive than the decay of ancient Puritanism.
That at least was stern and implacable, was rooted deeply and
solidly in its desert. Its confessors were not scholiasts but men.
Bowed down by the catastrophe of modern existence, we are
apt to wonder a little if the highest flights of reason are not the
most destructive, and whether the peasant who tills his field in the
740 ANCIENT VISION AND NEWER NEEDS [Mar.,
sober credence that his destiny is in the bosom of his Father, be
not blessed above the loftiest seer. It is not the weight of death
that burdens our poets and moralists, but the sere futility of life
itself. Never before has the quietus of the bare bodkin been so
admired or resorted to. The representative modern novelist, be it
Mrs. Wharton in Ethan Fromme, or Mr. Bennet in The Old
Wives' Tale, always preaches the vacuity of living. No, it is not
that men are afraid to die, but that never before have they so
feared to enter upon the day. Posterity has become a sort of
shrine to which the Olive Schreiners can carry the prayers that we
used to bring to church. Emerson, if he did nothing else, at least
proclaimed the essential beauty and usefulness of life.
The time has come when Protestantism, scorning all authority
save the powers of the individual mind, has cast off the primal
forms and dogmas that gave it vitality, and bowed itself in the
dust before masters of the agnostic science. I can know nothing
save the plash of earth through the murky waves of space, declares
the modern seer, and of that we shall ask questions through
eternity. It is immaterial to me if you believe in an after-life for
the soul or in a God : life is too short for me to fill it with dreams.
Sincere as is the credence of William James and Josiah Royce it
bears no burden for the brotherman. For at most it is a fancy or
a vague hope. Speculation and more speculation; doubt heaped on
doubt; a smudgy self -complaisance in what one gets out of
religion: that is all one reaps in the vineyards of modern science.
Still, it is impossible that such a state of affairs should continue.
Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Spencer have led the universities in their
turn, and have one by one been laid aside. There is no longer
authority even in thought, and logic has been flung to the winds.
Every sanction of morality, every mandate of the natural, eternal
law, every concept identified for ages with divine revelation, have
been trampled under. Can we now proclaim the independence of
man? Never before have the hopes and destinies of the individual
been more ruthlessly commandeered; never have we stood in such
quaking subservience to what ought to be the rudimentary concern
of life, the economic state. And in surrendering the individual,
America has parted company with Emerson and some of its fairest
dreams.
Perhaps, as has been said, he was merely a poet. Certainly
he dealt little enough with government, the question of inter-
national power or the merchant marine. It is altogether likely
1918.] ANCIENT VISION AND NEWER NEEDS 741
that his voice will not carry in the turmoil of the market-place.
And yet, what would we not give for the optimism of that man!
We must get back his faith in life, his joy in nature, his smile at
the promise of the night. Without these things, the wine of
power must become bitter as wormwood. To be sure we cannot
go back to him, for the graceful curves of his vista have somehow
been cleared away. It is impossible to believe, either, in the dry
forms of Puritan worship or in the ponderous cogitation of the
professors. All the wit of Bernard Shaw cannot fill the mind with
glee. Can it be we have tired of journeying and are going home?
The demand of the world is for faith — something to die for
and better still, something to live for. Again, as with Emerson,
it is the poet rather than the thinker who approaches us with coun-
sel. With every wind that comes from the vast land where the
simple souls are gazing on the runes of stars and sea, is borne the
fragrance of that strange beautiful virtue which we have missed
so long, humility. On all sides stirs the melody of the soul,
whether it spring from the far horizons where few feet have
trod or from the whirr of stifled cities. Thank God for the poet
who sings ! In the day when civilization is threatened almost with
extinction of the higher forms of human life, the strong man bows
his head to the earth and believes. It may be the mission of the
Christian bard to ply his pen like an angel's sword and restore the
vision of God the Father and the eternal Mediator Who is the
Son. Whatever the future will bring, it must be something more
than philosophy or science; it must transcend the logarithms and
outdistance the search of the spectrum. We shall come back into
the House of Prayer.
It is possible that Emerson's vision, were it vital, would pene-
trate to the need of restful faith. The multitudes have come
together from the mountain and the valley, and they must be fed.
The Gospel shall be preached with authority, not that of kings or
peoples or savants or even poets, but by priests in the name of God.
For we have a satiety of dialectic. Every plain man with his
hands on the implements of labor, every woman with her arms
about a child; every longing soul amongst us: these demand that
life again be made worthy of the living, and that the insatiable
hunger of humanity be stilled. In confronting this lusty demand,
the Catholic Church will reply from the open doors of the Taber-
nacle. If the humility of bleeding earth will accept the Food, It
is waiting.
WOMAN AND CHILD LABOR UNDER WAR CONDITIONS.
BY JOSEPH V. MCKEE, A.M.
E are facing today a great danger, the danger of
hasty and ill-considered legislation. The War has
brought forward many problems that are of serious
import, not merely because of the problems per se,
but more gravely, because of the consequences that
may flow from attempts at their solution. In a great many cases
it is the cure and not the disease that is to be feared. This is due to
the fact that expediency is the policy that dictates the course of
action to be pursued. It seems trite to say that any action based
only on expediency is markedly dangerous, for it is clearly appar-
ent that no problem is solved, unless permanently so; that it is
futile to consider a patient cured by the substitution of one disease
for another. And yet that, in great measure, is invariably the
result of expediency. The surface problem is met and solved, but
in its solution dangerous means are employed that later work
reactions stronger and more serious than the primary trouble.
The evil of hasty legislation born of expediency makes itself
particularly apparent in the matter of child and female labor laws.
For years previous to the War there had been a universal tendency
among the nations to raise the educational requirements which
every child had to meet before being allowed entry into the indus-
tries, and safeguard more carefully the welfare of the women
workers. From the spirit of laissez faire that allowed the most
flagrant abuses in the employment of women and children, there
has developed in the past ten years a keen appreciation of the
primary truth that the greatest safeguards had to be thrown
around children of tender years and women to prevent their ex-
ploitation by unscrupulous employers and even by others, who
because of sharp competition, were unable to better conditions
in their factories. The thinkers of all nations had come to realize
the utter shame of a social system that permitted the sacrifice of
their children and the degradation of their women. Societies were
organized and definite action taken to remedy these conditions,
with the result that the old standards governing the employment
of women and children were improved and new ones enacted.
1918.] - WOMAN AND CHILD LABOR 743
At the opening of the War the advancement that had been
made was universally high and commendable. In every country
of Europe, including Russia, some attempt had been made to regu-
late the child's entry into the factory and to safeguard the rights
of female workers. In many instances the attempts have been
very feeble, but, at least, they were evidence that the movement
was in the right direction. In England, France, Italy and Ger-
many, labor organizations had forced the enactment of legislation
that did much to keep the child in school. Had international con-
ditions continued normal, it is probable that minimum wage laws
and minimum age limits would have been placed on the statute
books in every European state. In fact many were farther
advanced in this regard than a number of our own states,
especially Illinois, where seventy hours a week for women is not
illegal, where night work is not prohibited, nor one day in seven
required for rest.
But what might have been done for the women and children
in the factories under normal conditions is merely a matter of con-
jecture. Labor is the first commodity to show the reaction of
peace or war, hard times or prosperity. At the outbreak of the
struggle in 1914 the upheaval in labor conditions was so tremend-
ous that old standards were broken down. Previous means proved
inadequate in the face of the new emergencies of unemployment,
the national demand for special labor and the transfer of surplus
workers from one field of industry to another.
The first reaction in England, following the declaration of
war in August, 1914, was the economy panic which wrecked the
cotton trade and the so-called luxury trades, such as dress-making,
millinery and toilet specialties. As a result thousands of women
were thrown out of employment. The Report of the Board of
Trade on the State of Employment in the United Kingdom in
October, 1914, states that the number of women unemployed or on
short time was over a million. In October, 1914, there were
115,995 women weavers unemployed or on short time. In Sep-
tember of the same year the contraction in employment reached
the serious average of forty-four and four-tenths per cent.
While this condition of unemployed existed among the
women workers, just the opposite prevailed among the men. Here,
where the demand was so great for men in the industries, over
ten per cent were withdrawn from the trades by army enlistments.
This withdrawal was the more emphasized by the tremendous
744 WOMAN AND CHILD LABOR [Mar.,
stress placed upon the trades that were engaged in the manufacture
of articles necessary for carrying on the War.
In one case there were too many workers, while in the other
there were not sufficient numbers to cope with the sudden flood
of government contracts. What was needed was an adjustment
of labor. This enormous task was undertaken by the Central Com-
mittee on Women's Employment. This committee (its interim
Report of 1915 proves valuable reading) acted as the clearing
house in the matter of issuing contracts, financing some of the
trades formerly engaged in " luxuries " and adjusting the indus-
trial load.
The result of this work was the induction of women into
work formerly done by men. Between July, 1914, and January,
1917, the number of women employed was increased by one-half,
and of this number of 1,072,000 women, all but one thousand
replaced men. Work in government shops called 147,000 women,
while the private metal factories employed 270,000. The total for
railway service approximated an increase of from n,ooo to
33,000, while in the breweries the advance was from 8,000 to
18,000.
In Germany the use of women in the factories was also very
marked. It is reported that on July i, 1916, no fewer than
3,827,640 women were at work in the metal trades in Germany.
An example of the great increase in the performance by women of
exhausting labor is seen in the case of Diisseldorf, the centre of
Germany's metal production. Here before the War there had been
only 913 women working in the factories. In December, 1914,
the number jumped to 6,928, and no doubt has greatly increased
during the past three years of warfare.
In Italy, where women previous to the War seldom com-
peted with men, the percentage of women workers rose from four
to eighteen and in some trades as high as ninety and ninety-five
per cent. Despite this increase the government has issued orders
that all men of military age working in factories be replaced by
women. Reports are not now available to show in numbers the
significance of this change.
In France similar orders had been given for the replacement
of men available for military purposes. Women were employed
in the most laborious trades, even so far as to enter the furnace
industries. In September, 1916, there were 300,000 women who
had taken up work in the munition factories. Besides this service
1918.] WOMAN AND CHILD LABOR 745
they are also aiding their country in branches auxiliary to the
army, such as in laundry and clerical work.
The increase in child labor has been as marked as in the case
of women. In England previous to 1914 the number of children
under fourteen years of age engaged in gainful occupations was
146,417. In the first year of the War over 100,000 boys and girls
below thirteen years of age were excused from school and placed
in the industries. In France the number was proportionately
large, while Italy, though not affected to such a degree, had a large
increase in the percentage of children entering the factories.
It can readily be seen that such economic and social changes
could hardly be made without danger to the individuals of the
classes affected. Expediency was the guiding principle that
brought about the changes, and, while it produced the required
results for a time, it charged a price that none of the nations cares
to pay. The cost is now becoming apparent, and steps have been
taken to mitigate the damage already done and to prevent further
waste.
In the early part of the War when the demand was so great
for labor, the short-sighted policy of getting things done in the
shortest time possible, regardless of the consequences, dictated the
great labor shift previously outlined. This change was made
possible only by relaxing the former labor standards which
had been erected to protect women and children wage-
earners. The safeguards that had prevailed in normal times were
laid aside, and where formerly attempts had been made to dis-
courage female labor, especially in work of an exhausting nature,
great inducements were now held out, and many plans put into
operation, to bring women into the positions vacated by the men
called to war. The social, economic and moral evils that might
follow such rapid and unguarded changes were lost sight of in the
national urgency for men and materials.
The relaxing of standards, as stated in the Report of the
Children's Bureau of the United States Department of Labor1
came under three heads: first, lengthening of hours of work;
second, lowering the age requirement for children entering the in-
dustries, and third, placing of women in dangerous work formerly
prohibited by law.
In the first class, exemptions from pre-war standards were
1 Child Labor in Warring Countries, by Julia Lathrop. A very comprehensive
report of high merit.
746 WOMAN AND CHILD LABOR [Mar.,
more or less universal in England, France, Italy, Germany, Aus-
tria, Switzerland, Holland and Russia. In some instances in Ger-
many hours of labor were shortened, but these regulations, how-
ever, were enforced in order to bring about a saving in materials.
The exemptions granted in the various countries practically de-
stroyed all vestige of former restrictions thrown around the employ-
ment of children.
In the second class — the lowering of the age requirement for
children — the war-time changes' were even more radical.2 In Italy
boys of twelve whose fathers were soldiers were allowed to begin
work under exemption from the educational requirements for-
merly in force concerning the employment of boys under fifteen
years of age. France lowered the age of working boys from
t\velve years to eleven years and six months. In August, 1914,
Germany put into force special emergency exemptions, reports on
which are, of course, unavailable. In England, exemptions were
almost wholesale; on May 31, 1916, 15,753 children under four-
teen years were excused from school for agricultural work. So
great was the destruction of educational requirements that a speaker
in Parliament declared that the British school system was "like
the ruins of Louvain."3
In the employment of women in work formerly prohibited
because of its dangerous nature — the third class of exemptions —
the lowering of standards again was far-reaching in its effect.
Permission was granted by Germany and Russia to women to
work underground in coal mines. An idea of the work taken up
by women can be seen from the following paragraph taken from
Child Labor in Warring Countries:* " In wire factories women are
employed at wire spooking, at the wire-weaving machine, and at
wire drawing. In so-called ' pottery ' foundries women work at
the machine mold for cast-iron cooking pots. A smelter in Upper
Silesia employs about fifty women in blast furnaces, twenty- five in
coke ovens, and sixty in steel and rolling mills. These women are
obliged to do Sunday and over-time work. Another smelter em-
ploys about twenty-five women at blast furnaces and about twenty
at Martin furnaces and in the steel works. In still another, a
particularly strong woman is employed as stoker of a furnace.
These are all occupations for which formerly only strong men
were used. In other smelters women are employed in lighter
work. "
* Ibid., p. 8. "Quoted in the Survey, August 4, 1917. * Page 13.
WOMAN AND CHILD LABOR 747
In France female labor in the munition factories was author-
ized, girls under eighteen being employed in hazardous positions.
In England slight changes were made in the manufacturing
machines, whereby girls were enabled to work upon the construc-
tion of " eighteen pounder high explosive shells." Just to what
extent women displaced men in the British munition factories was
made public by the illustrated volume issued by the Ministry of
Munitions in February, 1916, popularly known as Lloyd George's
Picture Book.5
While the object sought by these means, the immediate sup-
ply of military necessities, was in some measure accomplished, the
price that was paid was altogether disproportionate. After two
years of war, M. Albert Thomas, the French Minister of Muni-
tions, declared : " The experience of war time has only demon-
strated the necessity — technical, economic, and even physiologi-
cal— of the labor laws enacted before the War. In our legisla-
tion secured in time of peace we shall find the conditions for a
better and more intense production during the War." Not only
France, but also England and Italy, have come to realize that eco-
nomic changes cannot be worked out at the expense of physiological
law. Investigations into the conditions of the industrial workers
show that based upon the cold basis of efficiency, it is a national
waste and extravagance to lower the standards of labor, partic-
ularly in the case of women and children. The whole situation
finds a telling summary in the findings of the official British com-
mittee : " In war time the workmen will be willing, as they are
showing in so many directions, to forego comfort and to work
nearer the margin of accumulating fatigue than in times of peace,
but the country cannot afford the extravagance of paying for
work done during incapacity from fatigue just because so many
hours are spent on it or the further extravagance of urging armies
of workers toward relative incapacity by neglect of physiological
law."
As a result of these findings England is hastening to return to
pre-war standards of labor. The relaxation of requirements that
was so rashly accomplished in the first two years of the War was
followed by such immediate evils, that the government realized the
fearful human waste and the natural inefficiency that followed the
placing of heavy loads on weak, immature shoulders. The lesson
' Notes on the Employment of Women on Munitions of War, with an Appendix
on the Training of Munition Workers.
748 WOMAN AND CHILD LABOR [Mar.,
has been so well learned that the new legislation to be enacted will
go even farther than did the former statutes in protecting women
and children in the industries.
Besides the restoration of former standards England is keenly
sensitive to the need of conserving her children. The British are
changing their conception of the child as a wage-earner for the
larger and saner view of the boy or girl as the prospective citizen
and matured worker. The recommendations of the British Board
of Education, which were disregarded in 1915, are now being
enacted into law. They provide :
1. The employment of children of school age should be
regarded as an exceptional measure permitted to meet special
emergency, and should only be allowed where the authorities
are satisfied that no other labor is available, and in no case
should children be excused attendance at school if older children
who are under no legal obligation to attend school are available.
2. In considering the available supply of labor, the author-
ities should satisfy themselves that all reasonable efforts have
been made to secure adult labor, e. g., by application at the Labor
Exchanges and especially by the offer of adequate remuneration.
3. Every case should be considered on its merits, and there
should be no general relaxation of by-laws.
4. The employment should be of light character and suit-
able to the employment of the child.
France, after two years of labor exemptions, has reenacted
legislation prohibiting night work for girls under eighteen, arid
has provided that other night workers be employed only after
medical examination and under constant supervision. The Minister
of Education is considering a bill to establish a system of contin-
uation studies for girls under eighteen and boys under twenty.
This arrangement will take the child out of the factory during
some of the working hours of the day and provide both a physical
rest and a mental training. The reports .of the Minister of Labor
show a keen appreciation of the evils that have followed haphazard
employment of women and children, and point to the establish-
ment of requirements even higher than of those of the pre-war
period.
In Italy the Central Committee on Industrial Mobilization has
been petitioned repeatedly by the deputies to restore the pro-
hibitions existing before the War. The pressure has become acute,
1918.] WOMAN AND CHILD LABOR 749
and undoubtedly the immediate future will see a revision of the
present loose standards governing female labor in Italy.
Switzerland at the close of 1915 defined more exactly the
exemptions which might be granted under the special war decree
of 1914, and made it plain that night work by girls under eighteen
and boys under sixteen would not be permitted. Fourteen years
was prescribed as the age limit for the employment of children.6
This voluminous evidence points to a clear, well-defined les-
son that the United States might learn at the expense of the Euro-
pean countries. The conclusions reached after three years of war
show that emergency measures that lower the standards of labor
for women and children are essentially extravagant in their waste
of human energy and inefficacious of the end for which they have
been enacted — increased production.
Although this experience stands out clearly, it would seem
that our state legislatures do not know of it, or have purposely
disregarded it. Labor conditions, and in particular the standards
for employment of women and children, have been a matter for
state regulation. It was only in September, 1916, that the Fed-
eral Child Labor Law became a statute to go into effect a year
later. Because of this fact, that the states have had the super-
vision of labor, the standards have been as varied in extent and
character as there are states. How low these requirements are
may be seen from the following summary given in the Twelfth
Annual Report of the General Secretary of the National Child
Labor Committee:
Twenty-eight states have no regulation of street trades and
twenty states have poor regulation.
Twenty-three states need night messenger laws.
Twenty-eight states permit children under sixteen to work
more than eight hours a day in stores or other local estab-
lishments.
Nineteen states permit children under sixteen to work at
night in stores or other establishments.
Twenty-six states do not require medical examination of chil-
dren for work permits.
One state has no compulsory education law ; four states have
local option laws.
Twelve states have no educational requirements for work per-
mits; thirty-two states have standards lower than the fifth
grade.
* Child Labor in Warring Countries, p. 17.
750 WOMAN AND CHILD LABOR [Mar.,
Despite these extremely low standards that permit of such
conditions, and in the face of the lesson held out by the warring
countries in Europe, the state legislatures are making the War an
excuse to -lower the requirements safeguarding the interests of
women and children workers. In Kansas, by resolution of the
State Superintendent of Education, the boards were authorized
to excuse children from school at any age, at any time, and for any
length of time. The superintendent told the investigator that " he
did not know and had no way of knowing how many children
were excused." 7 As a result of this " war need " the school term
was reduced to five months. Similar action was taken in Missouri,
with the exception that a limit of fourteen years was required.
In Illinois, boys were excused to do farm work, but under
more stringent conditions than in Missouri or Kansas. In In-
diana, the age limit had been twelve years. Despite this, the can-
ners attempted to have the opening of the schools postponed. The
Department of Education agreed to this proposition, but permis-
sion to relax the enforcement of the Child Labor Law was refused
by the factory inspection department.
California decreed in 1917 that no female shall be employed
more than forty-eight hours a week with this disgraceful excep-
tion : " The provision of this section shall not apply to or effect
graduate nurses in hospitals, nor the harvesting, curing, canning
or drying of any variety of perishable fruit, fish or vegetable dur-
ing such periods as may be necessary to harvest, cure, can or dry
said fruit, fish or vegetable in order to save the same from
spoiling." 8
The significance of this exception can be realized when it is
seen that by this enactment the canners, in the name of the national
emergency, may use women and girls in their factories for any
number of hours, for any number of days, without restriction of
any kind.
In Connecticut, the governor has been empowered to suspend
the laws relating to labor upon request of the Council of National
Defence.9 In Massachusetts a state board has been established to
hear and pass upon any manufacturer's plea for exemption from
the labor laws on the ground of emergency.10 In New Hamp-
shire, the governor has been empowered " to suspend or modify
7 Child Labor Bulletin, August, 1917, p. 115.
8 Statutes and Amendments to the Codes, 1917, ch. 582, p. 829. (Italics ours.)
'Public Acts, 1917, ch. 326, p. 2,458.
10 Acts and Resolves, 1917, ch. 342, pp. 340, 341.
1918.] WOMAN AND CHILD LABOR 751
the restrictions contained in the labor laws of the state when such
suspension or modification shall be requested by the Council of
National Defence." However this act does not apply " to labor
performed entirely in the manufacture of munitions and supplies.11
In Vermont the following law was enacted : " The commissioner
of industries may, with the approval of the governor, suspend the
operation of the laws of this state relating to the hours of employ-
ment of women and children while the United States is at war.12
In New York, the legislature empowered the commissioner of
education to suspend the law regarding the compulsory attendance
of children during the period between April ist and November
ist, for the purpose of aiding in agricultural work.13
These enactments show clearly that, in the rush to do things
in the name of war, the United States is going ahead, blindly obli-
vious of the dangers attendant upon the relaxation of labor stand-
ards and the evils sure to follow the imposition of heavy burdens
upon the shoulders of our women and children. No emergency,
national or state, has so far presented itself, calling for any radical
exemptions from our pre-war requirements. In the event of such
a crisis the situation could be met by means other than by marshal-
ing our women and children to take up unlimited and unregulated
factory work. If it should happen that our national existence
required the placement of our women and children in the exhaust-
ing industries, the change should be worked only after considering
and enacting into law the most efficacious means to protect them
in their work. But we face no such crisis. If we did, we should
bear in mind the lesson learned by the warring countries of
Europe.
•" Public Acts, 1917, ch. 196, pp. 97, 98.
"Acts and Resolves, 1917, no. 172, p. 192.
13 Laws of New York, ch. 689.
JANE AUSTEN AND THE COMIC SPIRIT.
BY BROTHER LEO.
LITTLE reflection on the representative work of
the world's greatest humorists readily leads to the
conclusion that, from the standpoint of its effects
on the reader, humor has two main functions: It
makes us laugh, and it makes us think. Both these
functions may, and generally do, operate synchronously, for in
Aristophanes, Cervantes, Shakespeare and Moliere, we find food
alike for laughter and for thought ; but it is clear that the one tend-
ency or the other so dominates that it is possible to classify comic
writers as laugh-humorists and thought-humorists. Thus, the
diverting adventures of the Knight of La Mancha and his stolid
squire, though possessing an undoubted thought content so per-
vasive and so considererable that Turgenev was able to construct
a convincing philosophical comparison of Hamlet and Don
Quixote, constitute mainly an appeal to the risibles; and so Cer-
vantes is a laugh-humorist. The drama of Tartufe, on the other
hand, though not devoid of provocatives to laughter, possesses
mainly an intellectual appeal; it is really the drama of hypocrisy,
and the enjoyment of it is conditioned on the spectator's ability to
follow thought transitions and thought contrasts; and so Moliere
is a thought-humorist. Myriad-minded as he is, Shakespeare in
his mirthful moods now falls into the one attitude, now into the
other. Falstaff and Launcelot Gobbo make us laugh, Jaques and
Malvolio make us think. Shakespeare is a laugh-humorist in A
Comedy of Errors and a thought-humorist in The Tempest.
This distinction between laugh-humor and thought-humor
involves a corresponding differentiation between comedy and the
comic spirit. The latter is, more intimately and directly, a thing
of the mind. It may spring from what Thackeray called a mix-
ture of love and wit ; it may be, as Mr. Crothers would say, " the
frank enjoyment of the imperfect; " but in any case it is less con-
cerned with what people do than with what they are. The laugh-
ter it evokes is a laughter of the mind — " a harmless wine," says
George Meredith, " conducing to sobriety in the degree that it
enlivens. It enters you like fresh air into a study ; as when one of
1918.] JANE AUSTEN AND THE COMIC SPIRIT 753
the sudden contrasts of the comic idea floods the brain like reassur-
ing daylight." And a little earlier in his brilliant essay, On Com-
edy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit, the creator of Sir Wil-
loughby Patterne defines the test of the comic spirit to be " that
it shall awaken thoughtful laughter." The comic spirit is humor
" sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought."
Comedy, properly so-called, points out her objects with an
Horatian chuckle, perhaps even with a Rabelaisian leer : " See,"
she says, "yonder man who inadvertently sits upon his own hat;
who goes out during a thunder storm with a watering-can and an
umbrella to sprinkle his favorite rose tree; who tells such mas-
todonic lies that he deceives nobody except himself ; who heroically
leads his platoon of soldiers in headlong charge against the main
body of his own troops; who laughs at funerals and weeps at wed-
dings and habitually mislays his spectacles and manifests living
faith in hair-restorers; who marries his cook because she is so
excellent a cook only to find that once a wife the lady refuses to
enter the kitchen." But the comic spirit, smiling as the Prince of
Denmark smiled during his verbal bout with the socialistic grave-
maker, gently reminds us : " The gentleman's lack of table man-
ners is really due to his extreme self-consciousness; he gets up at
a most ungodly hour because he once read in a book that early ris-
ing is salutary; like Browning's Caliban and Mr. H. G. Wells, he
has made unto himself a deity in his own image and likeness; he
never mentions himself in conversation because he dreads being
put down as an egotist; he would like to wear his hat sideways
because his friends say he looks like Napoleon; he is discourteous
to his wife because he is really very fond of her, and he worries
incessantly because he learns from his Sunday newspaper that a
million years from now the earth will probably be destroyed by
fire. "
When Erasmus declared humor to Independent on good tem-
per and insight into human nature, it was really the comic spirit
that he had in mind. The thought-humorist knows man and men,
not merely in their external vagaries, but from the inside; and his
attitude, for all its keen enjoyment, is one of deep and even loyal
sympathy. There is nothing of morbidity about it. " Contempt,"
says Meredith again, " is a sentiment that cannot be entertained
by comic intelligence." It is a thing apart from cynicism.
Socrates understood it as he joked with Crito, the hemlock cup
at his lips; it was alien to Diogenes in his tub. Voltaire knew
VOL. cvi. — 48
754 JANE AUSTEN AND THE COMIC SPIRIT [Mar.,
naught of it, and Swift and Pope; neither does Mr. Bernard Shaw.
But Thackeray dwelt in its light, and Charles Lamb and Terence;
and so does M. Edmond Rostand.
It is not without a gently humorous significance that the
supreme exponent of the comic spirit in English letters is a woman,
a spinster, the daughter of an obscure village clergyman. Jane
Austen, a century after her death, claims recognition as England's
premier thought-humorist. In her refreshing unconsciousness of
the distinction, in her not less refreshing avoidance of all striving
after the distinction, in her ingenuous refusal to take herself too
seriously, lies an added charm. The second half of the nineteenth
century gave her a formidable rival in the person of George Mere-
dith— not a rival merely, but at many points an antithesis. For
Meredith was conscious of what he called "the comic intelligence ;"
Meredith did strive to realize every potentiality of his admitted
gift of humorous perception; Meredith did — and here the comic
spirit for once blends into tragedy — take himself seriously. Bui
all in vain. The man's meticulously thought-out theory of his
art, his syntax-shattering manipulation of elusive epigrams, his
elisions, suspensions, dissonances, inversions and neologisms, his
tortuous and torturing pursuit of shadows of shades of meaning —
shame itself, why did he make such faces? — his castigation of the
" inveterate opponents" who refused to smile at his sallies and of
the not less detested " drum-and-fife supporters " who insisted
upon smiling too broadly to suit the taste of this arbiter
elegantiarum of the comic spirit — all availed not against the native
ability, the keen observation, the apt turn for language and the
fine sense of proportion of the woman — the woman who, working
with a tiny brush upon her two inches of ivory, painted comic min-
iatures likely never to be surpassed.
The seemingly unaccountable caprice of genius that came with
peerless dramatic gifts, to a Warwickshire poacher and touched
with rare lyric fire the thick lips of an Ayrshire ploughboy, dallied
with the dark-haired girl playing about the Hampshire lanes. Born
at Steventon toward the close of the year 1775, Jane Austen lived
her relatively short life never two hundred miles from the place of
her nativity. Grown up, she dwelt with her family at Bath, after-
ward at Southampton, a rare jaunt in London being the only not-
able variety in her external existence. She died at Winchester,
whither she had gone to attend a physician, in July, 1817.
The Austens were respectable, home-loving, ordinary folks.
1918.] JANE AUSTEN AND THE COMIC SPIRIT 755
The father, the Rev. George Austen, was rector at Steventon until
succeeded in 1801 by his son, the Rev. James Austen. The mother
was a peaceful body and a good housekeeper. Two of the boys
took orders and two more entered the navy, both ultimately attain-
ing to the grade of admiral of the fleet. Cassandra, Jane's only
sister and inseparable friend and confidant, led in single blessed-
ness a sweetly uneventful life. Such a family might well be
regarded by the worldly wise as an abode of serenity, of
mediocrity, of rural gentility, a nursery, perhaps, of Mr. Kipling's
" general averages ;" but the last place on earth where one would
look for the nursery of an eminent exemplar of the comic spirit.
Steventon, Jane Austen's birthplace and her home for more
than a quarter of a century, was peaceful, secluded, commonplace.
It had a church dating from the eleventh century standing a little
beyond the village, and sturdy hawthorns and a solitary yew —
reputed to be as old as the church — kept melancholy ward above
the graves. The elm-shaded rectory, comfortable after a fashion
but far from luxurious, stood at the end of a row of cottages. The
village itself, in essentials unchanged by the passing of a century
and more, sulks in a shallow valley surrounded by low-lying hills.
As a very young girl Jane Austen with her sister Cassandra
attended the Abbey School at Reading, a secularized Benedictine
foundation; and she played with her little companions among the
ruins of the abbey church which was begun by Henry I. and conse-
crated by St. Thomas of Canterbury in 1125. At Steventon, the
children had a penchant for amateur theatricals and utilized the
barn in summer and the dining-room in winter for performances.
Substantially all we know of the externals of Jane Austen's
home life we get from her own letters, published by Lord Bra-
bourne in 1 884 ; from the memoir written by her nephew, the Rev.
Austen Leigh, which appeared in 1870, and from a contribution
made by the third and fourth generations, Jane Austen: Her Life
and Letters., by William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Aus-
ten-Leigh, the son and the grandson of the author of the memoir,
which saw the light as recently as 1914. All these witness to the
conventionality and serenity of the Austen's home life, and to the
far from spectacular manner in which Jane's days were spent. Her
nephew pays a tribute to his aunt's skill with the needle; and
despite his assurance that both she and Cassandra " took to the
garb of middle age sooner than their years or their looks required,"
the numerous vivacious passages in her letters commenting from
756 JANE AUSTEN AND THE COMIC SPIRIT [Mar.,
various angles on that complex subject of feminine attire, make
it clear that she had a normal and healthy interest in her personal
adornment. Like her own heroines, in externals at least, she was
a conformist to the whims of dame fashion, a respecter of the
slogan, " it is always done," a trembler — though forsooth a sub-
risive one — in the presence of the fiend named Social Error. And
so she interested herself in fancy work and imitation china and
filigree baskets, wore dainty pattens on a mid-winter walk, dined
at four in the afternoon and expressed polite interest in somebody's
" putrid " sore throat. Her writing was done, not in a decorated
bower or an inaccessible " den," but in the common sitting-room,
subject to all the interruptions, annoyances and foolish questions
from which not even a clergyman's household may boast immunity.
" May we not be well content with Jane Austen as we have her,"
Miss Repplier asks, " the central figure of a little loving family
group, the dearest of daughters and sisters, the gayest and bright-
est of aunts, the most charming and incomparable of old maids? "
Indeed, we may; but if we look no further than the sitting-
room at Steventon and the pump-room at Bath, the cottage at
Chawton and the black marble slab that marks her grave, we shall
find no clue to the seeming incongruity between her undis-
tinguished daily life and her distinguished place in English letters.
We are glad to know that there was nothing saturnine or lugubrious
about her, that she was fond of dancing the stately figures of her
generation, that she idolized her sailor brothers, that she delighted
her nephews and nieces with improvised fairy stories, that she wrote
a firm, neat hand, that, in short, she was a sane and sensible wom-
anly woman. But what have all these things to do with the comic
spirit?
Nothing at all — except in so far as they indicate a character
at once simple and acute, shrewd and sympathetic. Superficially
considered, Jane Austen was an ordinary woman living an ordi-
nary life; more intimately known, Jane Austen assumes something
of the lure and distinction of the Wordsworthian star that dwelt
apart — a woman who visioned in the pettinesses and foibles of her
day and her caste much of the mightiness and the whimsicality of
human nature unchanged through all the ages; who, ostensibly
concerned only with English middle class men and manners, really
succeeds in observing and depicting the traits of character and the
truths of environment that play their part at all times and every-
where in the great drama of life. And her visioning was the per-
I9i8.] JANE AUSTEN AND THE COMIC SPIRIT 757
ception of the comic spirit. Even in her letters and even when
writing about herself, she reveals that canny insight into charac-
ter and that apt and suggestive way of conveying her impressions
which betoken the presence of thought-humor — the distinction
which George Meredith achieved in theory, however short he fell
of it in practice.
Living in stirring times, she was not stirred. Napoleon she
neither execrated nor worshipped; she simply ignored him. A
country dance meant more to her than the French Revolution. In
the momentous year of 1799 she could write to her sister: " There
were twenty dances, and 1 danced them all, and without fatigue.
I was glad to find myself capable of dancing so much and with
so much satisfaction as I did ; from my slender enjoyment of the
Ashford balls, I had not thought myself equal to it, but in cold
weather and with few couples I fancy I could just as well dance
for a week together as for half an hour." This is not the gush-
ing'of a giddy girl unconscious of the deeper meanings and larger
issues of life; it is the amused self-criticism of a mature woman
who looks out upon the world, including the social microcosm in
which she moves, with smiling eyes and narrowed eyelids; who
enjoys, with the cerebral enjoyment of a -connoisseur, her own
tendency to absorption in community trifles. And in another let-
ter the same gentle, appraising humor is noteworthy : " Charles has
receive £30 for his share of the privateer, and expects £10 more;
but of what avail is it to take prizes if he lays out the produce in
presents to his sisters? He has been buying gold chains and
topaz crosses for us. He must be well scolded .... I will write
by this post to thank and reproach him. . . .We shall be unbearably
fine."
Never does she betray any of the popularly accepted indica-
tions of the alleged artistic temperament. " There was in her,"
writes her nephew, " nothing eccentric or angular ; no ruggedness
of temper; no singularity of manner; none of the morbid sen-
sibility or exaggeration of feeling which not unfrequently accom-
panies great talents." She wrote her stories primarily for her
own delectation and the amusement of the family circle; and
though she was human enough to be anxious about the sale of her
books when once the publishers had taken them up, though she
frankly wrote of Pride and Prejudice as her " own darling child,"
and considered Elizabeth Bennet " as delightful a creature as ever
appeared in print," Emma as " a heroine whom no one but myself
758 JANE AUSTEN AND THE COMIC SPIRIT [Mar.,
will much like " and Anne Elliot as " almost too good for me,"
she was always able to retain both her poise and her good-humored
outlook. " Her talents," says the author of the memoir, " did
not introduce her to the notice of other writers, or connect her
with the literary world, or in any degree pierce through the
obscurity of her domestic retirement." She refused to submit to
any process of lionizing. She shrank, with deliciously assumed hor-
ror, from a meeting with Madame de Stael. When it was inti-
mated that the Prince Regent was interested in her work, she took
effective means to let the royal attentions die a natural death.
Some of Jane Austen's admirers, possessed of more constructive
imagination than scientific judgment in the manipulation of veri-
fied facts, have sought to read a romantic love episode into her life.
They have built, upon most inadequate foundations, a conventional
story of a man to whom she lost her heart and whose untimely
death drove her into spinsterhood saddened and subdued. They
would do well to read again both her earlier and later books, and
seek to discover in one or the other any evidence of blighted ro-
mance; or tell by what process of reasoning they detect a note of
unassuaged repining in her sprightly letters to Cassandra. That
her sister destroyed some of Jane's letters, is readily admitted ; but
that the destroyed letters contained proof of the reality of Jane's
love story, is neither easily credible nor possible to establish. Jane
Austen has earned her place in Miss Repplier's dainty pantheon
of incomparable old maids.
Neither in her life nor in her works was Jane Austen a
romanticist. Even as a girl in her teens, though she read the con-
ventional romances of the day, she read them in an unconventional
spirit. They inspired her first attempts at story writing, appren-
tice work contained now only in a few old copy books in the pos-
session of the Austen family. The " silly romances " prompted
her to write burlesques of them in stilted, exaggerated, mock-
heroic language; to poke sly fun at the improbable events of the
older tales, to douche with common sense their mucilaginous sen-
timentality and their scenes of impossible and interminable love
making wrought in King Cambyses' vein. Lord Acton recognized
this procedure as an incipient manifestation of the comic spirit
when he said that Jane Austen condemns the romantic type of
fiction, " not by direct censure but by the indirect method of imitat-
ing and exaggerating the faults of her models, thus clearing the
fountain by first stirring up the mud."
1918.] JANE AUSTEN AND THE COMIC SPIRIT 759
The same burlesque tendency, more sure in its touch and more
under the salutary guidance of artistic reserve, is the dominant
note in Northanger Abbey, the first written, though posthumously
published, of her little group of novels. This -story, which half a
century after it was written Macaulay declared to be " worth all
Dickens and Pliny together," was a re-written version of a tale
originally called Susan. In 1803, Jane disposed of it to a pub-
lisher who made no use of it; and it was recovered by the author
thirteen years later. Northanger Abbey has an easily detected
though thoroughly decorous farcical note, and is really a clever bit
of fun making at the expense of novels of the general style of The
Mysteries of Udolpho, Mrs. Radcliffe's melodramatic romance
which some of the text-books label " gothic." The humor of
Northanger Abbey has not always been appreciated as humor.
Thus, another lady who wrote, Maria Edgeworth, registered a vigor-
ous protest: " The behavior of the General in Northanger Abbey,
packing off the young lady without a servant or the common civilities
which any bear of a man, not to say gentleman, would have shown,
is quite outrageously out of drawing and out of nature." This
stricture reminds one of the dear old lady who declared that for
Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream to become enamored of
Bottom the bewitched " didn't seem natural." The conduct of
the General, to say nothing of the discussion between John Dash-
wood and his wife in the second chapter of Sense and Sensibility
and numerous kindred episodes in the Austen novels, has its justi-
fication and its charm in the devices employed by the comic spirit
to clear the fountain by stirring up the mud.
The fine fruitage of the comic spirit is, almost necessarily,
caviar to the general. It is not without significance that Edward
Fitz-Gerald, the man who was preeminently a popularizer of the
superficial, a middleman of the exotic and a brandisher of the bi-
zarre, should complain that Jane Austen is overrated as a novelist.
More things, and more kinds of things, should happen in her stor-
ies, he thinks; he can discern no real greatness in her romances of
the tea table. " She is capital as far as she goes," he wrote in
1871, "but she never goes out of the Parlour; if but Magnus
Troil, or Jack Bunce, or even one of Fielding's Brutes, would but
dash in upon the Gentility and swear a round Oath or two !" There
are times when we can sympathize with that viewpoint; but the
result of the incursion of Fielding's brute would be farce, or per-
haps comedy; it would not be the embodiment of the comic spirit.
760 JANE AUSTEN AND THE COMIC SPIRIT [Mar.,
The relative slightness of Jane Austen's plots, the relative slimness
of her episodes, the relative paucity of her external action, are
necessary prerequisites for the securing of her most telling hu-
morous effects. Her books are splendid manifestations of thought-
humor precisely because so very little does happen; the reader's
attention becomes absorbed, not in what is done, but in who is
doing it. Her usual scheme of plot construction is suggestive of
the expedient employed by Mr. Langdon Mitchell in the first act
of The New York Idea. The dull, drab and drearily respectable
Phillimores have dawdled over the wedding invitations for many
weary minutes; they have yawned and droned and hemmed and
hawed over the momentous question, " Shall we invite the Dud-
leys?" Then, one after another, the members of the family lan-
guidly drawl, " Well, we shall invite the Dudleys." Whereupon
the prospective bride, Mrs. Cynthia Karslake, jumps out of the
chair where she has been all the while fuming in atrabilious ennui
and dances about the room shouting, as the curtain falls, " The
Dudleys are coming, hurrah, hurrah!" The outburst of the viva-
cious widow, rendered necessary by the demand of the dramatic
form for visualized contrast, is the only element in the superbly
conceived scene that is not Austenesque. Given the situation and
the characters in one of Jane Austen's novels, nothing else would
be changed; but the chapter would probably draw to a close with
some one suggesting more tea. This difference in treatment is
an excellent example of the difference between Mr. Mitchell's
comedy and Jane Austen's comic spirit.
But it is not in her plots, but in her characters, that we per-
ceive Jane Austen's comic spirit at its best. In her study of men
and women she has a keen eye for what might be called conven-
tional incongruities for those inconsistent traits of character
which most of us accept as usual or even necessary without dis-
turbing ourselves over their inherent absurdity. A case in point
is her portrait of Marianne Dashwood who is, as Austin Dobson
says, " the obsolete survival of the sentimental novel." Another
is her commentary on Mrs. Musgrove's " large and fat sighing
over the destiny of a son whom alive nobody had much cared for.
Personal size and mental sorrow have certainly no necessary pro-
portions. A large bulky figure has as good a right to be in deep
affliction as the most graceful set of limbs in the world. But, fair
or not fair, there are unbecoming conjunctions, which reason
will patronize in vain, which taste cannot tolerate, which ridicule
1918.] JANE AUSTEN AND THE COMIC SPIRIT 7&i
will seize." Jane Austen speaks here out of the fullness of experi-
ence ; as a clergyman's daughter she had often come in contact with
the incongruity of the lachrymose fat woman. It is utterly un-
reasonable, as she declares; and yet the portly weeper suggests a
grief as diverting as fat Jack Falstaff's periodical professions of
repentance. The weeping ways of the too, too solid flesh are food
for the comic spirit.
Macaulay, Archbishop Whately and Professor Sainstbury
have all recognized a kinship between some of Jane Austen's char-
acters and the fools of Shakespeare. (More accurately, I think,
his clowns.) Her clerical characters, Saintsbury maintains, are
" preachers of the highest and most Shakespearean comedy." Be
that as it may, they are not conspicuously preachers of religion.
As the daughter of one clergyman and the sister of two others,
and therefore in necessarily intimate contact with the clerical asso-
ciations of her day, Jane Austen unquestionably knew at first hand
the churchly types she has so vividly portrayed in her novels. At
their best, like Edmund Bertrand, her ministers achieve a formal
seriousness, a species of frock-coated decorum consciously as*-
sumed during office hours only ; at their worst, they descend to the
assininity and canting obsequiousness of that prince of clerical
nincompoops, Mr. Collins, whose professional ideal is to demean
himself " with grateful respect to her Ladyship, and be ever
ready to perform those rites and ceremonies which are instituted
by the Church of England." Between such extremes are those
nice young men of fashion, Henry Tilney and Edward Ferrars;
Charles Hayter, whose conception of the clerical office is of an
advantageous stepping-stone to the holy sacrament of matrimony;
Mr. Elton, an ill-bred, cringing sycophant, very fond of his wine:
and Dr. Grant who exudes at every pore of his being the unctious-
ness of the worldy bon vivant. That Jane Austen depicted the
English clergyman of a hundred years ago true to the life is
vouched for by her nephew, Austen Leigh, himself a gentleman of
the cloth. " Such," he says, " were the opinions and practices then
prevalent among respectable and conscientious clergymen." Her
comic spirit reveled in the paradoxical spectacle of the spiritual
shepherd unlearned, unspiritual, unzealous. Cowper, whom she
vastly admired, had already written : " The parson knows enough
who knows a duke."
Her exceptional possession of the comic spirit Jane Austen
further demonstrates in the technique of her art. Her books pos-
762 JANE AUSTEN AND THE COMIC SPIRIT [Mar.,
sess balance and proportion; her manner is one of reserve rather
than emphasis, suggestive rather than obvious. Within their
limits — admittedly narrow — her novels achieved results " nearer
in artistic perfection," says Professor Child, " than any others in
the English language." The more she wrote the more she grew
in acuteness of observation, in depth of outlook, in sureness of
touch, in power of analysis and delineation. In her later novels
she depends for her effects less on the outward peculiarities of
her characters and more on their range of interest. Hers was, in
the words of the generously envious Walter Scott, not " the big
bow-wow " style, " but the exquisite touch which renders common
things and characters interesting;" the humorous perceptions and
conceptions which, David Masson assures us, have put the most
hard-headed men in ecstasies.
Perhaps the hard-headed readers have been all the more im-
pressed by her studious avoidance of the didactic note. She re-
fused to make fiction an adjunct of the pulpit; her characters are
never puppets for preachments ; her tales, in the sense of the word
preempted by Maria Edgeworth, are not " moral " tales. Her
humor, as Professor Francis Hovey Stoddard has aptly remarked,
" is the humor of an observer — of a refined, satisfied observer —
rather than the humor of the reformer; it is the humor of one who
sees the incongruities, but never dreams of questioning the general
excellence of the system as a whole." We may regret, with Car-
dinal Newman, that she has not a dream of the high Catholic
ethos; but we may rejoice that her endowment of the true comic
spirit was sufficiently strong to prevent her sharing, even in a re-
mote degree, the conviction of Stevenson's Israel Hands who
" never yet seen no good come of goodness." She could say with
her own Elizabeth Bennet : " I hope I never ridicule what is
wise or good. Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies, do
divert me, I own, and I laugh at them when I can." That some
readers demand more than this, does not minimize the worth of her
contributions to English literature. " We are not much better,
but perhaps a little more prudent for her writings," Macready, the
actor, wrote in his diary. Be it so; prudence is rare, and a
virtue — a cardinal one. Many a promising novelist — for a mod-
ern instance consider the melancholy case of Mr. Winston Churc-
hill— has abused his talent for story telling and depicting character
by insisting on donning clerical bands and preaching, not very
effectively, from the rickety pulpit of the six best sellers.
1918.] JANE AUSTEN AND THE COMIC SPIRIT 763
Jane Austen's adverse critics have found fault with her, not
for what she accomplished, but for what she did not, and did not
want to, do. Is it not time, a century after her death, to praise her
for those identical reasons ? A darkly passionate sister of the quill,
Charlotte Bronte, complains of her lack of emotional force.
" She ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him by
nothing profound. The passions are perfectly unknown to her;
she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy sister-
hood." Here is palpable if unintentional laudation. Might not
the flavor of world fiction be a trifle sweeter and its portraiture of
life a more veracious guide, if some of the lurid ladies — like
George Sand and Anne Radcliffe and Charlotte Bronte herself —
had been a shade less intent upon reconnoitering the dark and
bloody ground, a little less given to what Huxley described as
" sensualistic caterwauling," and a degree less successful in
achieving theatricality and hysterics? Not the least impressive of
Jane Austen's exquisitely drawn clerical bores would we exchange
for a wilderness of Brontean Rochesters.
In a world that has survived the madness of the naughty
nineties, that has squirmed before the crepuscular morbidity of
Marie Bashkertsev, that has recoiled from the mephitic pyrotech-
nics of Marie Corelli, that has flung up its arms in frenzied and
panic-stricken protest against the fulgurant obscenity of Victoria
Cross and Elinor Glyn, we are justified in turning with genuine
affection to Jane Austen in the lively confidence of finding in her
one- foot shelf of fiction episodes that do not set the teeth on edge,
characters distinguished for the lack of both neo-paganism and
peanut piety, and an appeal to intellect rather than an appeal to
sex. Following the advice of Horace and the example of Moliere,
the Hampshire parson's daughter observed and limned the man-
ners of her age; and as the unsurpassed possessor of the comic
spirit she demonstrated what so many of the strident sisterhood,
with their wild eyes and loosened hair and waving arms and rau-
cous voices, have tried so hard and successfully to make us forget —
that the saving sense of humor is not an exclusive masculine
possession and that a woman who writes may win a place in the
sun without sacrificing her womanhood.
ASPECTS OF RECENT DRAMA IN ENGLISH.
BY KATHERINE BREGY.
III.
THE THEATRE OF IMAGINATION.
|NE makes much, for critical purposes, of these two
main divisions called the theatre of realism and the
theatre of imagination. And in all truth they will
be found to sum up the two distinct lines of dramatic
development, from beginning to end of the story.
Only, in point of human fact, there comes a moment when all such
artificial boundaries appear false as well as true. The oracular Sir
Henry Arthur Jones used to believe that the whole future of Eng-
lish drama hung upon his question : " Do people go to the theatre
to get away from life or to see life portrayed?" But there is no
hard and fast answer to that acute question. Audiences, being like
ourselves variable and human, go to the theatre for both reasons —
or for each reason at a different time. And the critic of really
catholic taste must needs mold himself into some likeness of the
fabled and heartening optimist — the man who between two good
things always made a point of choosing both! For in the very
nature of things, there must and will be a theatre of imagination
and a theatre of realism : just as there must be a literature of poetry
and a literature of prose; and within poetry itself an alternating
tendency toward the classic or the romantic form of expression.
So it is with no implication of a sheep and goat division that
these two aspects of recent drama are thus sharply separated. Imagi-
nation will, indeed, enter into every realistic play — if its realism is
to carry over with any significance ; and realism must have its part
in every imaginative drama — if it is to be a drama and not merely
a dream fantasy. At a thousand points the lines will seem to con-
verge. None the less, they are distinct in aim and in method, and
perhaps never more conspicuously distinct than in the drama of the
last fifty years. The theatre of imagination is, then, neither an
ideal nor an organization. It is the storehouse of all the poetic
drama of our recent renaissance, of the romantic and symbolic
drama, the revival of pageant and miracle play in English-speaking
1918.] ASPECTS OF RECENT DRAMA IN ENGLISH 765
countries. And it is the hot-bed of those charming, exotic, some-
times enigmatic experiments which are still springing up almost
daily, and which will demand a discussion all their own later on.
As first fruit of this imaginative theatre, one would single out
the poetic drama — because it is the nearest lineal descendant of the
imaginative drama of the past :• the historic drama of Shakespeare
and the Elizabethans, of Dryden, and of the not so successful mid-
Victorians. And first among producers of recent poetic drama,
there is likely to be a very strong agreement in naming the late
Stephen Phillips. For when his first play, the story of Francesca
da Rimini, was produced in the year 1900, it was said in London
that he had achieved the impossible. He had succeeded in uniting
poetry and actability — he, a young poet barely thirty-two, had suc-
ceeded where Tennyson and Browning had failed !
Stephen Phillips was happy in the off-setting combination of
highly respectable ancestors and a highly romantic temperament.
Reared as became the son of a well-born Anglican clergyman, he
left Oxford during his first term to follow the life of the itinerant
stage ; and when, later on, the young knight entered himself the lists
of playwriting, he came as an actor of experience and a poet of
already notable achievement. It had become manifest that the
English stage had a present as well as a past — and Mr. Phillips
determined to produce poetic drama not to be read by the fireside,
but to be acted with all the technical splendor of the modern theatre.
That first play, Paolo and Francesca, remains his greatest. It
was presented in London by Mr. George Alexander, and proved
itself a drama of such extraordinary beauty and power that it is
difficult to understand why it is not more frequently revived, at
least by the less commercial managers. From the opening scene,
where the little bride Francesca is led through the great chained
doorway into the grim castle of the Malatesta, there is an atmosphere
of brooding tragedy. She is pictured young and fair and
helpless before the fate which has already its hold upon her, as upon
the silent soldier destined to be her husband, and the youth-
ful Paolo destined immortally to be her lover. Stephen
Phillips does not blacken the character of the husband as so many
tellers of the story, including our American Boker, have done : there
is something of the divine patience in the understanding with which
all his characters are here developed ; and like the tragedies of old,
the drama purifies by terror and pity. It follows Dante's version
in that unforgettable scene where love is first admitted between the
766 ASPECTS OF RECENT DRAMA IN ENGLISH [Mar.,
two — the scene where Paolo, suddenly back from the war, comes
upon Francesca in the garden as she sits dreaming over the old ro-
mance of Lancelot and Guinevere. But there is much of Mr. Phil-
lips' own delicate psychology in all the gradual unfolding of their
tragic destinies. When his Francesca is urged by a light-minded
serving maid to meet Paolo more -frequently, the young harassed
countess gives an answer worth remembering:
O, Nita, when we women sin, 'tis not
By art; it is not easy, it is not light;
It is an agony shot through with bliss :
We sway and rock and suffer ere we fall!
And the close of the play is really amazing in the tensity of its re-
strained passion. Always throughout Stephen Phillip's work it is re-
strained : his fondness for the classic Greek models of tragedy was
self-confessed, and he would have, for instance, no murder done
before the eyes of the audience: but he brought all the subtle
powers of modern analysis to bear upon his ancient themes. So
here one sees Giovanni, the betrayed husband, entering slowly
through the curtains. There is blood upon his hands. Presently,
while the servants cower from him, torches are brought in; then
the bodies of Paolo and Francesca, carried upon a litter. The serv-
ants and handmaids break into lamentation, which Giovanni silences
with a motion. Marble-like, he walks to the litter and gazes down
at the silent forms:
Not easily have we three come to this —
We three who now are dead. Unwillingly
They loved, unwillingly I slew them. Now
I kiss them on the forehead quietly.
He is shaken — then the agony breaks from his lips in one last
quivering cry:
She takes away my strength.
I did not know the dead could have such hair.
Hide them ! They look like children fast asleep !
Stephen Phillips' next play, Herod, might be described as a
work of almost aching beauty. Its dramatic interpretation of the
love of Herod and Mariamne is as exquisite in its own way as this
poetic description of the young, death-doomed priest, Aristobulus:
1918.] ASPECTS OF RECENT DRAMA IN ENGLISH 767
All behind him is
A sense of something coming on the world,
A crying of dead prophets from their tombs,
A singing of dead poets from their graves.
And once again, the ending of the drama was particularly success-
ful. Herod was played in London by Sir Herbert Tree; so also
were Ulysses and The Sin of David and Nero. This last play lent
itself to gorgeous scenic investiture, and the title role was drawn
with no little originality ; but it betrayed only too plainly the gradual
weakening of Stephen Phillips' dramatic genius. More and more
the poet in him was out-topping the playwright, so that his later
dramas were manifestly for the reader rather than the audience.
Latest of them all, and but a brief time before Mr. Phillips' death,
came his epic of the present war, Armageddon. Moving through
its scenes one meets the mystical figure of Jeanne d'Arc: and in
the end it is her vision — symbol of highest patriotism, civilization
and sacrifice — which deters the French and English armies from
the destruction of Cologne Cathedral, and beckons on to a world
peace. There could scarcely have been a more fitting crown to Mr.
Phillips' lifelong service of the ideal.
Not a few resemblances exist between the poetic drama of the
English Phillips and the Irish William Butler Yeats. Both men
were in the first and last place poets : and Mr. Yeats gained at least
a working knowledge of the stage through his connection with the
Abbey Theatre. It is interesting to observe that the most human
and active of all his plays is the curious Unicorn from the Stars,
which he wrote in collaboration with Lady Gregory : and just who
supplied the superb imagination and who the vivid, colloquial real-
ism of this venture makes no very difficult guess. But the more
strictly Yeatsian dramas are all worth remembering. The Countess
Cathleen clothes with tremendously fine poetry the old legend of
the ruler who sells her soul to Satan for the succor of the poor : only
to find that no such impious bargain may hold before the Divine
Clarity, since
The Light of Lights
Looks always on the motive, not the deed,
The Shadow of Shadows on the deed alone.
Kathleen Ni Houlihan is a very well-known symbolic drama of
Irish patriotism : and The Pot of Broth is perhaps not as well
768 ASPECTS OF RECENT DRAMA IN ENGLISH [Mar.,
known as it should be for a delicious parody upon Irish " bluff."
In the Land of Heart's Desire Mr. Yeats has achieved a little
lyrical drama surcharged with Celtic wistfulness and fatality — the
call of magic set against the call of the home. Higher still must be
rated that really luminous miracle play, The Hour Glass. It is a
one act drama, admirable for performance by Catholic amateurs,
the story of an old, learned professor who is saved by the faith of
a fool. Some hint of its quality may be gained from this little dia-
logue between Teigue the Fool and the Wise Man :
Wise Man: I am wise, and I have never seen an angel.
Teigue: I have seen plenty of angels. .. .They are always
there if one looks about one : they are like the blades of grass.
Wise Man: When do you see them, then?
Teigue: When one gets quiet ; then something wakes up inside
one, something happy and quiet like the stars — not like the seven
that move, but like the fixed stars. . . .
Wise Man: Is it long since you have seen them, Teigue the
Fool?
Teigue: Not long, glory be to God! I saw one coming behind
me just now. It was not laughing, but it had clothes the color
of burning sods, and there was something shining about its head.
These symbolic plays of Mr. Yeats point on to a most significant
symptom of our recent dramatic renaissance — the revival of reli-
gious drama. It is, of course, common knowledge that the drama of
the modern world was literally cradled in the sanctuary ; growing
out of the festal offices of Holy Church by way of the mystery
plays, the miracle plays, saints' lives, moralities, interludes, etc., and
becoming more and more secularized by contact with the popular
chronicle histories and masques, until the robust flowering of
Elizabeth's time.1 But this very Catholic art, while enduring in
religious schools and colleges, has been banished from the public
stage these three hundred years. And now one sees it returning —
the mystery and the miracle play : by no means only within the
British theatre, nor always within the body of the Church Catholic !
One thinks of Massenet's lovely Jongleur de Notre Dame and of the
host of beautiful religious plays which the English censor (save
the mark!) has felt called upon to forbid during the past decade and
a half. Monsignor Benson's Nativity Play and The Upper Room
*See English Religious Drama, by Katherine Lee Bates, also Introduction to
The Elizabethan Drama, by Felix E. Schelling.
1918.] ASPECTS OF RECENT DRAMA IN ENGLISH 769
were among these: devout little dramas of the Birth and Passion
of Christ, lineal descendants of their mediaeval prototypes; true
even in mystical intention, since they bear witness that to their
author the miracle was of infinitely greater importance than the
play. Most of these recent Christmas dramas, including the noble
and simple Nativity of Dr. Douglas Hyde, were very picturesquely
described in a recent article contributed to these pages by Charles
Phillips. But Mr. Phillips did not, and indeed could not, add that
he himself had produced a poetic drama of rare beauty built about
the story of Mary Magdalen — a miracle play which was presented
with success by Miss Margaret Anglin some two years back in
happy California. Perhaps the full significance of this dramatic
fact will become more evident as time goes on, for it opens before
the determinately Christian artist vistas of limitless aesthetic pos-
sibility. Indeed, non-Catholic and betimes even non-Christian poets
have been quick to seize upon the artistic value of religious drama.
Not one of our contemporaries has written a more tender or satis-
fying Christmas play than the Bethlehem of Laurence Housman.
Its entire action might be transferred to a stained-glass window,
and its poetic dialogue is so devotional, even so ecclesiastical, that
the drama is frequently performed in the convent school or the
parish theatre. It was the superlative and compelling beauty of
holiness which won this tribute from the versatile Mr. Housman —
who once to the present writer described himself as " a mystical
pragmatist." And at another time he wrote to one of the London
journals a sentence which might almost stand as the credo of a
whole literary movement : " I feel that there is working through
English literature a growing recognition not so much of the dog-
matic truth as of the emotional beauty of the Catholic presentment
of Christianity."
This " emotional beauty " is regnant again in Josephine Pres-
ton Peabody's Franciscan drama, The Wolf of Gubbio. The author
is, as all the world knows, Mrs. Marks, a poet of New England
birth who has lived much abroad — winner of the coveted Stratford
Prize in 1910 by her poetic drama, The Piper. Much publicity at the
time attended this latter play of the " Pied Piper," and it was in-
deed full of beauty and of pathos. But there was a certain Puritan
frown upon the faces of its severe mediaeval burghers, and one gath-
ered the impression that its author's sympathy lay rather with the
rebels than with the spirit of the ancient Faith. The romance
which she has since built about the Poor Little Man of Assisi and
VOL. cvi.— 49
770 ASPECTS OF RECENT DRAMA IN ENGLISH [Mar.,
with the very sweetness of Catholicism. The Wolf of Gubbio is
his conversion of Brother Wolf is, on the other hand, fragrant
not an easy drama to produce, but no more difficult than Peter Pan
or many of Maeterlinck's poetic fantasies. There is a radiance in
its sunshine, even in its tears, very heartening in " times which try
men's souls " — a radiance which extends even to such inimitable
stage directions as " Enter St. Francis, shining with gladness." And
while the play seems conscious that the canons of religious drama
are less strict than those of the secular stage, while its supreme merit
lies no doubt in the beauty and poignancy of its lyrics, both story
and characterization are well knit, and the essentials of conflict and
suspense are most artistically preserved.
But the theatre of imagination has not been debtor only to poetic
drama. From prose also it has gathered many precious things.
Justin McCarthy's drama of Villon, // / Were King, was romance
incarnate. In fact, it was one of the most successful and gripping
of all semi-historical plays; yet its lyrics were merely incidental.
On the religious side, there have been the sermon-plays of Charles
Rann Kennedy, highly imaginative but entirely in prose. There
is a socialistic tincture to some of them, but they just escape sub-
limity. Indeed, The Terrible Meek escapes only because it sees
simply the much-suffering " peasant mother " where it might have
seen — the Deipara! In Mr. Kennedy's Servant in the House, as in
Jerome K. Jerome's Passing of the Third Floor Back, one meets
again the miracle play in modern vestments — the veiled Christ as
Passer By upon earth.
And in the realm of pure elfin fancy, human enough for ten-
derness but never too human, our recent drama has been hugely
fortunate in capturing the genius of Sir James M. Barrie. And
Barrie himself has been hugely fortunate in capturing the genius
of Miss Maude Adams ; for hand in hand, creator and interpreter,
they have fluttered into supremacy in the theatre of imagination.
The Little Minister brought its revelation of arch mischief and shy
sweetness as far back as 1897. Then came Quality Street, The Ad-
mirable Crichton and, in 1904, Peter Pan. Peter marked an epoch:
that adorable and unconscious lad who determined never to grow
up, not only renewed the youth of myriads of sober adults — he also
inaugurated a new and festive era for the children's theatre all
over the world. And those who fancy that Barrie owed a debt of
example to Maeterlinck, will gently observe that Peter Pan was
written four years before the more mystical but less coherent
1918.] ALL THINGS UNTO GOOD 771
Blue Bird, After the incomparable Peter, came Alice-Sit-by-the
Fire, What Every Woman Knows, The Legend of Lenora, then
A Kiss for Cinderella, and on and on — each title a name to conjure
with. The distinctly Barriean mixture of superficial realism with
exuberant, effervescent imagination entered in varying proportion
into them all, as into the exquisite one-act plays of Rosalind, The
Old Lady of the Medals, and that delicate and plaintive idyl of the
Clown and Harlequin, Pantaloon — in which the dramatist has
dared the experiment of presenting two roles which speak no
word at all save with their all-expressive feet! And with this
wealth of whimsy, there is a comforting root of sanity in all that
Sir James Barrie gives us. For variety, for gentle humor free ff om
all tempting bitterness, for grace of fancy, wistful tenderness and
warmth of imagination, the modern theatre shall scarcely look upon
his like again.
ALL THINGS UNTO GOOD.
BY FRANCIS P. DONNELLY, SJ.
FATHER, who clasps a son's unanswering hand;
And, mother, counting over one by one
The laggard hours since she you loved has gone
And left you with the dust of all you planned;
And, every heart, with love's fires lit and fanned
Or with dead ashes cold; and, you, undone
With Magdalen's excess nor yet rewon;
Oh, be not blind, look up and understand!
The iris glittering on the stagnant pool,
All hues that wake love's smiling or love's tears,
Splendid in cloud or sordid in the clod —
Heaven's shattered glories — put your hearts to school
And glean for you the shadowy gleam of years
To winnow thence the sunlight love of God.
CARLYLE AND THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
BY MOORHOUSE I. X. MILLAR, S.J.
HOMAS CARLYLE is one of the saddest and most
significant figures of the nineteenth century : sad,
since for all his singular earnestness and love of the
truth his mind never found rest in any definite reli-
gious belief, and significant, because, as W. G. Ward
said of him : " He may be fairly taken to mark the highest point to
which the thought of unbelievers has yet been able to reach in solving
the problem of human destiny."1 Like Browning it has been his
lot to be both misunderstood and misinterpreted, so much so that
Ruskin, though in certain respects his disciple, may be considered
to have expressed the more common opinion about him when he
asked : " What can you say of Carlyle but that he was born in the
clouds and struck by lightning?" Yet Goethe speaking of him to
Eckermann in 1827 before Carlyle had as yet produced any of his
more notable works said : " Carlyle is a moral force of great im-
portance, there is in him much for the future, and we cannot fore-
see what he will produce and effect;" and the more judicious and
favorable estimate of recent times appears to be best summed up in
the words of Mr. Augustine Birrell, in whose judgment Carlyle
was " one who though a man of genius, and of letters, neither out-
raged society nor stooped to it; was neither a rebel nor a slave;
who in poverty scorned wealth; who never mistook popularity for
fame; but from the first assumed and throughout maintained the
proud attitude of one whose duty it was to teach and not to tickle
mankind." Such a judgment has the further advantage of express-
ing fairly accurately what Carlyle himself conceived to be his own
appointed mission in the world. Writing to his mother when his
arduous career as a man of letters was just beginning, he thus states
what was to be his lifelong and deep felt conviction : " Doubt not,
dear mother, that all will yet be for the best, and that the good pur-
poses of Providence shall not fail to be fulfilled in me. I feel as if
I had much to do in the world ; not in the vain pursuit of wealth and
worldly honors, which are fleeting as the breath that can bestow
them; but in the search and declaration of Truth in such measure
1 The Dublin Review, September, 1850.
1918.] CARLYLE AND THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 773
as the All-wise shall see meet to impart to me and give me means
of showing it to others. With such views of my vocation, I have
good reason to rejoice in it and often instead of envying the blind,
slothful comfort of the men of the world, I bless heaven that I have
had strength to see and make choice of the better part."
This then is what Carlyle really was: a teacher, and for a
world now yearning for a peace which is to usher in a new era, his
teaching should have a special interest, for, as far back as 1850, he
declared it to be his conviction that " there must be a new world, if
there is to be any world at all." At a time when Macaulay still
reveled in the hearty approval of things as they were, Carlyle
sounded the first note of protest destined to carry conviction to a
complacent England. Macaulay had compared seventeenth century
England with England as he knew it in his own day and expressed
entire satisfaction with the latter. Carlyle saw deeper : For him the
boasted nineteenth century with all its material advantages was not
worthy to sit at the feet of any age animated by religious faith as
were the Middle Ages of Gregory VII. , Abbot Samson, Dante and
Shakespeare. If there had been any Dark Age it was the eighteenth
century of which he said: " All this haggard epoch, with its ghastly
doctrines, and death's head philosophies ' teaching by example ' or
otherwise, will one day become what to our Moslem friends their
godless ages are, ' the period of ignorance.' '
In order to appreciate this attitude in such a way as to be
able to set a correct valuation on what was sound or unsound, of
positive or negative worth in Carlyle's teaching, one should recall
what was the spirit of the times in which he first beg^n to think
and write; for however similar to our own, it is in many respects
much further removed from us than we are apt to believe. The Ref-
ormation, it must be clearly noted, had brought in its wake a
peculiar kind of intellectual atrophy which settled over Europe
and was the result of the absolutism of its rulers, and of that
princely tutelage in religious matters for which both rulers and
people had Luther chiefly to thank. Then came Nemesis ! " The
ancient Christian republic of the Middle Ages had passed away.
»For four centuries everything — the common religion, family bonds,
monarchic solidarity and the most solemn oaths of alliance and
friendship, had been sacrificed to a selfish and ferocious policy of
self-aggrandizement. Right had ceased to exist ; might ruled every-
thing ; successful blows had broken every bond between the ' Chris-
tian ' princes .... And further, since kings had used the vilest in-
774 CARLYLE AND THE NINETEENTH CENTURY [Mar.,
struments and tolerated the most merciless proceedings in carrying
out their plans. Europe, morally speaking, was powerless to with-
stand the Revolution. She could not intervene on the score of
principle, for Europe had no principle save one — reasons of state."2
Once the French Revolution, in its horribly misguided and semi-
intelligent return to medievalism, had swept these rulers aside,
the mind of Europe awoke to an unwonted sense of freedom; but
having lost their sense of continuity with the past, men despised
their full mediaeval inheritance, and allowed the experience and
wisdom of earlier ages to count for little or nothing in modern at-
tempts at change, revolution and improvement. These attempts,
time and a better acquaintance with the Middle Ages show more
clearly to have been gradually resulting in mere reconstruction.
Strongly influenced, like so many others, by this new intel-
lectual ferment, Carlyle, even better than Tennyson, came to see how
Our little systems have their day,
They have their day and cease to be.
But as has been too little noted heretofore, the real merit and
singularity of Carlyle's genius was the outgrowth of his discovery
which others failed to see : the rock whereon " our little systems "
were one and all making shipwreck. This was " Fact and Nature,"
or as he expresses it most clearly in Past and Present: " Nature and
fact, not red-tape and semblance, are to this hour the basis of man's
life; and on those through never such strata of these, man and his
life and all his interests do, sooner or later, infallibly come to rest —
and to be supported or swallowed according as they agree with
those." In order to grasp something of the significance of this
statement we need only contrast the present moral state of mind of
the peoples of the Allied nations with that which prevailed before
the War: a contrast which may be strikingly emphasized by a
passage from Madame de Stae'l, written at the beginning of the last
century. " Indifference to the moral law," she says, " is the ordin-
ary outcome of a thoroughly conventionalized civilization, and
this indifference is a much more telling argument against the
abiding presence of an inborn conscience within us, than the most^
degrading errors of savage races. Yet men, however skeptical, no
sooner feel the weight of an oppressive hand, than they appeal to
justice as if they had believed in it all their lives; let tyranny attempt
to dominate over their more cherished affections and they appeal
'Louis Madelin, The French Revolution, English translation, pp. 155, 156.
1918.] CARLYLE AND THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 775
to sentiments of equity with an earnestness worthy of the strictest
moralist. The moment our souls are inflamed by any passion,
whether of hatred or love, the hallowed principles of eternal law
recur inevitably to our minds."8
Carlyle, however, did not derive the above principle, in the
first instance, from any observation of human society in general.
It was the fruit of his own bitter personal experience and the first
thing to suffer by it was his faith, to the loss of which he alludes
in Sartor Resartus, when he says that " for a pure moral nature,
loss of his religious belief was the loss of everything." He had
read Hume, Gibbon and others of like tendencies, and though he
found these two " abundantly destitute of virtuous feeling " it can
readily be seen how doctrines such a's theirs had a deadly effect on
the active mind of one who could summon nothing better in support
of his belief than the Protestant hypotheses of what Christianity
had been and was, although placed over against the real claims of
the Catholic Church, these have clearly proved to be nothing short
of bold perversions of the truth. Faced by the denial of the possi-
bility of miracles and of the supernatural and without any hold on
the Ariadne-thread of Catholic tradition such as Newman had
when he began his search for religious truths, Carlyle could find
little in his Scotch Presbyterianism likely to suggest anything ap-
proaching the real force of St. Augustine's argument appropriated
by Dante, which every Catholic, knowing his religion and knowing
human nature, appreciates as one of the strongest confirmations of
his faith:
Were the world to Christianity converted
.... withouten miracles, this one
Is such, the rest are not its hundredth part.4
Hence, for Carlyle at least, the definite conclusion was that
Protestantism, or Christianity as he conceived it, had lost its foot-
ing upon solid fact and had suffered the fate of the giant Antaeus
whom Hercules, the fit symbol of modern materialism, succeeded in
throttling by holding him off the ground.
But this was not all. There was the further test of " nature "
which in his own experience came to the fore in the process of
what he considered his conversion. Writing in his old age of the
events of his life in 1825 he says: " This year I had conquered all
my skepticism, agonizing doubtings, fearful wrestlings with the foul
1 De L'Allemagne, 3me. Partie, ch. ii.
4 Paradiso, Canto xxiv., Longfellow's translation.
776 CARLYLE AND THE NINETEENTH CENTURY [Mar.,
and vile and soul-murdering mud-gods of my epoch, had escaped as
from a worse than Tartarus with all its Phlegethons and Stygian
quagmires, and was emerging free in spirit into the eternal blue of
ether .... I had in effect gained an immense victory .... I then felt
and still feel endlessly indebted to Goethe in the business; he in his
fashion, I perceived, had traveled the steep, rocky road before me —
the first of the moderns .... Meanwhile my thoughts were peaceable,
full of pity and humanity as they had never been before. Nowhere
can I recollect of myself such pious musings; communings, silent
and spontaneous with Fact and Nature, as in these poor Annandale
localities. The sound of the Kirk-bell, once or twice on Sunday
mornings .... was strangely touching — like the departing voice of
eighteen hundred years."
These are sad words indeed to any Christian who has learned
to appreciate the real nobility in Carlyle's character. But to under-
stand his position it must be remembered that the Luthero-Calvinistic
theodicy was but the corollary of a false anthropology, as is ever
bound to be the case the moment men cease to look upon Revelation
as one concrete fact, not to be hewn at and parceled off by private
judgment, but to be accepted as a gratuitous gift, in all its entirety,
on the word of God. Whereas the Middle Ages had possessed a
joyful and fundamentally harmonious Christianity, the gloomy and
violent feature in the Reformation teachings about the nature of
man, have to a great extent been to blame for the fact that in sul>
sequent ages, many men of powerful intellect have turned away
from Christianity and sought a more cheerful, reasonable and
humane view of life. It was out of this false conception of human
nature that Carlyle had to work his way before he could arrive at
his partial rediscovery of natural religion. This, although
presupposed and implied in the foundations of real Christianity,
had for the non-Catholic world suffered quite as lamentably at
the hands of the Reformers as did Christian revelation and super-
natural religion. In this reaction, however, Carlyle had predeces-
sors, and a comparison with some of these may help to throw light
on the real merit of his achievement. Rousseau, in whom as Car-
lyle said, " the French Revolution found its evangelists " was, of
course, the first to take the lead in this " return to nature." Later
on Goethe as a young man was horrified at hearing a preacher de-
clare that it was Pelagianism to assume the existence in man's
nature of anything good which by the help of God's grace might
develop and bring forth fruit. While Fichte, in his discourse to
1918.] CARLYLE AND THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 777
the German nation, complained that the system of education in force
in his day taught " its students from their youth that there is in
man a natural repugnance to God's commandments and that it is
absolutely impossible for him to conform to them." But to all three
of these men may be applied the judgment which Teufelsdrockh
pronounced against the Saint-Simonians : " Here also are men
who have discovered, not without amazement, that man is still man ;
of which high long- forgotten truth you already see them make a
false application." " The fault and misery of Rousseau," to quote
Carlyle again, " was what we easily name by a single word, egoism;
which is indeed the source and summary of all faults and miseries
whatsoever." In the writings of Goethe, on the other hand, there
is, as Madame de Stae'l has finely noted, a philosophy, whose spirit
with regard to the good and evil in this world, is that things must
be so, since they are so. And Fichte, though he could descend from
the cloud-lands of his godless idealism to quote Ezekiel : " Come
from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon the slain, that they
may live. So I prophesied, as He commanded me; and the breath
came into them, and they lived and stood upon their feet, an exceed-
ing great army," he only did so that he might apply his scriptural
text to the results he expected from that " better " moral training
which was to make the nation absolute sovereign over the lives of
all its members. It was not thus with Carlyle. " If," as Froude
tells us, " he had been asked what specially he conceived his own
duty to be, he would have said that it was to force men to realize
once more that the world was actually governed by a just God,"
and to make them live up to the necessary consequences of such a
belief.
Yet, as already said, Carlyle's rediscovery of natural religion
was only partial because while he rejected historical Christianity,
the psychological elements of his inherited Protestantism clung to
him like a Nessus-shirt to his dying day. Religion, for one thing,
was to his mind a matter of heart and will with which our intellects
have nothing more to do than to embody our belief in fitting
formulas. That is true which you believe to be true and religious
truth changes with the ages: a modernistic view of things that re-
minds one strongly of Kilmarkecle's philosophical theory in John
Gait's The Entail. " This snuff," says the Scottish laird, " is just as
like a hippopotamus as the other sort that was sae like it was like a
linty; and nothing could be plainer; for even now when I hae't in
my nostril I think I see the creature wallowing and wantoning in
778 CARLYLE AND THE NINETEENTH CENTURY [Mar.,
some wide river in a lown sunny day, wi' its muckle glad e'en,
wamling wi' delight in its black head, as it lies lapping in the caller
water, wi' its red tongue, twirling and twining round its ivory teeth
(bigger, as I am creditably informed, than the blade o' a scythe)
and every now and then giving another lick." This is subjectivism
in zoology, and how could religion evolved in such fashion, fail to
be at odds with science and history and everything subjectively sane
or objectively reasonable?
In this characteristically Protestant assumption we shall find
the chief reason for that note of contradiction and inconsistency
so frequently detected in Carlyle's writings. Mediaeval Christian-
ity, .for instance, presented to his mind the greatest realized ideal
ever yet attained by man, and his insight into the spirit of those ages
is remarkable considering the prevalent ignorance about them at
the time when he wrote. Impersonating the monks of St. Ed-
mundsbury, he makes them say : " There is yet no Methodism
among us, and we speak much of secularities : no Methodism ; our
religion is not yet a horrible restless doubt, still less a far horribler
composed cant, but a great heaven-high unquestionability, encom-
passing, interpenetrating the whole of life. Imperfect as we may
be, we are here, with our litanies, shaven crowns, vows of poverty
to testify incessantly and indisputably to every heart that this
earthly life and its riches and possessions and good and evil hap
are not intrinsically a reality at all, but are a shadow of realities
eternal, infinite; that this time- world, as an air image, fearfully
emblematic, plays and flickers in the grand still mirror of eternity,
and man's little life has duties that are great, that are alone great,
and go up to heaven and down to hell." And Abbot Samson, the
one " hero " for whom Carlyle had nothing but unqualified praise,
he characterizes thus : " Abbot Samson all along a busy working
man, as all men are bound to be, his religion, his worship was like
his daily bread — which he did not take the trouble to talk much
about; which he merely eat at stated intervals, and lived and did
his work upon ! This is Abbot Samson's Catholicism of the twelfth
century."
But, for Carlyle, there had been nothing supernatural at work
in this mediaeval Christianity, nor could there be a " Second
Spring," for he denied the supernatural; and his attitude towards
the Catholic Church in modern times, as contrasted with that of
Macaulay, is instructive.
Macaulay more clear-sighted as to facts, and judging of the
1918.] CARLYLE AND THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 779
Church's future by her past, prophesied her " undiminished vigor
when some traveler from New Zealand, shall in the midst of a vast
solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to
sketch the ruins of St. Paul's ;" but with a moral blindness of which
Carlyle was scarcely capable, he attributes this eternity of greatness
to a permanent tradition of cunning. Carlyle, on the contrary, with
a moral sense vastly deeper, but thoroughly saturated with the
Protestant belief that the Catholic Church was false, simply denied
the fact before his eyes. Luther's prophecy had been " dying, O
Pope, I shall be your death," and yet in 1840 when, as Carlyle him-
self said, Protestantism had dwindled into " theological jangling of
argument," " skeptical contentions," " down to Voltairism itself—
through Gustavus-Adolphus contentions onward to French Revo-
lution ones," Carlyle's fatuous assertion was that " Popery cannot
come back any more than paganism can." And such assertions
made with complacent assurance in the beginning turned at last to
shrieks and execrations.
With all this, however, Carlyle was more up to date with the
truth than our more modern modernists in that he did perceive that
within himself and others there exists a supreme law of right and
wrong and that God alone could account for its presence. And it
was chiefly from this vantage ground that he arraigned the world
and pointed out its errors. For him right and wrong did not differ
in degree merely, as aesthetes of the type of Walter Pater and
A. C. Benson would have us believe, but in kind, with an im-
measurable distance. He saw that Europe could never have grown
at all, still less have grown to its present stature, unless truer the-
ories of man's claim on man had once been believed and acted on,
and if " all human dues and reciprocities have been fully changed
into one great due of cash payment; and man's duty to man reduces
itself to handing him certain metal coins, or covenanted money-
wages, and then shoving him out of doors," the " progress " so
loudly talked about could be nothing but progress downwards. In
opposition to Machiavelli, Luther, Kant and our modern theorizers
on sociology and government, he insisted that a divinely sanctioned
morality existed throughout the whole range of human action. His
"Everlasting Yea" was : "Love not pleasure, love God," and with it
he soared way beyond the Olympic hedonism of Goethe. He pierced
in advance, as it were, through the fallacy in Matthew Arnold's
gospel of culture when he put the question: " If (a man) have not
the justice to put down his own selfishness at every turn, the courage
780 CARLYLE AND THE NINETEENTH CENTURY [Mar.,
to stand by the dangerous-true at every turn, how shall he know?"
He pointed out one of the principal errors of the Benthamites, of
Mill* and of the Positivists with their "greatest happiness of the
greatest number " when he proclaimed that " faith in mechanism, in
the all importance of physical things, is in every age the common
refuge of weakness and blind discontent; of all who believe, as many
will ever do that, man's true good lies without him, not within." To
his mind the only progress worth the name was " moral progress."
"How were friendship possible?" he asked, and his answer was: "In
mutual devotedness to the good and true; otherwise impossible;
except as armed neutrality or hollow commercial league." He per-
ceived on all hands " falsehood taken for granted, and acted on as
an indubitable fact," and he told a world that professed Christian-
ity on Sundays and disregarded or denied it on work-days, that it
was in a sadder state than any ever imaged in prophetic vision,
since it was " false with the consciousness of being sincere." While
to the statement of H. G. Wells that our modern "cosmic solicitudes,
it maybe, are the last penalty of irreligion," he had already provided
this far sounding warning : " In very truth how can religion be
divorced from education? An irreverent knowledge is no knowl-
edge; may be a development of the logical or other handicraft fac-
ulty inward or outward; but is no culture of the soul of a man.
A knowledge that ends in barren self -worship, comparative in-
difference or contempt for all God's universe except one insignificant
item thereof, what is it? Handicraft development and even shal-
low as handicraft." He considered " society, properly so called, to
be as good as extinct, and that only the gregarious feelings, and
old inherited habitudes, at this juncture hold us from dispersion and
universal national, civil, domestic and personal war " because " for
the last three centuries (i. e., since the Reformation) . . . .religion,
where lies the life-essence of society, had been smote at."
But how to teach religion? This the all-important question in
his own eyes, Carlyle more honest than the modernist, could only
answer with an exhortation to sincerity and to a trust similar to,
if less clear- toned, than Browning's who
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake.
Unlike Browning, however, Carlyle was not a Christian, and
1918.] CARLYLE AND THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 781
the nearest he ever reached to Newman's Lead Kindly Light was to
adopt as his own Pope's universal prayer :
Father of all in every age,
In every clime adored
By saint, by savage, and by sage,
Jehovah, Jove or Lord.
Thou great First Cause, least understood
Who all my sense confined,
To know but this, that Thou art good
And that myself am blind.
That he had the insight of genius for the problems of the age
is seen the moment one stops to recall the nature of his several
works. Past and Present was the great forerunner of G. K. Ches-
terton's What's Wrong With the World. Heroes and Hero Worship
and Chartism, as treatises on the question of authority and the need
for leadership in a democracy, forestalled such works as Paul
Elmer More's Aristocracy and Justice. The Life of John Sterling
was the nineteenth century prototype of H. G. Well's Research
Magnificent. His French Revolution he wrote with the purpose of
proving to the world that the laws governing nations today are
substantially the same as those delivered in thunder on Mount Sinai,
and that God is in their. midst to enforce them: a lesson again
sternly taught by the present War. While in the lives of Cromwell
and Frederick the Great his quest is the same as that which drove
Diogenes into the agora with his lantern, in search of a man. But
the fact that Carlyle had no adequate solution for any of the prob-
lems he so strongly propounded is as portentous now as it was
characteristic of the whole nineteenth century. For both he and his
century either could not or would not see with Novalis that " the
Catholic Church alone can resuscitate Europe and reconcile all na-
tions," and in this connection the words in which A. H. Clough so
aptly sums up the spirit of that century may still have a meaning
for us :
Sound, thou Trumpet of God, come forth Great Cause to array us
King and leader appear, thy soldiers sorrowing seek thee.
Would that the armies indeed were arrayed, oh where is the battle ?
Neither battle I see, nor arraying, nor King in Israel,
Only infinite jumble and mess and dislocation
Backed by a solemn appeal : " For God's sake do not stir there ! "
ECHOES OF THE CANTICLE OF CANTICLES IN MEDIAEVAL
LITERATURE.
BY MARY G. SEGAR.
AMLET to the Elizabethans was an unusual type.
Today or rather yesterday — for with the coming of
war we are a nation renewed, young again with
the youth of our fighting forebears — there were
many young men of over-sensitive, introspective
dispositions, with whom everything became " slicklied o'er with
the pale cast of thought." They thought so much and saw so many
aspects of everything that action became difficult. Such a type of
youth seemed an anomaly to the men and women of the " spacious
days of great Elizabeth," and in the main the Elizabethans differed
little from their ancestors of the Middle Ages. If anything, the
qualities of vigor, daring, and wholeheartedness were stronger in
the thirteenth than in the sixteenth century. Compromise was un-
known, even by name; colors were strong, men hated or loved,
gave their lives for an ideal or slew its upholders. The bad were
bad and the good were good with an abandon and an intensity which
feebler generations find it hard to realize. The whole being of the
good so turned to God that the fire of their love for Him consumes
and transforms all they say and do. They dare say and do more than
many a modern, for single-mindedness such as theirs cannot antici-
pate the possibility of misinterpretation. And their own generation
does not misunderstand.
It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that love is the
theme of all mediaeval song. Beauty of thought did not appeal to
the mediaeval mind apart from connection with a person, Divine
or human. Every mediaeval work which achieves poetic quality is
personal, an outpouring of devotion to God or to an earthly leman.1
A mediaeval poet would have written the Rabbi Ben Erza as a
passionate expression of devotion to a particular old man, and from
its very fervor we would have learnt something of the meaning of
an old age, which could inspire such admiration, perhaps something
of old age in general. What mediaeval poetry lost in scope, it
gained in intensity. No emotion is more readily transmitted in
1 Leman — beloved.
I9i8.] ECHOES OF THE CANTICLE OF CANTICLES 783
poetry than personal affection, so, few mediaeval poems are wanting
in emotional appeal. Nature, as well as God and man, our fore-
bears loved, but,
Lenten2 comes with love to toune,
With blosmen and with briddes roune.3
The two are inseparable.
Here then, truly, is a people for whom Solomon wrote the
Canticle of Canticles. They had vigor, decision, fearlessness in the
love of God ; they had, too, the habit of singing of love. The hold
that it exercised over their minds is evident from the frequency
with which it was translated into English for popular use, and from
the similarity to it in tone of some of our most glorious mediaeval
poems. It will not be within the scope of this article to consider
more than one popular translation and one religious poem, the
most beautiful, the anonymous Quia Amore Langueo.
There is a small manuscript in vellum in the possession of the
Halliwell family, in which, in a hand of the fourteenth century, the
compiler has transcribed his daily prayers.
After writing out the Our Father, the first part of the Hail
Mary, the Creed, the Ten Commandments, the Seven Gifts of the
Holy Ghost and the Eight Beatitudes of Our Lord Jesus Christ, he
concludes4 " and such a soul that hath these seven gifts of the Holy
Ghost, with these eight blessings of Christ's mouth, may well sing
a morning5 song of love-liking that Christ's special8 singeth in the
Book of Songs." He then transcribes the part of the Book of
Songs that most appeals to him.
" See you, faire seemly darling, our little bed is huled7 with
flowers, that is, the rest of contemplation that Thou hast made fair
with virtues and fairer wilt Thou make it in heaven where will be
the great bed of rest. The timber of our house is of cedar and
cypress that shall never rot, that is strong patience and sad perse-
verance in tribulation ....
" In the second chapter of this book God's Son conforming
him to His special singeth this song — I, flower of the field, most red,
burning with charity ; I lily of the valley, that is most white chaste
love and most sweet smelling .... All men that live meekly in Christ
1 Lenten — spring. * Roune — song, din.
4 1 shall modernize throughout this extract and throughout the Quia Amore
Langueo sufficiently to make them comprehensible to modern readers.
' The text has " mornyng " which may be " mourning."
• Special — beloved. ' Huled — covered.
784 ECHOES OF THE CANTICLE OF CANTICLES [Mar.,
shall suffer persecution, and so it behouveth them (to have) the
red burning charity of the flower and the chaste humility of the lily,
and as the lily waxing and smelling sweet among thorn, that is
among sinful men, drove out of them devils, and healed them of
their sins, so shall My special do among daughters. Then the
special answered, ' as the apple tree is plenteous of apples and of
leaves among trees of woods, so is my Darling among sons, under
His shadow I desired to sit, and His fruits were sweet to my taste,
with His shadow He refreshed me, and with His fruit He fed me,
that my strengths fail not in tribulation.
" ' The King hath lead me into a wine-cellar and hath ordained
me in charity.' That is, my Darling has drawn my love from worldly
things into the great multitude of sweetness at the which David
wondereth, and then my Darling hath thus laid His left arm, that is
earthly love, under mine head, the head of my soul, and with His
right arm beclipped8 me, I seeing mine own frailness for long abid-
ing, and dread of falling, more trusting to others than to myself.
Therefore the angels and souls of saints ' hule me with flowers and
set me round with apples . . . .^>r I long for love.'
" Behold my Darling speaketh to me : Arise, come nearer My
special, come My shapely one through charity, My dove through
simpleness now winter is passed, that is worldly covetousness that
made men cold and hard frozen as ice, the flowers shew themselves
in our earth, the voice of the turtle is heard in our arbor — (that is
that soul that the King of heaven hath lead into His wine-cellar,
singeth chaste songs of love-mourning for her sins and for the
death of Christ, her mate). She will no more sit on a green bough
loving worldly things, but she feedeth her with love of Christ, the
clear white corn. She flieth up into the hole of His Five Wounds,
looking with simple eyes into the clear waters of Holy Writ. More-
over, she is as a dove for dread of the falcon, that is the devil, she
flieth carrion, that is fleshly love as doth the dove ever."
Though clearly strongly influenced by the spirit of the Canticle
of Canticles, the work of this anonymous mediaeval is in some
ways widely different from it. From the sixteen verses of the first
chapter he takes only the verses :
Behold thou art fair, my beloved, and comely. Our bed is
flourishing.
The beams of our houses are of cedar, our rafters of cypress
trees.
* Clippan — to embrace, enfold.
1918.] ECHOES OF THE CANTICLE OF CANTICLES 785
He has explained the meaning of them as he understands them.
The mediaeval mind was readier than our own to seize the meaning
of mystic writings. The first five verses of the second chapter he
translates freely, but his translation and the explanations where he
gives them are not wanting in a poetic beauty of their own. Where
he wanders farthest from the text he is still very near the original in
spirit. He concludes with verses 10, n, 12. Here again his ver-
sion is in no way spoiled by his interpolated explanations. There
is no change of key when he passes from translation to
interpretation.
Unlike the mind of the mediaeval Frenchman, the English-
man's mind was objective. He was occupied with the reality and
tangibility of things, the beauty of things he loved; not the thoughts
they inspired in his mind. Such a power of exultation in the glory
of the works of the Creator was the dower of the singer of the
Canticle of Canticles.
Of Quia Amore Langueo there are five texts known. There is
one among the Lambeth Manuscripts (No. 853). This has been
edited by Furnivall for the Early English Text Society. There is a
text in the Cambridge University Library, one in the Douce col-
lection in the Bodleian Library and one in the Bibliotheque Nation-
ale at Paris. The one in Bodley (Douce MS. 78) has been ascribed
by V. Falconer Madan to Sydgate. It is possible that it is his,
though from internal evidence, unlikely. Sydgate was pious and had
considerable literary skill, but not the fire and vigor of the Quia
Amore Langueo.
Since the revival of interest in the works of Richard Rolle it
has been customary to look on him as the founder of a school of
mystical writing, and on all other mediaeval mystical works as the
outcome of his influence. This supposition is entirely false and
due to the ignorance which prevails of the magnitude of the poetic
output of the Middle Ages. Richard Rolle, great though he was,
was only one of many who voiced the national spirit of the time,
and though considerable in bulk, his work is, if anything, less indi-
vidual than that of many other mediaeval writers. He begins one
of the chapters in his Form of Perfect Living9 with the words,
Amore Langueo. He continues;10 "These two words are written in
the book of love, that is called the song of love or the Song of
• Rolle. Ed. Horstman. Vol. i. p. 29. A new text of Rolle has
lately been brought out by Messrs. Methuen, London ; edited by Miss E. M. Comper.
" Modernized for the sake of intelligibility.
VOL. CVI. — SO
786 ECHOES OF THE CANTICLE OF CANTICLES [Mar.,
Songs. For he that mickel loves, him list oft to sing of his love, for
joy that he or she has when they think on that that they love,
namely, if their lover be true and loving. And this is the English of
these two words, ' I languish for love.' ' It is much more likely
that the regularity of the song with the refrain, Quid Amore
Langueo, lead Rolle to head one of his chapters thus,11 than that
his emphasis of the words suggested the song.
The song once read, can never be forgotten. I shall modern-
ize only in so far as intelligibility makes it necessary.
In a valley of this restless mind
I sought in mountain and in mead
Trusting a true love for to find.
Upon an hill then I took heed,
A voice I heard and neer I yede12
In huge dolour complaining tho
" See dear soul, how My sides bleed "
Quia amore langueo.
Upon this hill I found a tree
Under the tree a Man sitting;
From head to foot wounded was He;
His heart's blood I saw bleeding;
A seemly man to be a King,
A gracious face to look unto
I asked why He had paining
He said, " Quia amore langueo.
" I am true love that false was never ;
My spouse man's soul, I loved her thus;
Because we would in no wise discover,
I left My kingdom glorious.
I purveyed for her a palace precious;
She flieth, I follow, I sought her so;
I suffered this pain piteous,
Quia amore langueo.
" I crowned her with bliss and she Me with thorn ;
I lead her to chamber, and she Me to die;
I brought her to worship, and she Me to scorn;
I did her reverence, and she Me villany.
11 In the Vernon text the words Amore Langti£o are printed in capitals.
" Yede— went.
1918.] ECHOES OF THE CANTICLE OF CANTICLES
To love that loveth is no mastery.
Her hate made never My love her foe.
Ask me then no question why
Quia amore langueo.
i
" I will abide till she be ready ;
I will her sue if she say nay;
If she be reckless, I will be gredy13
And if she be dangerous, I will her pray.
If she weep, then hide I ne may —
I stretch out My arms to clip14 her Me to
Crying ' stay soul, I come ;' now soul, asay !
Quia amore langueo.
" I sit on this hill for to see far ;
I look in the valley My fair spouse to see;
Now runneth she wayward, now cometh she near,
For out of My sight may she not flee.
Some wait her as prey to make her Me flee;
I run them before, and fleme15 her her foe.
' Return then, my spouse again to Me/
Quia amore langueo.
" Fair love, let us go play !
Apples be ripe in My garden.
I shall thee clothe in a new array;
Thy meat shall be milk, honey and wine.
Fair love! let us go dine!
Thy sustenance is My crip, lo !
Tarry thou not thou fair spouse Mine,
Quia amore langueo.
" If thou be foul I shall make thee clean ;
If thou be sick, I shall thee heal;
If thou mourn ought, I shall thee meene.10
Why wilt thou not, fair love, with One deal ?
Foundest thou ever love so leal?17
What wouldst thou, spouse, that I should do?
I cannot unkindly thee appelle18
Quia amore langueo.
13 Gready — eager (in my care for her). " Clip — embrace.
" Fleme — put to flight. " Meene — console, from an old French word.
"Leal — loyal. "Appelle — call, exhort.
;88 ECHOES OF THE CANTICLE OF CANTICLES [Mar.,
" What shall I do with My fair spouse,
But abide her of My gentleness,
Till that she look out of her house
Of fleshly affection? Love Mine she is.
Her bed is made, her bolster is bliss,
Her chamber is chosen; is there none mo?
Look out on Me at the window of kindness,
Quia antore langueo.
"My love is in her chamber. Hold your peace;
Make ye no noise but let her sleep.
My babe I would not were in disease;
I may not hear My dear child weep.
Will all My care I shall her keep.
Nor marvel ye not though I tend her to.
This hole in My side had ne'er been so deep
Quia antore langueo.
" Longest thou for a love never so high ?
My love is more than thine may be;
Thou weepest, thou gladdest, I sit thee by,
Woulds't thou but once, love, look at Me! —
Must I always fee thee
With children's meat? Nay, love, not so!
I will prove thy love with adversity.
Quia amore langueo.
• " Waxe not weary Mine owne wife !
What meed is it to live ever in comfort?
In tribulation I reign more rife
Oftentimes than in disport.
In weal and in woe I am aye to support.
Mine owne wife, go not Me fro!
My nee is marked when thou art mort.
Quia amore langueo."
The influence of the spirit of the imagery of the Canticle of
Canticles is evident. But the mediaeval writer had contributed
something of his own. The unheedingness of the " beloved " in
Quia Amore Langueo gives it a human touch and a pathos that
are not in the Canticle of Canticles. The psychology of the last
two verses makes their interest still more vivid ; they show a knowl-
edge of human nature equal to Chaucer's; but this of course is not
1918.] ECHOES OF THE CANTICLE OF CANTICLES 789
their strongest appeal. This version is the Lambeth 853. Some
verses on account of space have been omitted.
There is another poem, entitled Quia Amore Langueo, a lament
of Our Lady over the sorrows of her Son. It is beautiful and touch-
ing but it is less fine than the poem quoted. It, too, has imagery
that has undoubtedly been suggested by the Canticle of Canticles.
It begins :
In a tabernacle of a tower,
As I stood musing on the moon,
A crowned queen, most of honor,19
Me thought I saw sitting on a throne.
It is a long poem, far too long to quote in full. Somehow the
imagery of Solomon does not altogether suit the theme — a favorite
one in mediaeval literature. Its usual form is a picture of the young
Mother with a Babe on her knee, " lulling " Him quiet and then
the Babe speaks. He tells His Mother of His Passion and she is
heartbroken. She ceases her " lulling " to- weep and to ask Him if
she can do nothing to prevent it. He tells her that she can do
nothing but continue to " lull " Him, but that He knows she would
save Him from suffering if she could.
The vigor, the wholeheartedness of our ancestors, their ob-
jectivity and simplicity, their power of love and their habit of sing-
ing of it, ensured the appeal of the Canticle of Canticles. These
were the characteristics of a nation that could write in the same
vein.
The appeal of a work of art is ever strongest to those whose
own genius lies in the same direction.
19 "Most of might," " most of honor " are favorite epithets for God and Our
Lady in mediaeval poetry, " most " meaning " greatest," " highest."
ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA.
BY EDMUND T. SHANAHAN, S.T.D.
III.
ALESTINE had its wave of expectancy before the
Saviour came. For more than a hundred years the
official and popular mind had become persuaded that
when Israel fell, the world would fall along with it,
and the whole course of history change. Differences
of opinion existed regarding the order in which the final events
would ensue, and the manner of their staging. Some looked to a
brief reign of conquest and victory, during which the Messias would
put His enemies under foot, before proceeding to consummate His
Kingdom. Others were of the view that history would roll up its
scroll at once, denied even this brief respite of extension. The
resurrection to Judgment was not, in any case, to be long deferred.
It would immediately follow, if it did not actually precede or accom-
pany, the short Messianic Reign. The dead were to be trumpeted
forth from their resting-places — the wicked to punishment, the good
to glory, in the everlasting earthly Kingdom of the Messias-King.
" The just shall shine forth and run to and fro like sparks among
the stubble. They shall judge nations, and have dominion over peo-
ples, and their Lord shall reign forever."1 Whatever the differ-
ences ruffling the surface of opinion, all Palestine was in complete
accord on one point of eschatology: the coming of the Messias
and the end of the world were connected events. A mere hand's
breadth of time lay between.
It was the great hope and the still greater dread of that cen-
tury, this expectation, and the crest of its wave did not perceptibly
diminish during the ministry of the Lord and His chosen Twelve.
Fed from a multiplicity of springs, canonical and apochryphal,
it took firm hold of the popular imagination, and struck its roots
deep enough to disturb economic and political conditions. The
Roman authorities watched all this ferment closely, fearful lest the
imperial eagles should drop a subject province from their clutching
talons. The poet of the Empire set the expectancies of the time to
1Wis. iii. 7, 8.
1918.] ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA 79*
music. Virgil caught the echoes of the distant commons, and in
lines that shall ever live, begged the Sicilian Muses to pitch his
minstrelsy to a higher key, that he might worthily sing the passing
of the old order and the wondrous innovations of the new.2
Were the disciples of the Lord — St. Matthew especially —
swept into this maelstrom of public opinion, and borne like swirling
driftwood on its tide? Was the teaching of Jesus, as one apologist
puts it, " over the heads of His reporters," and did it leave their
Palestinian outlook unchanged? Had the converted toll-gatherer
of Capharnaum, whose name the Lord changed from Levi to Mat-
thew, such little power of discernment that he could not see the
long spiritual presence implied in the words : " Behold, I am with
you all the days,"8 but perforce must garble them with the limiting
addition: "unto the end of the age?" Was the standpoint which
he adopted " somewhat similar to the canonical prophets, who advo-
cated the view that the Jewish religion was destined to attract to
itself all nations, but who never seem to have doubted that the re-
sult would be the submission of the Gentiles to the privileges of
Judaism rather than the complete supersession of Judaism by a new
religion ?"* Is it " probable that he saw in the apostolic preaching
in the West, culminating in the arrival of St. Paul at Rome, an
ample fulfillment of the ' preaching in all the world, for a testimony
to all nations?' "5 Or — to put the question more pointedly still —
is the evidence which we gathered in a previous study,' to prove
the Kingdom a world-wide evangel, completely set at naught by
the simple reflection that a Jewish-Christian writer might easily
have said as much and more, about the spread of the word among
the Gentiles, and not distinctively mean Christianity at all, but the
final and speedy triumph of the purified religion of Israel?
The Parable of the Tares or Cockle offers a fine opportunity to
put the likelihood of this supposition to the test. The question with
which it deals is the time of the Judgment; and no writer who had
the Palestinian outlook in mind could treat this topic, even incident-
ally, without self -betrayal. " The Kingdom of Heaven is likened
to a man who sowed good seed in his field. But while men were
asleep, his enemy came and oversowed cockle among the wheat, and
went his way. And when the blade was sprung up, and had brought
forth fruit, then appeared also the cockle. And the servants of
*Ecl. iv. 'Apologetics. Bruce, p. 465.
4 St. Matthew. W. C. Allen, Ixxvii. • Loc. cit., Ixxxiv.
'St. Matthew and the Parousia. THE CATHOLIC WORLD, January, 1918.
792 ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA [Mar.,
the goodman of the house coming, said to him : Sir, didst thou not
sow good seed in thy field ? Whence then hath it cockle ? And he
said to them : An enemy hath done this. And the servants said to
him: Wilt thou that we go and gather it up? And he said: No,
lest perchance, gathering up the cockle, you root up the wheat also
together with it. Suffer both to grow until the harvest, and in the
time of the harvest, I will say to the reapers: Gather up first the
cockle, and bind it into bundles to burn, but the wheat gather ye into
my barn."7
The thought of this parable is distinctly un- Jewish in character.
It does not accord with the main tenet of Palestinian eschatology,
sketched for the reader at the beginning of the theme. A Kingdom
which would suffer the wicked to grow up unmolested among the
good ; which would have its springtime of sowing, and its summer of
fruitage, before the autumn days of reaping came; which would
even leave its members exposed to " tribulation and persecution
because of their adherence to the word/'8 was not the Messianic
Reign of Jewish expectation. Not thus had the Palestinians con-
ceived of the Kingdom that was to be; not thus had they looked for-
ward to its peopling, or to the newness of earth and spirit which it
had been prophesied to bring. Where was the glory of its promise
and the thorough "purging of the floor?"9 More disconcerting
still to the listening Twelve was the thought that Jesus had the
disavowing of their own personal beliefs in mind, when he spoke of
the impatient servants, and gave the multitude to understand that
the New Kingdom was not to be likened to a harvester prematurely
reaping, but to a generous sower who went out to sow his seed,
regardless of the good or evil ground on which it fell. If this
comparison represented the nature of the Kingdom, the official
theology of Israel had misled its devotees. It had connected the
establishment of the Kingdom with the glow and glory of the Final
Harvest. It had associated the end of Israel with the last chapter
of human history, in the ordinary sense previously attaching to this
term. And yet here was Jesus, under the figure of a householder,
plainly saying no to this cherished expectation. The world was not
about to end ; it was about to enter on its Second Spring, instead.
Wondering if they had caught the true import of the parable,
the disciples waited until the throng of listeners fringing the shore
had been dismissed, and Jesus was alone with them in the house near
by — a circumstantial detail which could not possibly have been a
fMatt. xiii. 24-30. § Matt. xiii. 21. • Matt. iii. 12.
1918.] ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA 793
feature of the " Logia." The audience which Jesus had just ad-
dressed was evidently imbued with the prevailing views. They
were not of that kind " which hath, and to whom it shall be given,"
but rather of that other kind " which hath not, and from whom
even that which it hath shall be taken away."10 Their hearts had
grown gross and their ears become dull of hearing; the mysteries
of the Kingdom of Heaven it was not given to such as these to
know, and the Master was chary of utterance in their presence.
Surprised at the summariness of the Lord's manner in address-
ing the assembled multitude, the disciples asked Him in private for
an exposition less reserved. " Expound to us the Parable of the
Cockle,"11 they said to Him, and He complied with their request in
a way explicit enough to rouse the dullest hearing. We incorporate
the commentary12 entire, before proceeding to discuss its drift. " He
that soweth the good seed," said Jesus, " is the Son of Man. And
the field is the world.13 And the good seed are the sons of the King-
dom. And the cockle are the sons of the wicked one. And the
enemy that sowed them is the devil. And the harvest is the end of
the ' age.'14 And the reapers are the angels: Even as cockle there-
fore is gathered up, and burnt with fire, so shall it be at the end of
the * age.' The Son of Man shall send His angels, and they shall
gather out of His Kingdom all scandals and them that work iniq-
uity. And shall cast them into the furnace of fire: there shall be
weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then shall the just shine as the
sun in the Kingdom of their Father. He that hath ears to hear, let
him hear."
What is the period of time with which this commentary deals?
Is it the period of preparation prior to the establishment of the
Kingdom at " the end of the age?" Is the reference to history con-
fined to the brief tract between Christ's preaching and the fall of
Jerusalem — a matter of some two score years at most ? Is " the
world " during this preparatory period compared to a field, and the
end of the period " likened to a harvest?" Are the just to shine
forth in the Kingdom when disaster overtakes Israel, and are the
wicked to be ca*st out of it forthwith? Is that all the history sug-
10 Matt. xiii. 12; xxv. 29. "Matt. xiii. 36. "Mat. xiii. 37-43.
13 Matt. xiii. 38. & x6<J[XO<;.
aUVrlXsta TOQ alwvOC. We leave the phrase throughout in its original
form, " age " — without translating it into its Western equivalent : " world." The
originality of the Lord's teaching is more clearly seen when the language is not
Westernized, but studied as recorded.
794 ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA [Mar.,
gested, and have we here Palestinian eschatology thinly, if at all
disguised?
Professor Allen is of the opinion that this commentary does
not look to the continuance of history after the Jewish times.15 He
thinks that some Judaizing compiler has tampered with the Lord's
words and wrested them from their originally universal bearing to
the narrow thesis of a finally triumphant Judaism. In his opinion St.
Matthew wrote the "Sayings of the Lord " in the Hebrew tongue,
but not the present Gospel — an opinion based on a very doubt-
ful translation from Papias, which does not concern us here. What
does concern us, however, is Professor Allen's failure to show how
the text of the narrative can be made to fit his view. He does not
explain the surprise of the disciples; their request for a comment-
ary; the Lord's asking His hearers if they understood; the two ref-
erences to " newness of teaching," within which the commentary
is enclosed; or the statement of Jesus that the "just shall shine
forth in the Kingdom of their Father," not in the Kingdom of the
Son of Man.
Neither does he explain why he abandons his general thesis
so conveniently, to meet the difficulty put in his path by the present
parable. He holds that the phrase " Kingdom of Heaven " means
in St. Matthew, throughout, the eschatological Kingdom which is
to be inaugurated at the end of the Jewish age. But when, as here,
he finds the Kingdom described as a Sower, with the world for its
field, and the Fall, not the Springtime for its appointed harvest
season, he reads all these references to the future as if they con-
cerned the Jewish period of preparation only, and did not extend
beyond it into the actual life-period of the Kingdom itself. Apropos
of " the gathering of the wicked " out of a Kingdom which, on his
own admission, does not yet exist, he declares that this weeding
process will be possible when the Son of Man shall have come,
though he does not stop to tell us how tares and wheat may be
said to grow up together in a Kingdom that has had no past.
Reading the parable in accord with his eschatological theory of the
Kingdom, he dehistoricizes its drift completely, notwithstanding
the mute protest of the text. It is the natural consequence of an
attempt to fit fact to theory. The method should be reversed. So
let us set aside all preconceptions, forget for the moment all difficult
ties elsewhere occurring, and endeavor to approach the parable here
recorded, in its own native light and setting, to see whether it points
15 St. Matthew. W. C. Allen, pref. Ixx. and pp. 153, 154.
1918.] ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA 795
backwards to Palestinian eschatology, or forwards to an un-Jewish
period of history yet to be.
The point to be critically determined in the explanation of
the Cockle is what St. Matthew meant by " the end of the age."
On this the whole question of interpretation hinges ; into it the pith
and substance of the discourse refunds. The critical student will
notice that the Parable of the Cockle concerns itself throughout
with the nature of the " Kingdom of Heaven," a comparative der
scription of which it professes to give. Ample proof that this is
its topic may be had from the definitely stated subject with which
the parable begins : " The Kingdom of Heaven is likened to a man
that sowed good seed in his field."16 The very manner of wording
compels us to regard all that is said in the parable or the explanation,
as successive descriptions of the subject stated, to be read in no
other reference or light. The " end of the age " here in question
is, therefore, the end of the age of the " Kingdom of Heaven ;" a
statement manifestly implying that the New Kingdom is to have
a history before its consummation comes.
Circumstances show that this conclusion is rightful. If the
end of the New Kingdom and the end of Israel were understood to
coincide, we should expect no surprise on the part of the disciples
at the Lord's reaffirmation of the Palestinian expectancy; it was
what they had been led to believe from their childhood days. But
if, by any chance, they gathered the impression that the New King-
dom was to have a history, after the end of the Jewish age had
come, we should expect to find the disciples seeking further assur-
ance on a point so clearly at variance with existing belief. Which
happened ? The latter. The psychology of the incident, as recorded
by St. Matthew, is one which no Judaizing writer would ever have
spread so fully on his pages. Let us study it in detail.
Why did the disciples ask Jesus for an explanation of the
parable? The request was without reason, unless they had caught
something from His words, that was new and strange; and the chal-
lenging expression, " He that hath ears to hear, let him hear," is
a sure textual sign that no stale pronouncement of Jewry has come
forth from the Master's lips. Jesus was not wont to italicize points
of doctrine with which His hearers were familiar. Something out
of the ordinary had been said, to which He wished attention called.
What was it ? The announcement that at the end of the Jewish
age, at " the end " of the generation then living, the century then
M Matt. xiii. 24.
796 ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA [Mar.,
passing, the just would be made resplendent as the sun? Was this
the sense they gathered from the statement : " the harvest is the end
of the age?" Hardly ! This was a matter of doctrine too common-
place, an article of existing belief too familiar, to have escaped
instant understanding on its first utterance ; too trite a thing to have
been made the object of solemn emphasis on His part, or of renewed
inquiry on theirs. No Jew of the time required to be told twice
that " the end of the Jewish age " and " the beginning of the Mes-
sianic Kingdom " would witness a great change in the world-order,
or that the wicked would then be punished, and the just come
forth from their sepulchres to an everlasting life on earth. And
were that the meaning which the disciples caught when the Lord
said that " at the end of the age " He would " gather out of His
Kingdom all scandals and them that work iniquity," they never
would have wondered for a moment if they had understood aright,
nor have asked Him for a more open explanation of the Parable.
Its thought would have appeared to them instantly as a matter of
course; and the fact that this was not the direction which their re-
flections took compels us to look elsewhere for the explanation of
their conduct.
Was it the picture17 which the Lord so strikingly drew of the
servants of the householder, asking the Master if it was His will
that they should go at once to separate the cockle from the wheat,
only to be told that both should be suffered to grow up together
until the harvest time — was it this picture of the impatient servants
and the forebearing householder, that led them to see in the Lord's
words the extinction of Israel's hope for a speedy judgment of its
enemies? Everything suggests that this was the psychology of their
request. They understood the Lord to imply by the parable, that
the Judgment would come at the end of the Messianic Kingdom,
and not, as the Jews expected, soon after its opening days; they
understood Him to imply that the wicked were to survive in His
Kingdom, and grow up unmolested among the just, to its very
close. And if this was what they had gathered from the parable,
it was also what the Lord took special pains to emphasize in the
commentary, when He declared that the just would reign in glory,
not in His Kingdom, but in the Kingdom of " their Father,"18
when the end of His had come. " Then shall the just shine19 as the
" Matt. xiii. 27-30.
" Matt. xiii. 43. The meaning is explained in Matt. xxv. 34 : " Come, ye blessed
of My Father." » Wis. iii. 7, 8 ; Dan. xii. 3.
1918.] ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA 797
sun in the Kingdom of their Father. He that hath ears to hear, let
him hear."
What sense could there have been in this truistic employment
of the adverb " then " in the verse about the just, or in reciting
immediately after it the Lord's usual phrase for calling attention
to something new or corrective in His teaching, namely, " He that
hath ears to hear, let him hear "20 — what sense could there have
been in this manner of literary construction, if the author of the
First Gospel really thought that the Judgment was to come at the end
of the Jewish, and not at the end of the Messianic, Age? It would
have been the most idle case of stress and emphasis imaginable, if
these words referred to the end of Israel, or to a point of time not
far removed therefrom. Prodigal as St. Matthew was in his use
of the adverb " then," one cannot explain why he affixed it to the
prophetical quotation from Wisdom — " Then shall the just shine "•
unless it was to indicate deferral. The problem to be faced by one
who would take " the end of the age " in its restricted Jewish signifi-
cance resists solution at every turn. Not only the text, the whole
psychology of the situation described, places the thought of this
parable beyond successful reduction to the categories of Judaism.
The Parable of the Cockle, when thus approached through the
psychology of the Teacher and His audience, becomes one of the
best instances of the Christianizing of the disciples, recorded in the
New Testament. The author who incorporated this special ma-
terial ; the writer who took such pains to portray Jesus in the act of
un teaching the Twelve, " combined warp and weft without error in
the weaving." His purpose in employing the phrase " end of the
age " was to exemplify the Lord's manner of instructing His dis-
ciples, and not, as critics think, to Judaize the Master's word. It
matters not what the phrase meant in the literature of the times.
Set it down, if you will, as everywhere associated with the fate of
the Kingdom of Israel. That would still leave the question open
whether such were, or could be proved to be, its meaning here.
Could not the Lord employ a phrase that popularly had one mean-
ing, and reinvest it with another, by the simple process of associat-
ing it with a different subject, by the simple art of using it in a new
connection and relation? And is not that precisely what we find
Him doing in the parable under review ? And was it not His hav-
ing used the phrase in a context all-concerned with the " Kingdom
"Matt. xiii. 43. For parallel instances, see: Matt. xv. 10, 15, 16; and the
Parable of the Sower in St. Luke viii. 9.
798 ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA [Mar.,
of Heaven," that transported His hearers into a world view not
taught them by the Rabbis — a world view with all its bars and bar-
riers let down ? The disciples understood from the Parable of the
Cockle and the Lord's open comment upon it, that the Judgment
was indefinitely postponed. A world-wide sowing of the word
would take place before the trumpets blew to Judgment. There was
not the least thought in St. Matthew's mind that Judaism — purified
or otherwise — would eventually prove supreme.
The same phrase is used again, some verses further on, this
time in connection with the Parable of the Net,21 and in circum-
stances that recall its first employment. " The Kingdom of Heaven
is like unto a net cast into the sea, and gathering of every kind.
Which, when it was filled, they drew out, and sitting on the shore,
they chose out the good into vessels, but the bad they cast away.
So shall it be ' at the end of the age.' The angels shall go forth and
shall separate the wicked from among the just. And shall cast them
into the furnace of fire: there shall be weeping and gnashing of
teeth. Have ye understood all these things? They say to Him:
Yes. He said unto them : Therefore every scribe instructed in the
Kingdom of Heaven is like unto a man that is a householder, who
bringeth forth out of his treasure new things and old" 22
How shall we look upon the phrase in this new setting? Is
" the end of the age " here employed in its usual Jewish connotation,
and does it imply belief on the part of its employer, that the Judg-
ment would come within the lifetime of those addressed? Such
an interpretation is excluded by the description of the Kingdom of
Heaven as " a net that gathereth of every kind," one that was not
drawn forth from the sea until filled with the motley creatures of
its catch ; for it must be borne in mind that the Kingdom of Heaven,
in the admission of critics, is portrayed as future — a circumstance
which compels us to understand this Parable of the Net in an his-
torical sense, not. limited to the end of the Jewish times. In fact
this restriction of its scope is put completely out of consideration
by the Lord's question: Have ye understood all these things?23 to
which the listeners made answer in the affirmative.
What reason could the Lord have had for probing the intelli-
gence of His hearers, if He really shared their eschatological views,
and was merely rehearsing the theology of the Synagogue? What
11 Matt. xiii. 49. * Matt. xiii. 47-52.
23 Matt. xiii. 51. Compare St. Luke viii. 18 : "Look to it, how you hear." No
one announcing the familiar would have thus addressed his audience.
1918.] ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA 799
reason could He have had for identifying the believers in this the-
ology with those " who heard the word of the Kingdom and under-
stood it not," because they looked to freedom from " tribulation
and persecution " — a thing that was not to come ? And what reason
could St. Matthew have had for reporting the Lord's process of
questioning on this occasion, if he, too, believed that the world-
order was about to enter upon its final phase? Would the Lord
have stopped to inquire of His hearers if they had understood, or
would St. Matthew have troubled to record Him as so inquiring,
if the Palestinian view that the Judgment was to come at the end of
the Jewish, and the beginning of the Messianic era, had been in the
mind of either?
It stands neither to sense nor reason that they would. The
asking of the question is itself a proof that no old bread of doctrine
is being broken. Indications all point to the fact that the Lord is
here correcting current belief, denationalizing the notion of the
Kingdom, lengthening the perspective of His hearers, and actually
painting out of their minds that vainglorious racial picture of a
Messias reigning in state at Jerusalem, when the nations were no
more, and the sons of God exchanged their jubilance with the stars
of the morning.
Translate "end of the age " in these passages as " the consum-
mation of the Jewish times," and the two parables fill with an idle
insistency, and a still more idle process of questioning. Nay, the
wave of meaninglessness flows back into the previous chapter — the
Twelfth — where an explicit distinction is drawn between " this
age" — the Jewish — and "the age to come;"24 where the context
speaks of " One Who is greater than the Temple,"25 One who is
spurned of His own people,26 yet in Whom " the Gentiles shall
hope and have judgment shown them."27 Again, therefore, it is
an occasion to ask whether the meaning of a passage should be de-
termined from a particular phrase occurring in it, or whether the
phrase and its meaning should be approached and read through the
cumulative drift and circumstance of the entire passage itself.
Certainly, the obscurity of view, the unnaturalness of explanation,
the forced way of reading, to which those descend who pursue the
former method,28 decidedly impairs the likelihood of its being the
right one to follow.
St. Matthew uses the phrase " end of the age " five times ;29
" Matt. xiii. 32. M Matt. xii. 6. *• Matt. xii. 14.
11 Matt. xii. 21, 18. "St. Matthew. W. C. Allen, p. 153.
** Matt. xiii. 39, 40, 49; xxiv. 3; xxviii. 20.
8oo ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA [Mar.,
thrice in the passages just examined ; in the twenty- fourth chapter,
where it is put to the Saviour in the form of a question ; and in the
very last verse of his gospel : " Behold, I am with you all days
even unto the end of the age." We have not found the least con-
textual evidence in the first three instances of its use, that it either
had, or was understood to have, a restricted Jewish application. On
the contrary, the distinct impression created in each case by the
context was that the Lord had been at pains to put a new meaning,
a wider vista, into this current apocalyptic expression — an effort at
corrective teaching crowned completely with success, if we may
judge in the first instance by the question put the Master by the
disciples, and in the second, by the question which He put them
in turn. Contextual, not textual criticism, if we may so express
the distinction, is the sole fair-minded manner of approach to such
contingencies of interpretation as are here involved. So far, there-
fore, from affording circumstantial evidence of the Judaism still
surviving in the mind of St. Matthew; so far from furnishing a
telltale trace of the common expectation of the times, the use of
this expression, when contextually studied, denotes no more than
the raising of old terms to new powers of significance — a method
of teaching not unusual with the Saviour, and here expressively
recounted by one who had felt its disenchanting spell. What is
true of these three instances will be found to hold also of the others.
It is not likely that progressive teaching, such as is here recorded,
will eventually sink back into the stagnant levels of Palestinian
eschatology.
Nor should it prove in the least surprising that old phrases
were thus re-employed in a new significance. The mentality of the
Jewish people was peculiar ; it had to be addressed through the lan-
guage of prophecy, and in terms of prophecy fulfilled. New ideas
had to have their kinship shown with old, or go condemmed of
hearing. Apperception ruled the mental life and tested all the de-
liverances of religion. The Jewish people did not think, as we do,
of the world as ending; they thought of it rather as passing from its
present phase of anguish, injustice, and distress, into an idealized
form of existence which would " know the old no more ;" and they
thought of this great change as coming "at the end of the age," when
Israel, crushed suddenly to earth by the might of the nations, would
as suddenly rise from her ruin to the imperishable dignity of
world-dominion.
To teach new and distasteful truths to a people of such men-
1918.] ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA 801
tality, was a delicate task. The prophecies had all been read, as
implying wondrous changes when the Messianic Kingdom came;
and to say outright that these prophecies were not destined to ful-
fillment would have shocked the faith of Israel in the reliability of
God's word. What more natural and prudent method in such cir-
cumstances could there consequently have been than to retain the
phrase " end of the age," detach it from its former associations with
the Kingdom of Israel, and assert it anew of " the Kingdom of
Heaven," as the Lord did in the Parable of the Cockle? And if
we make the supposition, not groundless by any means, but well
supported by the evidence, that this was actually the Lord's manner
of procedure in the Parables of the Cockle and the Net, the phrase
" end of the age " becomes at once divested of its ordinary Jewish
meaning, and ceases to have any points of contact whatever with
the theology of the times. Nay, have we not the express word of
Jesus Himself, that this was the form which His teaching took
in the instance before us? Of what other import are the resumptive
words : " Therefore, every scribe, instructed in the Kingdom of
Heaven, is like to a man that is a householder, who bringeth forth
out of his treasure new things and old."30 These words are not
mere "editorial comment." They are in answer to the question:
" Have ye understood all these things ?" — and refer to the newly
acquired knowledge which was to distinguish the disciples of Him
" Who taught not as the Scribes,"31 and gave proof of it most
convincingly on the present occasion.
Nor is this the only textual warrant that the thought behind
the phrase is new. The whole section containing the explanation
of the Cockle is introduced by a prophetical quotation which pro-
claims the veiled novelty of the Messias' preaching to the public.
" I will open my mouth in parables ; I will utter things hidden from
the beginning (of the world)."32 This is immediately followed
by a description of His more open manner of speaking when with
those favored ones to whom it was given to know the mysteries
of the Kingdom of Heaven, hidden as these had been from Jewish
sight. Publicly He spoke in parables, but " privately He expounded
all things to His disciples," to quote St. Mark's summarized equival-
ent of this section.33 His method was one of hooded utterances and
plain, dictated alike by the political danger of outspokenness on
a Matt. xiii. 51, 52. w Matt, vii. 29.
M Matt. xiii. 35. The quotation is from Ps. Ixxvii. (Ixxviii.) 2. The second
part seems to be an independent translation from the Hebrew.
13 Mark iv. 34.
VOL. CVI. — 51
802 ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA [Mar.,
the subject of the Kingdom and by the inability of His hearers to
give ear effectually to any other manner of address.
The detailed picture of the Lord's public and private manner
of teaching, which the author of the First Gospel sets before us in
the thirteenth chapter, is also interesting on another account. It
furnishes the solution of that chronic puzzle of scholarship, why it
was that St. Matthew intercalated the commentary34 between two
groups of parables — the Cockle, the Mustard Seed, and the Leaven
on the one hand; the Hid Treasure, the Goodly Pearl, and the
Draw Net, on the other.35 There was no way more natural and
effective to bring out the newness of the Lord's teaching; to ex-
emplify His foretold " utterance of things hidden from the begin-
ning." And so we find St. Matthew singling out the explanation
of the Cockle as a salient instance of the Lord's private manner of
instruction. It came more pointedly under this head, if the purpose
was to distinguish it from the parabolic manner in which Jesus ad-
dressed the public ; and that is why the commentary does not follow
after the parable, but at some distance from it in the text. The new
sense attaching to the three parables that preceded and the three
that followed, would, in this arrangement of the material, be more
strikingly brought out, and the phrase, " end of the age," stand in
a new surrounding.
It is not necessary, therefore, after the manner of some critics,
to imagine this section mechanically put together, carpenter-fashion,
mortise into tenon. Nor is there any need for such extraneous
suppositions as " Logian influence," " conclusions of the editor,"
or " fondness for grouping things in threes," to account for the
position assigned the Lord's commentary in the text. The intro-
ductory quotation concerning the novelty of the Messianic teaching,
and the closing remark of Jesus about the new knowledge which the
" Scribes of the Kingdom of Heaven " were to have, reveal a didac-
tic purpose in the present collocation of the material, sufficient, of
itself, to account for the literary problem involved.
Occurring in this context of novelty, the phrase, " end of the
age," redeems itself completely from all taint of the thought of
Jewry, and shines with a fresh, unborrowed light. So far from
implying that Jesus, or St. Matthew, announced the Kingdom as
near, in the sense of its final consummation, the use of this ex-
pression simply indicates that both spoke in the terms of the times
for their transcending and overcoming. The particular mentality
M Matt. xiii. 37-43. " Matt. xiii. 24-33. 44-5°-
I9i8.] THE REVEALER 803
of the Jewish people made this manner of discourse imperative.
The new had perforce to seek expression under cover of the old.
The mass of considerations assembled in the course of this
study create the presumption, if they do not also establish the con-
viction, that the phrase, " end of the age," is predicated of the new
historical era of the " Kingdom of Heaven," not of Palestine and
the perishing letter of its law. The period of the rising Kingdom
was not confined to Jewish days. Israel and Christianity are not
presented in the Parable of the Cockle as running abreast to a
common doom. The angels are not said to go forth for the gath-
ering of the elect at the end of the Jewish era, but in the harvest
season of the new Kingdom of Heaven. " Then shall the just shine
as the sun in the Kingdom of their Father. He that hath ears to
hear, let him hear."
THE REVEALER.
BY CAROLINE GILTINAN.
TIME was I saw Christ's body
And could not understand
The thorn-crowned head, the bleeding- feet,
The nail that pierced each hand.
. ...
- ^ ' . ' - . . "> •
But Life came and then I knew:
Oh, blood from God's opened side,
I know and shall forever know
How Love is crucified.
THE MYTH OF SOULLESS WOMAN.
BY CHARLES F. AIKEN, S.T.D., A.B.
T is the spirit of true culture to reject what is false
and attain to an ever larger measure of truth. Not
a few popular beliefs of former generations are now
rightly classed as myths. But there are some that, like
cleverly counterfeited coin, still pass current as genu-
ine articles of exchange. They are chiefly such as make a strong
impression on the imagination. Si non e vero, e ben trovato, runs
an Italian saying. Not always is it easy for the public mind to
throw aside as spurious an alleged event that stands out sharply by
its very strangeness. It may not lightly be removed from the
cabinet of historical curiosities.
A good instance of this may be found in the myth that in the
early ages of the Church there was a widespread tendency to deny
to woman the possession of a human soul.
This myth was given publicity by the Encyclopedists of France,
who eagerly seized on everything that could be turned to the dis-
credit of the Christian religion, and it has proved a sweet morsel
for many writers of later generations. It has cropped up fre-
quently in recent times, being welcomed by more than one advo-
cate of the feminist movement, to give point to the charge of in-
justice to woman in the early Church.
Like most popular myths, the story of the denial to woman of
a human soul has been subject to many variations. Bayle, in his
Dictionnaire Critique, article Geddicus, wrote : " What surprises me
more, is to see that the question was raised in a council whether
woman was a human creature, and that a favorable decision was
reached only after long discussion."
Somewhat similar is the statement of Charlotte Perkins
Gilman, in her book, Women and Eonomics, published in Boston in
1905. On page thirty-eight, she says: "In some nations, religion
is said to be a masculine attribute exclusively, it being even ques-
tioned whether women have souls. An early Christian council set-
tled that important question by vote, fortunately deciding that they
had. In a Church whose main strength has always been derived
from the adherence of women, it would have been an uncomfortable
reflection not to have allowed them souls."
1918.] THE MYTH OF SOULLESS WOMAN 805
In the Revolution Franqaise of October 14, 1908, may be found
the statement from the pen of a certain L. Abensour : " It is said
that the Council of Macon decided that woman had a soul only by
the plurality of a few votes."
At a meeting held in Richmond, early in December, 1911, in
favor of the movement to extend the suffrage to women, one of
the speakers, a graduate of Bryn Mawr, referred to a council of
the Church held in southern France to decide the question whether
woman had a soul, and she greatly amused her audience by declaring
that an affirmative answer was reached by a plurality of one vote.
Rivaling this version in piquancy is the account given some
years ago in an address to the graduating class of the Girls' High
School, Philadelphia. The speaker informed the young aspirants
after higher knowledge that, as late as the fifteenth century, there
was held in the south of France a council of learned prelates who
for two days discussed. the question whether woman had a soul, and
at last gave this equivocal decision — that woman was a human being.
More striking still is the version of the myth that tells how in
those dark days of feminine suffering and repression, woman was
heartlessly denied a human soul. As long ago as 1841, Aime-
Martin, in book one, chapter six, of his work, l'£ducation des Meres
de Famille, declared : " In times past, yet not so very remote, grave
doctors denied them (women) a soul.... They go so far as to
doubt the existence of woman's soul, and the theologians them-
selves, in their confusion of mind, seem for the moment to forget
that Jesus Christ derived His humanity from His Mother."
In harmony with this, is the more explicit statement of Bebel in
his bitterly anti-Christian work, Woman and Socialism. On page
forty-five of the German edition of the year 1894, he says: " The
Council of Macon, which in the sixth century debated the question
whether woman has a soul or not, pronounces likewise against the
view favorable to woman."
In his article, Notes on the Intelligence of Woman, in the Atlan-
tic Monthly of December, 1915, Mr. W. L. George, drawing his
inspiration from Herr Bebel, writes : " Men have been found to
deny woman an intellect .... They have gone further, and I seem to
remember that in the Middle Ages an oecumenical council denied
her a soul." It is unfortunate that Mr. George's memory should
have failed him to the extent of confounding the Council of Macon
with an oecumenical council, but it cannot be denied that through
this slip of memory the story becomes more racy than ever.
806 THE MYTH OF SOULLESS WOMAN [Mar.,
These are the principal variants of the soulless woman myth.
And myth it is, in all its forms unhistorical and untrue, despite the
fact that it has so often found a place in serious writings and lec-
tures. It rose, whether carelessly or maliciously, from an incident
said to have taken place on the occasion of the second Council of
Macon, which was held in the year 585. This Council was convened,
not for the alleged purpose of deciding whether women have souls,
but in order to further the cause of Christian justice and charity in
those times of turbulence and oppression. The proceedings of the
assembly have been preserved in several collections of the councils
of the Church. Perhaps the most accessible is the scholarly French
edition by H. Leclercq of Hefele's Counciliengeschichte. In the
third volume, first part of this Histoire des Condles may be found
the acts of the Council. Among the forty-three bishops who took
part, were the distinguished Metropolitans, Sulpitius of Bourges,
Bertram of Bordeaux, Evantius of Vienne, Prsetextatus of Rouen,
Artemius of Sens, and Priscus, Patriarch of Lyons, who presided.
The twenty canons drawn up by the Council bespeak the dignity,
earnestness, and highly religious tone of the discussions. Espe-
cially interesting is the benevolent legislation in favor of the weak
and oppressed. On Sundays and holydays, slaves are to be free
from compulsory labor. The right of asylum is insisted on.
Slaves freed from bondage, in the church are placed under the
protection of the bishop. It is in his presence that every discussion
must take place in which their right to freedom is called in question.
Far from being indifferent to woman's welfare, the bishop is de-
clared to be the protector of the widow and the orphan. To safe-
guard their interests against the rapacity of evil-minded men, civil
judges are forbidden under pain of excommunication to judge
cases of widows and orphans without having first notified the
bishop, who in turn must see to it that his representative, priest or
archdeacon, is present at the trial. The penalty of anathema is to
be laid on powerful courtiers who may seek to plunder them.
It is hardly in a council of this kind, so high in its aims, so
pronounced in its defence of widows and orphans, that one would
expect to find a puerile discussion whether or not woman has a
soul. In fact, there is absolutely no trace of such a discussion in
the recorded acts of the Council. How, then, did it get the name
of having seriously treated this question ? Simply and solely from
the distortion of a story told of a bishop of this Council by St.
Gregory of Tours, the Christian Herodotus of the Church in Gaul.
1918.] THE MYTH OF SOULLESS WOMAN 807
The incident, related in the twentieth chapter of the eighth book,
of his History of the Franks, runs as follows : " There was in this
synod one of the bishops who said that woman could not be called
a man. But after the bishops had explained the matter, he acqui-
esced in their view; for the sacred book of the Old Testament
teaches that, when in the beginning, God created man, He said,
' male and female He created them, and He called their name
Adam; ' which means man of earth. It was by this name He called
the woman as well as the man, declaring each to be man. Then, too,
the Lord Jesus Christ is called the Son of Man, because He is the
Son of a virgin, a woman. It was to her He said, as He was on the
point of turning water into wine, ' Woman, what business is it of
Mine and thine?' and so forth. The case was made good by many
other proofs also, and set at rest."1
From this story it appears that, at the second Council of
Macon, a single bishop ventured the statement that the term, man,
could not rightly be applied to a woman, Let us grant, for the
moment, what we shall see to be very improbable, that the bishop
denied to woman a human soul. What was the attitude of the bish-
ops assembled? We are told that they all promptly challenged
his statement, gave him many reasons for the opposite view, and
brought him to their way of thinking. There was no debate on
the question, for the bishops were all against him. This is why
no mention of the incident was made in the acts of the Council.
It was not a subject for deliberation and discussion, to be finally
determined by vote. It was a mere incident in the general exchange
of views. It raised no serious difficulty and was quickly set at rest.
It is on the basis of this story that the myth of soulless woman
has taken form and imposed itself on the credulity of a goodly
number of writers. Is it not surprising that, in an age so critical
as ours, we should be gravely told by cultured writers and lecturers
that there was a time when the very leaders of Christian thought
were not sure that woman had a human soul, or that a soul was
actually denied to woman by an oecumenical council of the Church,
or that the question was raised in the Council of Macon and decided
in favor of woman only after long discussion, or that the Council
was convened for the express purpose of settling the mooted ques-
tion, and that it arrived at an affirmative answer by a plurality of
one vote !
It would be a mistake to ascribe the spread of this myth en-
*Migne, Pair. Lot. vol. Ixxi., c. 462.
8o8 THE MYTH OF SOULLESS WOMAN [Mar.,
tirely to bad faith and malice. It is true that its baseless character
has been amply set forth by Gorini, Kurth, de Riancey, Chavot,
Vacandard, Leclercq, and other scholars. But these refutations,
being in French, may well have escaped the notice of our misin-
formed English and American brethren. It is only of late that the
attention of English readers has been called to this popular error.
In these days of busy writing, few authors on popular subjects take
the pains to trace the authority for an important statement to its
reliable source.
Thus far it has been taken for granted that the offending
bishop in the Council of Macon expressed the opinion that woman
did not have a human soul. But it is by no means sure that this
individual held so low a view of woman. The words of the nar-
rator, " dicebat mulierem hominem non posse vocitari," he said that
a woman could not be called a man, might of themselves, it is true,
be made to mean that woman was not a human person, that she
was to te classed, not with man but with the lower animals. But
this view is so silly and so un-Christian that it ought not to be read
into the words if they are easily open to a more rational meaning.
Now there is another meaning that readily presents itself, one that
is more creditable to the bishop's common sense, one that is in har-
mony with his Christian faith. According to this interpretation,
the bishop's difficulty was one, not of feminine psychology, but of
grammatical propriety. He could not see how a woman could be
entitled to the masculine designation, man. He was a purist, and
objected to giving the term, man, the same extension as the term,
human being. In his view the masculine noun, man, could not
rightly be predicated of the female portion of mankind, for which
portion only a feminine designation was proper. In questioning
woman's right to be called a man, he thus had no intention of deny-
ing her a human soul.
This interpretation has the support of Gorini, Kurth, Vacan-
dard, Leclercq, and other able scholars. Perhaps some skeptical
reader may deem it far-fetched, disingenuous. But let us examine
a couple of parallel instances which. I have culled from the daily
press. In the Boston Herald of December 5, 1913, is a news item
from Chicago, under the heading, Women Election Judges. In
it we read : " The right of women to sit as judges and clerks of
elections here next spring will be challenged, it was made known
today, from both Republican and Democratic sources .... One
objection brought forward is that the law states that judges and
I9i8.] THE MYTH OF SOULLESS WOMAN 809
clerks must be ' men of good character.' ' It is plain that this
objection was to be based on the ground that, in legal phraseology,
the :erm, man, is exclusive of the concept, woman, or, to use the
words of the bishop at Macon, a woman cannot be called a man.
Another instance, still more curious and more striking, may be
found in an editorial of the same daily of December 16, 1913, under
the caption, Women, not Persons. It runs : "Coincident with the
unwillingness of the Massachusetts electorate to allow women to
become notaries public, comes the refusal of the British high court
to admit a woman, a graduate of Girton College, Cambridge, to the
bar, because of her sex. The case had been in the courts for some
time, and reached its final resting place on appeal. The court
adhered to a decision laid down in 1843 that ' a woman is not a
person,' adding chivalrously that ' the applicant was undoubtedly of
superior education and intelligence to many males, but that this had
nothing to do with the case.' ' The editorial closes with these
words of comment : " Some day, in the not too dim future, school
teachers of history will humorously refer to the early part of the
twentieth century, when the world held itself civilized, and ' women
were not persons/ '
When the politicians of Chicago argued that the phrase, " men
of good character," could not be applied to women, and when the
English judge insisted on the legal dictum that " a woman is not a
person," neither could rightly be charged with having denied to
woman a human soul, though their words by themselves might be
susceptible of this meaning. Is it right, then, to visit with mingled
feelings of indignation and contempt the poor bishop at Macon, on
the ground that when he said a woman should not be called a man,
he must have meant that she did not have a human soul?
The application of the term, homo, man, to a female person
was not altogether unknown in those days, and, while called in
question by the bishop, had a certain sanction in the rare usage of
classic times. The grammarian, Charisius, who lived in the fourth
century, lays down that the words, heres, parent, and
homo, may be predicated of a woman, but always in the masculine
gender. St. Gregory of Tours, in his History of the Franks, book
nine, chapter twenty-six, does not disdain to speak of Queen
Ingeberge as a man: " Accessi, fateor, vidi hominem timentem
Deum, I came up, and let me say, I saw a man who had the fear of
God." A classic example may be found in Cicero's Oration for
Cluentius, 70 : " Mater cujus ea stultitia est, ut earn nemo hominem
8io THE MYTH OF SOULLESS WOMAN [Mar.,
.... appellare possit, a mother of such stupidity that no one could
call her a man."
It was against this usage of the word, homo, not against the
view that woman had a soul, that the bishop ventured to speak.
The very context, when closely examined, does but serve to make
this point clear, and thus to exonerate him from the imputation of
gross stupidity. A reliable indication of what he had in mind may
be found in the way which the assembled bishops took to refute
his statement. Had he meant to say that woman did not possess a
human soul, they would naturally have resorted to proofs whereby
woman's claim to equality with man in this respect, would be vin-
dicated. They would most likely have asked why women as well
as men were baptized and admitted to other sacraments, the very
purpose of which is the sanctification of the soul. They would have
pointed out that among the saints and martyrs venerated as enjoy-
ing the bliss of heaven, were many souls of holy women. They
would have cited texts of Scripture attributing to woman a soul.
The opening verse of the canticle of the Virgin Mary, so familiar to
all from its daily use in the Church liturgy, could hardly have failed
to suggest itself : " My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit
hath rejoiced in God my Saviour." Proofs like these were ready
to hand, easily suggested by the common forms of liturgical wor-
ship. Now, none of these proofs were employed, but rather just
such as were suited to meet the objection that woman, on account
of her sex, could not rightly be called man. The bishops argue
that, since Holy Writ calls woman man, it must be right to give her
that appellation. According to the Old Testament, God created
man, male and female, and called them both man ; and in the Gospel
Christ, born of a virgin, is called the Son of man.
Enough has been said to show how utterly untrue are the
many forms of the story that would impute to the fathers of the
second Council of Macon a contemptuous attitude towards woman.
Not only is it untrue that the bishops in council denied, or called in
question, the fact that women have souls, but there is every reason
to acquit of this imputation the bishop who was shown to be in
error. We have to come down to the radical psychology of our
own day to find a serious denial to woman of a soul.
THE GLORY OF PADUA.
BY JOSEPH FRANCIS WICKHAM.
O every lover of beauty and of art, the very name of
Italy evokes dreams of the past, dreams for the
future. Into this dreamland of retrospect and of
prospect war entered as a nightmare. The haunting
terror of Louvain, of Ypres, of Arras, of Rheims
hovered over Italy until at last it has claimed as its prey treasures
of Ancona, Ravenna, of Venice and now of Padua. In vain has the
world sorrowed and protested ; in vain has the Father of the faith-
ful grieved over these " bitter wounds to his heart." In July, 1915,
he appealed several times to Austria to spare the churches and mon-
uments of the Italian coast towns. In spite of the Emperor's
assurance that all structures not used for military purposes would
be protected, the attacks continued until, in September, 1916, after
the repeated raids on Venice, Pope Benedict was forced sadly to
admit that " the paternal solicitude which, as you know, we have
not failed to interpose in order to prevent such disasters, has not had
the effect which Our heart so keenly hoped." Nevertheless " his
paternal heart " did not fail to protest again when Padua shared the
fate of Venice. In spite of all, a heedless, needless vandalism con-
tinues to despoil future generations of their rightful heritage; to
bury beyond all hope of resurrection the priceless creations of the
past. What will be left when the War is over? Yet when the War
is over you will go to Venice again, that wonderful city more than
ever endeared by her scars and her sorrows to the heart of the
world. There will be no air raids then to mar your joy on the
Grand Canal, no impending doom to threaten your ease before St.
Mark's, only the criminal thumb-print which cannot be erased.
Venice will be peace again, and all the province of Venetia, beauti-
ful still, yet never just the same. Whether you come from the west,
from Milan and Verona; or from the south, from Florence and
Bologna ; whichever way you come, you will pass a delightful city,
an old town famous in the long ago, now famous again, thanks to
the German courtesy of war. Do not pass it by; stop a while to
offer your sympathy and pay your meed of praise. Here is Padua,
shorn of some of her glory, but lovely still, standing in your path,
812 THE GLORY OF PADUA [Mar.,
bidding you enter her streets, and look upon her domes, and think
of her saint and ponder her old university days when learning was
in bloom. " Come you from Padua? " queried the Duke of Venice.
The same duke, who asked for Nerissa's credentials, would have
you pause at Padua, and so, I believe, you will.
One is not altogether prepared today to believe that after the
fall of Troy, in the year 1184 before Christ, Antenor, escaping
from Grecian hosts, came hither and founded the walls of Padua.
A more authentic historian than Virgil tells that in the year 302
before Christ, Padua battled against Cleomenes of Sparta, and that
she was with Rome at Cannae. In the year forty-five before Christ
she was enlisted among Rome's colonies. When the empire came,
Padua's period of magnificence bloomed into full flower. In
splendor, in riches, in population, she was second in Italy only to
Rome. But in 408, AJaric was her evil genius, as Attila was in
452, and she came to sorrow; and she bowed before the Lombard
king in 60 1. Building her walls again, she had attained prominence
when the deliverer Charlemagne came, but again and again through
the ninth century she bore the blows of war. In the year 1087 she
became a free commune, with the approval of Henry IV. In Bar-
barossa's reign, she was among the most active in the formation of
the Lombard League.
In the thirteenth century Padua had her hands full for long
distressful years with the monster Ezzelino. After his death in
1259 came fifty years of peace. In 1318, after internal quarrels
and wars with neighboring cities, Padua made Jacopo Carrara lord.
Then came a long period of clashing rivalry between the Carraresi
and the Veronese Scaligeri, in which the Paduan family was in the
end successful. In the passages with Venice, and especially in the
war of Chioggia in 1378, in which the Carrara aided Genoa, Venice
was quite victorious. Francesco Novello in 1388 yielded to the
Visconti of Milan, but escaping from prison, recaptured Padua in
1390. In 1403, he took Brescia and Verona. His efforts to take
Vicenza drew Venice to the battle line again. The island Republic
now destroyed the Carrara rule, putting to death Francesco and his
father, and annexing Padua to her domains. Thus did Padua be-
come a part of Venice's great dominion on the mainland. And
under her rule she flowered anew, and continued to send
the fame of her saint and her university even to the uttermost cor-
ners of Europe.
When you come to Padua, you come to a city basking among
1918.] THE GLORY OF PADUA 813
gardens and vineyards which look longingly all the sunny day
toward the far away Euganean hills. Outside the old walls, the doz-
ing oxen drag their carts in the leisurely fashion of the Middle Ages.
Within the city no wondrous hurry has fastened upon her life, but
a calm and contented air settles over the town, as if she were mind-
ful of noble accomplishment and thoughtful of a better past. It is
the aroma of those things which have been that you breathe, as you
walk through the narrow streets; it is with a love for them fully
kindled that you will come home each day at eventide, a little tired,
a little dusty, but glad and reverent of Padua.
For most people Padua means St. Anthony. And perhaps this
is right, for it is a rare man who can so link his name with a city
that a later age will sound their syllables as a single word. So
there will be nothing quite so becoming in Padua as to visit his
church before all else. " II Santo," it is called, this large, striking
edifice which the Paduans began in 1232 and finished in two hun-
dred years. For " the Saint" it was that they built the huge walls
and reared the columns and threw aloft those seven shining domes.
Here, in Christmas week of 1917, a bomb left its ineffaceable im-
print on the bronze doors. But it is the Saint, much more than the
church, that gains the mastery of one's thoughts as one lingers on
the Piazza.
St. Anthony of Padua was born in Lisbon. The Paduans, to
be sure, will admit of no paradox in this simple statement of fact,
for did he not choose Padua as a place to die ? For this reason, and
for others, he is not St. Anthony of Lisbon. But it is the Portu-
guese city that remembers the year of his birth, 1195, and it was
she that schooled him and saw him join the ranks of the Canons
Regular of St. Augustine in the monastery of St. Vincent,
and watched him seclude himself in their monastery at Coim-
bra, where he became very learned; it was Lisbon, in the
person of Don Pedro, who gave him his first zeal for the Franciscan
Order.
It happened in this way. In 1220 Don Pedro brought home
from Morocco the relics of five members of the Franciscan Order
who had died martyrs. Straightway was born in the heart of An-
thony a wish to yield up his life for God, and with it a yearning for
the poverty and hardship of the followers of St. Francis. So it was
that in this year, with the consent of the Prior, he withdrew from
his old associates, and taking the name of the patron of the mon-
astic life, entered the Franciscan fold.
814 THE GLORY OF PADUA [Mar.,
With no delay, Anthony now set forth for Africa to preach
the Gospel. And perhaps the wished-for martyrdom would have
come, had not an illness seized him which made him take ship for
Spain. But Spain was to offer him no harbor, as the winds were
boisterous and powerful and carried the ship to Messina. At this
port news came to Anthony that St. Francis was in Assisi for the
purpose of holding a general chapter of the Order. Thither went
Anthony, and on seeing his leader, wished to stay near him and
breathe more fully the Franciscan spirit. His wish was granted,
and he was sent to a hermitage near Forli. In this peaceful retreat
of Montepaolo, Anthony remained for some time, happy and con-
tent. And one day it happened that several Franciscans and
Dominicans were come to Forli for ordination. Through some
oversight no one had been appointed to preach, and as no one pres-
ent seemed desirous of delivering a sermon without preparation, the
superior told Anthony to speak whatever God might inspire him to
say. To the great surprise of all, Anthony began to preach on the
Scriptures in a manner that displayed a most profound learning.
From that day his light was no longer to be hidden from the eyes of
men. For St. Francis in 1224 commissioned him to teach theology
to the brethren; and he taught in Bologna, Montpellier and
Toulouse.
But it was as an orator, rather than as a teacher, that his great-
est work was done. In the seven years between 1224 and 1231 in
Italy and France he combated the vices of tyranny, luxury, and
avarice, with an eloquence that compelled the most unwilling to
listen. Against the heretics of the day, the Cathares and Patarines,
he enjoyed remarkable success. And his zeal, his learning, and his
eloquence were assisted by the gift of miracle. On one occasion
he destroyed the effect of poisoned food by the sign of the cross ; on
another he preached to the fishes of the river Brenta near Padua;
at Limoges in France he preserved his listeners in the public
square from the rainstorm; and there are many other authentic
miracles of his working.
Returning to Italy from France in 1226, he was soon elected
Minister Provincial of Emilia. This office he resigned in 1230, and
came to Padua to the monastery he himself had founded. He was
free now to devote more of his time to preaching, and he uttered
his impassioned sermons to the Paduans with untold success. Dur-
ing his sermons in the Lent of 1231 it was no uncommon occurrence
for thirty thousand penitent souls to listen to his pleadings. A
I9i8.] THE GLORY OF PADUA 815
wave of Christian living swept over Padua that made the city a
sweet fragrance in the forecourts of heaven.
These Lenten sermons were to be his last effort. After Easter,
he returned to Campo San Pietro, near Padua, and while there fell
ill of a severe malady. The brethren removed him to Padua, and
here on the thirteenth of June, 1231, he died. His thirty-six years
of sainted life the whole world had seen, and so, amid universal
gladness, Gregory XI. wrote his name on the Church's calendar of
saints before he had been gone a year.
Thus, as one lingers a bit before the church of " // Santo,"
does one call up in a flash of memory the old life of seven hundred
years ago, when St. Anthony like a ray of sunlight passed through
the world. He is the whole world's saint now, the saint of lost
things and nigh-lost souls, but it is here in this Italian city that in
a large measure he won his way to glory; and the world, sharing
in full his watch and ward, is content for aye to hail him as the
wonder-worker of Padua.
Within the great church there is much beauty. Above all in
preciousness is the high altar, designed by Donatello, and still
adorned with his original sculptures; and of vying magnificence is
the marble screen of the choir, of the same sculptor's designing.
Not far from the altar is Riccio's bronze candelabrum, an object of
rare craftsmanship. There are the tombs of Venetian generals and
the tomb of Cardinal Pietro Bembo ; two holy-water basins of much
loveliness ; the fourteenth century frescoes of Altichiero and Jacopo
d'Avanzo, of Verona, in the Cappella San Felice; and there is the
Renaissance Cappella del Santo, beneath the altar of which lie the
bones of the saint. Besides the fatal injury to the bronze doors,
some of the paintings of the church were scratched and torn by the
concussion from the bombs of the German air raid; the rose win-
dow and some of the Renaissance stained-glass shattered, and the
tomb of the Saint barely escaped desecration.
Among the more beautiful tombs to be seen in the church is that
of General Gattamelata, leader of the army of the Venetian Re-
public; outside in the Piazza the general sits on horseback in the
bronze of Donatello. It is one of the great equestrian statues of
the world, and is particularly interesting from the fact that from
the fall of Rome to Donatello's time, no bronze equestrian group
had been executed in Italy. In Venice were Nero's horses, brought
from Constantinople; the statue of Marcus Aurelius was Rome's
solitary boast; upon only these two could Donatello model his
816 THE GLORY OF PADUA [Mar.,
Gattamelata bronze of 1453. Fortunately, in the earlier days of
the Great War the Paduans removed it from its base to a place of
safety. It is probable that this alone saved it to the world, as the
base has suffered damage from the enemy bombs.
You cannot stay long in Padua without becoming aware that
the city is brimful of art. You will see Titian frescoes in the
Scuola del Santo; frescoes of Altichiero and Jacopo d'Avanzo in the
Cappella San Georgio; the fine altarpiece, "Martyrdom of Santa
Giustina " by Paolo Veronese in the large church of Santa Gius-
tina ; frescoes by Titian and Palma Vecchio and others in the Scuola
del Carmine (these have been saved, although the altar near by was
strewn with wreckage by the bombs and the dome of the church
fired) ; the splendid frescoes of Mantegna and the tombs of two of
the Carrara family in the Augustinian church of the Eremitani;
and, perhaps the most exquisite thing in all Padua, Giotto's fres-
coes of scenes in the life of Our Lord and His Mother in the Chapel
of Madonna dell' Arena, a chapel Enrico Scrovegno, a rich Paduan,
built and dedicated to the Blessed Lady, in 1303. These thirty-
eight frescoes executed in 1306 in this chapel, which stands in an
oval mulberry garden in the old Roman amphitheatre, one can count
as among the very best works that have come down from Giotto's
hand.
In the centre of the town is the Renaissance Cathedral, its
facade now torn away by the aerial bombs of German raiders. Not
far away stands the Palazzo della Ragione, a building completed in
1219. It is an immense structure, noted especially for its great
hall, which is two hundred and seventy-three feet long, ninety feet
wide, and eighty feet high ; it was planned and roofed as it now is in
1406. The hall contains several interesting objects, among them
being two huge Egyptian statues and a wooden horse, the model of
Donatello's statue of Gattamelata.
Close by stands the University building. It is commonly called
// Bo, after an earlier structure which was near a tavern bearing the
sign of an ox. Like its sister in Bologna, the University of Padua
was once very famous throughout Europe, drawing its students
from every nation. It dates from the year 1222, when many of the
students of Bologna left the Emilian town and came here, and even
previous to this Padua had professors of law. Not long after its
foundation the University entered a period of decadence, owing
mainly to the tyranny of Ezzelino. But with the peaceful days ush-
ered in with his death in 1259, the University saw a wonderful
1918.] THE GLORY OF PADUA 817
revival. The Council of Lyons in 1274 placed it on an equal foot-
ing with Bologna and Paris. About this time its School of Law
became renowned, and from the fourteenth century the Medical
School attracted widespread attention. The Faculty of Theology
was organized in 1363.
As you walk about the beautiful colonnades which Sansovino
erected in 1552, and look upon the names and shields of students of
the long years gone, you will catch through the vision of the past
the gleam of learning's light when Padua was a name to conjure by.
Perhaps the serious-minded chronicler of the times will look upon
the statue of the learned Elena Lucrezia Piscapia, who won Padua's
doctor's degree before she died in 1684, and remember the more
modern times when women could not hope for degrees in universi-
ties of later origin. But in Padua, in Bologna, in Salerno, in Italy
as a whole, the intellect of woman has never been disqualified, and
learned women have filled many a university chair with distinction.
There is much more in Padua; there must be in a city which
remembers the student days of Tasso and the visits of Petrarch and
the tarrying of the writer of the Divina Commedia. And you will
do right well if you bask for long in those ancient days that glow so
wondrously when you really penetrate the veil. But brief or
lengthy your stay, you will be repaid for your visit to this wonder-
ful old city, which lies dreaming in the valley, dreaming of her days
of glory in the treasured romance of the past. And then you will
pass on, content : content, indeed, for the palace gates and golden
towers of Venice are just ahead of you, waiting for your coming
to the islands of delight.
VOL. cvi.— 52
Boohs*
A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLAND. By Gilbert K. Chesterton.
New York: John Lane Co. $1.50 net.
Mr. Chesterton, as all the world knows, is both by instinct and
conviction a thorough believer in the rights and the rule of the
people, that vast and vague collection of folk who constitute the
bulk of a nation. Out of that instinct and conviction he has written
the present work, which lays its emphasis on the various crises of
the English democracy. The story may be summarized by saying
that the people after rising slowly, from slavery through serfdom
to peasant proprietorship, and the happy institution of the guilds,
began by reason of the greed and increasing power, and especially
the treachery of the aristocrats to decline till finally they reached
our unlovely modern condition of industrial dependence on the one
side and capitalistic despotism on the other.
That the present book is not a history in the usual sense of the
term, the reader will have no difficulty in discovering and the author
would be the first to admit; rather is it a commentary on history,
and indeed such is the nature of the tale and its telling that for its
right appreciation a previous knowledge of the English legend is a
necessity. But there are any number of works which can give us
names and dates and reigns and battles; here we have a rarer and
more living phenomenon — a free ranging over disputed ground, a
sharp attack on old prejudices, a convincing disproval of ancient
calumny, a new light on vexed issues. That the English Reforma-
tion was not entirely the affair of light and leading, nor the Church
altogether the monstrous engine of oppression, they are sometimes
supposed, Mr. Chesterton implies with considerable point and vigor ;
and his early remarks on the monastic establishments, the guilds,
and the barons, and his later animadversions on the workhouse, the
competitive system, and the aristocratic oligarchy of modern Eng-
land, whose " glory did not come from the Crusades but from the
Great Pillage," are the virile utterances of a Christian thinker and
a wise lover of his country.
The present work has of course its fair proportion of the wit and
brilliance, the originality and sturdy independence we are accus-
tomed to associate with its author ; nor do we look in vain for those
1918.] NEW BOOKS 819
characteristic outbursts of eloquence in which he has few contem-
porary rivals. Indeed, it is the defect of many of our most valued
and artistic writers of today that they have become too refined for
rhetoric. But there is rhetoric and rhetoric, and when we meet
with it in such a passage as the following, there can be no question
of its validity or its power:
"He in whose honor all had been said and sung stirred, and
stepped across the border of Belgium. Then were spread out before
men's eyes all the beauties of his culture and all the benefits of his
organization; then we beheld under a lifting daybreak what light
we had followed and after what image we had labored to refashion
ourselves. Nor in any story of mankind has the irony of God
chosen the foolish things so catastrophically to confound the wise.
For the common crowd of poor and ignorant Englishmen, because
they only knew that they were Englishmen, burst through the filthy
cobwebs of four hundred years and stood where their fathers stood
when they knew that they were Christian men. The English poor,
broken in every revolt, bullied in every fashion, long despoiled of
property, and now being despoiled of liberty, entered history with
a noise of trumpets, and turned themselves in two years into one
of the iron armies of the world. And when the critic of politics
and literature, feeling that this war is after all heroic, looks around
him to find the hero, he can point to nothing but the mob."
THE WORLD'S DEBATE, AN HISTORIC DEFENCE OF THE
ALLIES. By the Rev. William Barry, D.D. New York:
Hodder & Stoughton. $1.25 net.
Dr. Barry's latest war book is an historic defence of the Allies.
He proves his thesis by episodes of history, dating from 1649, UP
to the struggle of today. He shows in conflict two theories of state-
polity, one striving to give man a voice in his own government, the
other advocating the absolute sway of autocratic power in the state.
The one rose out of Catholic England, the other sprung from Prot-
estant Prussia. These two ideas, owing to the expansion of Euro-
pean civilization, are now found all over the face of the earth. For
these, the world is at war.
Dr. Barry sets out to show this conflict in modern history, and
to prove that the Allies are carrying on the traditions of the Chris-
tian concept of the state, in which the absolute state has no place;
but the accumulation of facts showing the rise and conflict of the two
theories, has left too little room for the development of the second
820 NEW BOOKS [Mar.,
theme. Only by piecing together the opening chapters and the final
one, and by keeping well in mind the origin of the ideas mooted,
does one perceive his point.
In the Middle Ages and before, the Roman Church maintained
the rights of the subject against the despotic powers of the Teu-
tonic rulers, impersonating the absolute state. The Renais-
sance principles swept aside this democratic tendency and Prot-
estant rulers exemplified their principles in the Jiis Reformandi, and
the axiom " ut dux, sic populus'
Hence, the English, the Allies, Americans, should be alive to
the fact that the spirit of the principles for which they are fighting
has its origin in the principles of Christianity : history proves this
and civilization confirms it.
A NEW BASIS FOR SOCIAL PROGRESS. By William Charles
White and Louis Jay Heath. Boston: Houghton Mififlin Co.
$1.25 net.
A survey of the educational needs of Pittsburgh under the direc-
tion of the Board of Trustees of the University of Pittsburgh, is
principally responsible for the present volume. The first and by
far the larger part of the book is taken up with the discussion of
general principles and theories, and with the application to the gen-
eral educational problem of those conclusions which the authors
derived from their survey of the particular field of Pittsburgh.
Whatever may be thought of the general doctrines and conclusions,
it must be admitted that they have a certain amount of concreteness,
inasmuch as they have grown out of an inductive study.
As might be expected, much attention is given to the conflict-
ing claims of cultural and vocational education. While the authors
believe that the culturalists and vocationalists both represent
extremes, and that the norm is somewhere between these two posi-
tions, they are strong in their condemnation of the failure of our
present educational system to fit the majority of the young for the
actual tasks and problems of life. The existing system turns out
too many clerks and too many professional persons. In the view
of the authors, the purpose of education is to "increase the sum
total of human happiness," which would be immensely furthered if
the educational system were enabled " to fit its students to be self-
supporting and desirable citizens, to wed both the educational and
the cultural .... to make a man who shall be a vocational specialist
and at the same time a latitudinarian." Whatever theory of happi-
1918.] NEW BOOKS 821
ness we may adopt, and whether or no we accept happiness as the
ultimate end of education, we can agree that these concrete and
immediate ends are worthy ones, so far as they go. Whether they
are substantially obtainable for all persons in any system of educa-
tion that can be devised and maintained, is another question. Yet
this is a simple problem in comparison with that of determining
" first the nature, and second the factors of happiness," which the
authors declare to be a preliminary condition to the establishment of
an educational system. The instrumentalities suggested by them
for getting this elusive information are comprehensive and fairly
logical, even though not entirely convincing.
EPISTEMOLOGY OR THE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE. By P.
Coffey, Ph.D. Two volumes. New York : Longmans, Green
& Co. $3.75 net, each.
These two goodly volumes form a valuable contribution to
Catholic philosophy. The author has already won recognition as
an able exponent of Scholastic philosophy by his earlier volumes on
The Science of Logic, and his more recent treatise on Ontology.
Both these learned works evidence a thorough acquaintance with
the philosophy of the Schools. In the present work he continues
his studies under the guidance, as he proudly declares, of his former
preceptor at Louvain, the illustrious Cardinal Mercier, to whom he
dutifully dedicates the results of his labors.
Though the sub-title terms it " An Introduction to General Meta-
physics," the author takes pains at the very outset (Volume I., page
23) to inform his readers that " Epistemology is not a preparatory
or introductory study which must precede metaphysics and make the
latter possible: it is a department of metaphysics, and not the first
in order either." As the term Epistemology has come into vogue
only of comparatively late years, one might suspect that it opens up
a field entirely unknown to mediaeval thinkers. This mistake our
author quietly forestalls by his brief, but satisfactory, historical
sketch of Scholastic writers who have more or less fully discussed
epistemological problems. In earlier times, these discussions
appeared under other titles, v. g., as Material Logic, Noetics,
Criteriology, Critics. In fact, the fundamental problem, that of the
nature and value of Universals, has been a perennial source of con-
troversy among philosophers not only in the schools of the Middle
Ages, but in the academies of Greece and Rome. And it is still the
question underlying all modern philosophical speculation. Our
822 NEW BOOKS [Mar.,
author, therefore, devotes much space to its examination. First
and foremost he considers the coryphaeus of modern skepticism and
agnosticism, Immanuel Kant. He takes up the principles laid down
in the Critique of Pure Reason, examines them with fairness and
keen discrimination, lays bare the false assumptions upon which
it is based, shows its plausible inconsistencies, and then quietly sets
it aside as a system incompatible with right reason as working in
normal man.
Over against this air-castle he sets up the traditional system of
the schools, moderate realism. After giving- a brief sketch of its
history, he shows it as consistent with the data of experience
revealed by introspection, the only means we have of learning the
working of our mind and the fruit of its operation. The proof of
this thesis is further elaborated in the second volume, which
examines in detail the various criteria of knowledge — the internal
and external senses. The workings of all these faculties are made
to converge upon the crucial question, What is truth? When do
we possess it with certainty ? These questions are answered in the
traditional way — the objective evidence of the data of experience
bringing with it undeniable certainty.
In his concluding chapters, Dr. Coffey deals with other theo-
ries of certitude, Traditionalism, Fideism, Moral Dogmatism, and
lastly, Pragmatism. We were, at first, disposed to find fault with
the scant notice accorded this latest fad of modern philosophy, but
after reading carefully the exposition and refutation of its main
principles and their consequences, we were satisfied with the coup
de grace with which he dismisses this psuedo-science.
This latest output of the famous college of Maynooth proves
its new generation of writers worthy to continue the tradition of
the last century. Dr. Coffey deserves to be classed with Crolly,
Murray, Walsh, Healy, and other lights of that seat of learning.
His Epistemology will prove not only a timely contribution to tech-
nical philosophy, but a useful book of reference for our Catholic
laity, who are daily feeling more and more the need of a guide to
breast the whirlpool of Modern Thought.
REALITY AND TRUTH. By J. G. Vance, M.A., Ph.D. New
York: Longmans, Green & Co. $2.50 net.
Dr. Vance's book deals with the same problems that are treated
so ably in Dr. Coffey's Epistemology; and again we recog-
nize at once a scholar who is thoroughly familiar with his subject,
1918.] NEW BOOKS 823
and who is capable of guiding his readers safely through the misty
mazes of manifold doubt and error to the peaceful home of cer-
tainty and truth. Within the compass of three hundred and forty-
four closely printed octavo pages, the accomplished author discusses
the leading problems of Epistemology with great clearness and
force.
The book opens with a chapter on the realism of the plain man
against whose assumptions the author in truly Socratic fashion
raises all sorts of difficulties. He next deals with skepticism, plac-
ing its plausibility in a strong light, and then mercilessly laying bare
its inherent unsoundness. He then discusses Dogmatism and the
Cartesian Doubt. His exposition and criticism of the method of
Descartes is very well done. His own position he establishes on the
Three First Principles: the Principles of Identity, Contradiction,
and Excluded Middle. These together with the Principle of
Causality he shows to be the true basis of valid knowledge. His
chapters on the existence of a real world, our grasp of reality, the
validity, nature and scope of our knowledge are written with fresh-
ness, clearness and depth. But the best chapters in the book are
those devoted to the Kantian theory of knowledge. Dr. Vance has
evidently studied the works of Kant and his exponents carefully;
and we venture to say that the reader will get a clearer idea of the
philosophy of the " sage " of Konigsberg by a study of these chap-
ters, than by reading the professional commentaries of Sidgwick,
Wallace or Caird.
The work is written in a graceful and pleasing style. We
strongly recommend it to readers with a taste for vigorous think-
ing. It should, we think, be a companion volume to the adopted
text-book of philosophy in our colleges and seminaries. We look
forward with interest to the appearance of Dr. Vance's promised
work on Cosmology, which we have no doubt will reach the high
level of scholarship displayed in the present volume.
THRICE THROUGH THE DARK CONTINENT. A Record of
Journey ings across Africa during the years 1913-16. By J.
Du Plessis, Professor in the Theological Seminary of the
Dutch Reformed Church, Stellenbosch, South Africa. New
York : Longmans, Green & Co. $4.50 net.
This book, with its excellent map, is the painstaking account
of a seventeen-thousand-mile trip made by the author through
Africa in the interest of Protestant missions. Two thousand miles
824 NEW BOOKS [Mar.,
of the voyage were performed on foot, and the adventures and dan-
gers which fill up this interval make, on the whole, the most inter-
esting reading in the book. Throughout, however, the style is
entertaining, lightened by humor and by bits of excellent descrip-
tion. The account should be of value to other missionary travelers
of like enterprise, for it speaks in detail of the roads, waterways,
and places for food and rest in its author's long itinerary. Mr. Du
Plessis likewise renders another practical service in making an elo-
quent plea for the medical missionary, especially in the Western
Soudan, where ulcers and diseases of the eye are pitiably common.
The Catholic reader, recognizing the enormous importance of
such missionary work, and the urgent need for a constructive, char-
itable attitude toward those who unselfishly undertake it, is eager
to concede these, and whatever other positive elements the book
may contain; but he cannot help wishing that Protestant mission-
aries shared this sense of the need of Christian forbearance toward
other workers in the same field. If they did, this book, for instance,
might be free of the many passages which exhibit such surprising
anti-Catholic prejudice. Here, as in the Protestant reports on the
religious condition of South America, the imagination inherited
from Reformation times is indulged with considerable freedom.
The kind of opinion, unbodied but not stingless, which is rooted in
the " great Protestant tradition " obtrudes itself more than once,
alone or in company with more definite intimations of this or that
kind of abuse. The author is sometimes unintentionally amusing,
as when he speaks of the Catholic savages who, unfortunately,
" consider themselves Christians .... They cross themselves reli-
giously before they. . .begin to eat (probably) purloined food," and
of the " wily Catholic missionaries who lure the native boys away
from the Protestants by gifts of safety pins and tobacco." It is
well to note that that " probably " represents the highest level to
which Mr. Du Plessis' certainty about Roman Catholicism, on its
dark side, rises. He regrets that he was not able to tell Pere Ful-
gence, of the Capuchin Mission, that it would be as well if all mis-
sionaries " left doctrines and dogmas and the pomp and circumstance
of religion, and taught the African the elementary virtues of hon-
esty, truthfulness and integrity." Probably, however, the good
Capuchin Father has not lived to be a missionary without learning,
of his own accord, that there are minds so wonderfully consti-
tuted that they are able to measure just what amount of the total
Divine Revelation it is necessary to teach the poor savages. Mr.
1918.] NEW BOOKS 825
Du Plessis finally states that, in the Congo territory, an atrocity was
committed by a priest whom the partiality of the government left
entirely unpunished, and whom the hierarchy defended to the extent
of " hounding " his would-be legal prosecutor out of the country.
Of course, the details which should accompany this accusation of
infamy are not given.
Mr. Du Plessis is apparently a sincere Protestant, whose heart
is very much in the missionary field. It is a pity that he cannot
abandon his ungenerous perspective on the Catholic missionary sit-
uation, and adopt another and truer one, which would show him the
enormous and praiseworthy work done by Catholic missionaries in
Africa.
A TREASURY OF WAR POETRY. Edited with Introduction and
Notes, by George Herbert Clarke. Boston: Houghton Mif-
flin Co. $1.25 net.
Of all the multitudinous war volumes, personal or philosophi-
cal, which have issued from the press during the past three years,
there is scarcely one which surpasses in permanent significance, at
least for English-speaking people, this little collection of poems.
All have been written by British or American poets between 1914
and 1917. Some of the authors included are Rudyard Kipling,
Robert Bridges, John Galsworthy, Gilbert Chesterton, John Mase-
field, Alfred Noyes; the soldier poets who fell so early, Rupert
Brooke and Allan Seeger; Dr. Henry Van Dyke, Edgar Lee Mas-
ters, Vachel Lindsay, and among the women, Katharine Tynan,
Winifred Letts, Florence Earle Coates and Josephine Preston Pea-
body. It was, perhaps, to be expected that the division devoted to
"America" (most of which, by the by, are by British authors!)
should be the least memorable of the whole volume. That means sim-
ply that our own country was the last to enter and, hence, to be con-
summately thrilled by the gigantic conflict. It was inevitable, also,
that many of the poems included should be of unequal value and
that there should be such regrettable omissions as that of Joyce Kil-
mer's Lusitania poem, The White Ships and the Red. These things
can be corrected in future editions, which are sure to be forth-
coming. In the meantime, Dr. Clarke has given us an anthology of
real value and timeliness — a gathering together of the deepest emo-
tional expression and the highest inspiration which have risen from
the hearts of English and American men and women since the
crucial August of 1914.
826 NEW BOOKS [Mar.,
THE RELIGIOUS POEMS OF LIONEL JOHNSON. Being a
Selection from his Collected Works. With a Preface by Wil-
frid Meynell. New York: The Macmillan Co. $1.00.
One scarcely knows which is the stranger paradox in these
strenuous and turbulent days — Christmas or Lent. But both para-
doxes are supremely good in shaking and lifting up our hearts ; and
the joy of the one and the penitential peace of the other will be found
inundating this precious little volume. The line between " secular "
and " religious " poetry has not been drawn too narrowly. That
the little volume includes secular and religious poems, is a tribute to
Lionel Johnson's peculiar gift or insight — call it what you will, by
which he always saw Catholic. He not only sounded the con-
sistent note of Catholic joy, but wherever he walked, he always
breathed the Catholic atmosphere. This world, as well as the next,
is God's. Creation no less than Redemption is His handiwork. As
Mr. Meynell points out in his charming little introduction, all of
Lionel Johnson's work " belongs to both worlds." So it is good to
find the lines to Winchester, and the Irish poems, and the unforget-
table poems upon human friendship included among such
exquisitely spiritual lyrics as Our Lady of the May, Te Martyrum
Candidatus, To a Passionist, or The Dark Angel. The songs of
the Catholic poet here do brave service to the cause both of art and
of devotion.
LIFE AND LETTERS OF THOMAS HODGKIN. By Louise
Creighton. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. $4.50 net.
Biography has long been reputed the most stimulating form
of reading; and though the subject of the present work, which
extends to over four hundred pages is not perhaps to American
eyes such an outstanding figure as to bear so marked an emphasis,
still in this book one is brought in contact with a singularly simple,
tolerant, kind and lovable personality. Thomas Hodgkin was an
English Quaker, born in 1831, whose ancestors had been such since
the days of George Fox, and though in early manhood he seemed
on the verge of quitting the Society of Friends, he remained in
it for his long life of eighty-one years, and by reason of his
intellectual attainments became, if not the representative, probably
the most widely-known member of his sect.
Well educated and always in easy circumstances, Dr. Hodgkin
devoted most of the spare time from his banking business to exten-
sive travel and archaeological and historical study, the fruit of
1918.] NEW BOOKS 827
which was Italy and Her Invaders, which treats of Italy and the
Gothic invasions of the fifth century. Besides this and several
minor historical works and many periodical papers, he delivered
numerous lectures, mostly on historical and kindred subjects. His
principal concern in life, however, was always with spiritual mat-
ters, and it was this which gave him his strong influence for good
both in public and private affairs, and imparts to the present volume
its chief interest.
THE CRUISE OF THE CORWIN. By John Muir. Boston:
Houghton Miflflin Co. $2.75 net.
In 1881 John Muir accompanied the Corwin expedition
through Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean in search of the lost arc-
tic explorer, De Long. The expedition failed of its purpose as the
Jeanette was crushed in the ice before relief came, and De Long
himself with ten of his men died of starvation and exposure while
making their way South across the ice floes.
The present volume is compiled from Muir's daily record of
the trip, some portions of which appeared years ago in the pages
of the San Francisco Bulletin. His main object in joining the
expedition was to look for evidence of glaciation in the arctic and
subarctic regions, and to record accurately their peculiar flora.
His valuable botanical report regarding Herald Island and Wran-
gell Land was published by the United States Government. He
discovered near Cape Thompson a species of Erigeron new to
science, which Dr. Asa Gray of Harvard named the Erigeron
Muirrii in his honor.
Muir paints in most vivid language the dangers and hardships
of arctic travel, and describes accurately and entertainingly the
hitherto unvisited Wrangell Land, the lives and customs of the
natives, and the experiences of the Northern whaling fleets. The
book is beautifully illustrated.
THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS. By Charles H. Grand-
gent, A.B., L.H.D. New York: Harvard University Press.
$1.35-
Professor Grandgent has guided some of us through the wind-
ing warp of syntax that lead to pleasant foreign paths of letters, art,
science and travel — and whatever else the student may elect to look
for — and now he tells us of beautiful things encountered in jour-
neyings of his own. This volume, composed of lectures delivered
828 NEW BOOKS [Mar.,
in Cleveland in February, 1917, and introduced as the first publica-
tion of the McBride lecture fund, adds a margin of new acquaint-
ance to those already famous ladies, Violetta, Matilda, Pietra,
Beatrice and Lisetta. For one who possesses no knowledge of
Italian and little familiarity with Dante's Lyrics, these pages form a
most attractive and satisfying introduction to a world of subtle
charm; and for the riper student they become a reminder and a
guide, recalling old pleasures and discovering new.
Professor Grandgent has the delicate touch required for such a
book as this. His learning is evident but never oppressive.
THE CONTINUITY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. By F.
W. Puller. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. $1.50.
The four lectures contained in this volume were delivered in
Russia six years ago in the official residence of the Chief Procurator
of the Holy Synod, as the front page emphasizes. The book is
remarkable neither for the novelty of its false statements, nor for
the logic of its strained effort to prove the myth of continuity. And
the old calumnies, which Mr. Puller does not seem to realize have
been refuted hundreds of times, are a bit wearisome. Perhaps he
thought his Russian audience ignorant of the controversies of the
West. Without a quiver of an eyelid he tells the Russians that in
the time between the coming of St. Augustine and the death of
Henry I. (1135) the Popes had nothing to do with the appoint-
ment of English bishops ; that the sending of the pall meant nothing
as far as episcopal authority was concerned? that the Forged
Decretals were the basis of the later Papal claims; that the exorbi-
tant and ever-growing claims of the Papacy were responsible for the
divisions of Christendom; that although on the continent men
started new churches, in England they made no attempt whatever
to found a new church ; that the Papal claims have not warrant in
early Church history ; that the Church of Rome separated from the
Church of England — and so on ad nauseam. The Magna Charta
is misinterpreted in the usual fashion, the question of the validity
of Anglican ordinations is assumed without proof, the Erastian
character of the Establishment is utterly ignored, the Anglican
hatred of heresy is stated as a fact which no one gainsays, etc. Is
Mr. Puller dishonest or ignorant when he states that " most of the
Anglican Articles would be accepted at once by the learned theolo-
gians of the Holy Church of Russia and of the other Orthodox
Eastern Church? " None are so blind as those who will not see.
I9i8.] NEW BOOKS 829
THE CHURCH AND THE SACRAMENTS. By P. T. Forsyth,
D.D. New York : Longmans, Green & Co. $2.00.
Dr. Forsyth writes as a free lance, and his book is interesting
to a Catholic simply as evidencing the lack of definite teaching on
theological matters today outside the Church. He tells us himself
in his preface: " My position is neither current Anglican nor pop-
ular Protestant. I write from the Free Church camp, but not from
any recognized Free Church position — having regard, so far as I
can, to the merits of the case, to early history, and the experience of
religion. The ruling tendency is an effort to moralize this and other
parts of theology by interpreting instead of abolishing. The view
here taken is neither memorial and Zwinglian, nor is it High Cath-
olic. It is sacramental but not sacramentarian, effective but not
sacrificial. The sacraments are not emblems but symbols, and sym-
bols not as mere channels, but in the active sense that something is
done as well as conveyed."
He knows nothing of Christian baptism, for he talks a good
deal about the conveying of grace, but then adds that the convey-
ance is not to the individual subject but to the worshipping church,
whatever that may mean. It does mean, however, as he says him-
self, that the immediate effect of baptism on an infant is nil. Just
as he holds that baptism is not regenerative, so also he declares the
Lord's Supper is not sacrificial. It is merely a "sacrament by which
God's love is witnessed to us and his gift conveyed." That there is
any Real Presence or, as he puts it, " a communication of God's
being " is to him impossible. We would urge our author to read a
few works on Catholic theology — a text-book of Dr. Pohle on the
sacraments, for example — before he discusses the sacraments fur-
ther. Any notion of there being seven sacraments is of course
unthinkable to Dr. Forsyth.
WESSEL GANSFORT, LIFE AND WRITINGS. By Edward W.
Miller, D.D. Principal Works Translated by Jared W. Scud-
der, M.A. Two Volumes. New York : G. P. Putnam's Sons.
$4.00 net.
The editors of these volumes repeat the oft-refuted thesis that
Wessel was a precursor of the Reformation, a myth revised in mod-
ern times by Ullmann. It is true that his theological writings are
full of errors, and that for this reason they were placed on the
Index in the sixteenth century, but in the fundamental truths which
characterized the Protestant revolt he was entirely Catholic. He
830 NEW BOOKS [Mar.,
taught the freedom of the will, justification by faith working by
charity, the meritorious character of good works, the Catholic rule
of faith, the primacy of the Pope, the efficacy of the sacraments ex
op ere operate, transubstantiation, the sacrificial character of the
Eucharist, the veneration of the Blessed Virgin and the like. Such
a man cannot in very truth be called a precursor of the Reformation
by any well-read scholar. It is truth that he held many errors. He
denied Papal Infallibility, the judicial character of the sacrament of
penance, the Catholic idea of indulgences, and the right of ecclesias-
tical superiors to command under penalty of sin.
These volumes were printed in view of the Luther centenary,
but the Great War in Europe has put Luther under a cloud these
days. Any attempt now to arouse enthusiasm for him will cer-
tainly prove abortive.
AMERICAN CIVIL CHURCH LAW. By Carl Zollmann, LL.B.
New York : Columbia University. $3.50.
This attempt to set forth logically and compactly the legal
aspects of the relations between Church and state in these United
States from the beginnings of our history, shows how they have
been developed, defined and illustrated by the federal and state con-
stitutions, by hundreds of statutes, and by thousands of decisions.
It rests on a direct study of the sources, and makes indeed an inter-
esting book both for the law student and the clergyman. The vari-
ous chapters discuss in turn religious liberty, the forms, nature and
powers of corporations, church constitutions, implied trusts,
schisms, church decisions, tax exemptions, disturbance of meetings,
etc. The book is chiefly valuable for its array of facts. More than
once the judicious reader will reject the theories of the author
deduced therefrom.
THE STORY-BOOK OF SCIENCE. By Jean-Henri Fabre.
Translated from the Nineteenth French Edition by Florence
Constable Bicknell. New York: The Century Company.
$2.00 net.
Youngsters of nine or ten to sixteen years should give a hearty
welcome to this book, for it introduces them to a uniquely charming
little circle whose members were created for their especial delecta-
tion. Uncle Paul, the scientist, here plays host to his niece Claire
and his two nephews Jules and Emile, who spend happy weeks at
his farm, exploring the mysteries of nature for themselves, and list-
I9i8.] NEW BOOKS 831
ening to their uncle's fascinating explanations of what they do not
understand. Few questions do these eager young scientists leave
unasked : rain, sun, wind, light, electricity, plants, trees, mountains,
volcanoes, animals, birds, insects, all come under their inspection.
Yet so well-planned is the book, and so interesting each separate
conversation and experiment, that there is no sense of a crowding
of unfamiliar details; hosts of different facts, all related in an
orderly way, are acquired naturally, and are remembered, as in
any interesting story. The attention of the young reader is in no
danger of flagging at any point; but — as one might expect in a book
written by the eminent " Homer of the insects " — perhaps the chap-
ters on the ant, the plant-parasite, and the bee, are the most
fascinating. .
The translator's English is clear, simple and attractive.
THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF LIFE. By Henry Fairfield
Osborn. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. $3.00 net.
This volume is as valuable for its scientific facts as it is value-
less -for its philosophical theories. In its pages we review many
facts of astronomy, geology, physics, chemistry and biology, but
they are perversely used to bolster up the physico-chemical
explanation of life. The professor assumes — but does not produce
the slightest proof— that man has descended from an unknown
ape-like form somewhere in the Tertiary ; that our simian ancestor
has evolved through merely material energies from the simplest life
forms ; that these in turn evolved by some unknown chemical work-
ing from a primitive inorganic element. He seems almost to fix the
date and place of this evolution, but at least has the modesty to
confess that he has not as yet destroyed the philosophy of vitalism
root and branch.
At some future date, he thinks, we may be able to produce in
our laboratories the long-sought- for life germs, but that may be
450,982,000 of years hence. Scientists of the materialistic school
demand plenty of time past and future for the working out of their
impossible hypotheses. We recommend to Professor Osborn the
late work of Professor Windle of Cork on The Church and Science.
REED VOICES. By James B. Kenyon. New York: James T.
White & Co. $1.25.
The title of Mr. Kenyon's book is aptly chosen, for his muse
is plaintive and swee^ rather than rapt and soaring; and though he
832 NEW BOOKS [Mar.,
may not thrill us to ecstasy, still he gives us a delicate music quite
agreeable and satisfying. He sings of old scenes and persons with
the tenderness of loving memory, and has a charming familiarity
with nature in her softer moods — birds, trees, brooks, flowers. And
when he has to do with the more sordid side of life, as seen in our
great cities, he is able to turn even that " to favor and prettiness."
The love-poems, to which a whole section is devoted, are not the
outcries of passionate youth, but the gentle utterance of mature and
conjugal affection ; and the religious poems, which also have a sep-
arate section, breathe a spirit of profound trust and patience and
enduring faith.
The present little book undoubtedly contains genuine poetry,
and while not substantial enough in matter to be called great, in
manner it is never disappointing. Moreover, the lines have the
further rare merit of striking no false notes, of being always in key;
and for once in a way it is pleasant to find a poet who so thoroughly
observes the limits of his own powers and refuses to be drawn aside
to those larger themes which have often proved the destruction of
more ambitious singers.
THE LAND OF DEEPENING SHADOW: GERMANY AT THE
THIRD YEAR OF WAR. By D. Thomas Curtin. New
York: George H. Doran Co. $1.50 net.
This book will make wholesome and profitable reading for the
American public, revealing, as it does, conditions in internal Ger-
many with which we are as yet only vaguely acquainted. The
author writes dispassionately and simply. He has a clear eye and
the ability to put down in plain words what he sees, without going
into hysterics whenever he discovers things that go against the
grain of men not inoculated with the virus of Teutonic kultur,
things that tell against us and our cause and its possible outcome.
Of course, the setting forth of such things is exactly what will
insure the outcome for us — our victory. When we begin to realize
just exactly what we are " up against " in fighting Germany, then
we will begin to win, and not until then. For this reason, Mr. Cur-
tin's book is of real value.
He covers his ground with much thoroughness. He is not
content with showing us the heart of Prussianism in Berlin ; he goes
out into the highways and byways of the empire and discovers for
himself the workings of the German system. Almost to a man, the
people, as Mr. Curtin shows them, are behind the government, not
I9i8.] NEW BOOKS 833
as a democratic people would be, but because they are molded and
shaped to the will of the rulers with a cleverness so diabolically deft
that they have no minds whatever of their own, but think, see, feel,
only as the powers dictate. As a result, Mr. Curtin concludes, " in
Germany patriotism becomes jingoistic hatred and contempt for
others, organization becomes the utilization of servility, obedience
becomes willingness to do wrong at command." We have never
seen the situation in Germany so well summed up as in these few
words.
BRITAIN IN ARMS. By Jules Destree. New York: John Lane
Co. $1.50 net.
This book will take a place among permanent war books
because of its clear and concise statement of the conditions which
led up to the conflict; and because of the peculiar interest attach-
ing to it as a French view of the part played in the great game by
her ally, her one-time traditional enemy, England. Were the book
from the pen of a Briton, it would miss fire and fall to the level of
self -laudation; but as it stands, it appears to be an illuminating and
singularly just statement of the facts of the case. While the book
is a documentary history, its material is drawn together in such a
cumulative and interesting manner as to make very absorbing read-
ing. Among Americans, who early in the War were long fed on
the Teutonic lie that England was shirking her part of the fight
and letting France be bled white, this book will make a decided
impression; and perhaps of all its chapters none will be more sur-
prising or enlightening than that which tells of the work done at the
beginning of the War by the British navy, in thwarting the German
plan for a great naval attack, which would have stopped the mobili-
zation of English forces on continental soil. The book has an
introduction by Georges Clemenceau, and is well translated by J.
Lewis May.
I
LORD NORTHCLIFFE'S WAR BOOK. New York: George H.
Doran Co. 50 cents net.
This bulky volume, a revised and enlarged edition of the
author's At War, is an entertaining potpourri of war views and
war news. Lord Northcliffe, who is a journalist first, last and all
the time, sees with the reporter's eye and recounts with the reporter's
gift of quick and telling strokes. While there is nothing of great
VOL. cvi. — 53
834 NEW BOOKS [Mar.,
importance in his book, it is interesting and will be popular with
the average reader who does not care to go further than a mere
glance will take him. The chapters on the author's personal
experiences at the front, his riding in a " tank," in a warplane, and
in a submarine, are the best in the volume. Also he gives some
graphic character-sketches of the war's leaders — Haig, Joffre,
Cadorna — and concludes with some glimpses of affairs in neutral
lands, revealing the tireless propaganda carried on by the Germans
wherever they can get a footing. He finds the Swiss " trying to be
fair;" but Spain he describes as sadly overrun by Teutonic gos-
pellers. There, he tells us, with true non-conformist naivete,
the Hun " has the support of practically the whole of the Church,
Jesuit and otherwise" — an expression which perhaps should no;
surprise us, coming from one who still thinks the priestly garb
" unmasculine." The book is sold for the benefit of the Red Cross,
and has already realized some $30,000 for that worthy cause.
THE EXPANSION OF EUROPE, THE CULMINATION OF
MODERN HISTORY. By Ramsey Muir, Professor of Mod-
ern History in the University of Manchester, England. Bos-
ton : Houghton Mifflin Co. $2.00.
This is no mere war book. It is a treasure for the student and
teacher of modern history, a philosophy not a chronicle, a survey of
European activities and influence in the extra-European world. It
brings into clear relief the new political form which these activities
have created, the world-state embracing peoples of many different
types with a European nation-state as the nucleus. In the upbuild-
ing of this imperial power, two forces have been at work : the idea
that empire must be achieved by force, by domination of the
stronger over the weaker unto the strengthening of the power of the
already strong; and the idea that the control of empire is a trustee-
ship to be exercised over weaker and more backward peoples for
the benefit of the inferior. Typical of one policy is Great Britain,
whose work in colonization has been longest, whose home experi-
ence in political freedom has led her to grant self-government to her
dependencies in proportion to their fitness for it, and whose colonial
empire has five autonomous countries widely divergent in race and
habits. The other policy Germany has pursued. These policies
were not forecast nor aimed at, but, like Topsy, " just growed."
It is the growth of this spirit of empire and its meaning which are
developed in this book.
1918.] NEW BOOKS 835
THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA. A Pageant. By Thomas F.
Coakley, D.D. New York: The Encyclopedia Press. 75
cents.
This is a pleasing dramatic pageant, full of color and action,
and written for practical stage production. It has, in fact, been
already put to the test of presentation and has met with signal suc-
cess, running for a week in Pittsburgh, and attracting large crowds.
The story embraces three episodes in the life of Columbus — his
finding shelter at La Rabida; his appeal to the court of Ferdinand
and Isabella; and his triumphant landing at San Salvador. The
scenes are conceived in a truly dramatic spirit, their action playing
vividly against a background of commingled religious and gayly
colored Spanish atmosphere. While the blank verse at moments
halts, the general effect of the dialogue is lofty and at times reaches
real poetical heights. As an addition to what Dr. John Talbot
Smith has so aptly named our " Parish Theatre," Dr. Coakley's
pageant is of genuine value, and will be welcomed by parochial dra-
matic clubs and especially by the Knights of Columbus all over the
land.
A GLORY OF MARYLAND. By M. S. Pine. Philadelphia: The
Salesian Press. $1.00.
Written in irregular rhymed verse, in the form usually chosen
for the classical ode, this poem not only celebrates the glories of its
hero, Leonard Neale, but recounts in pleasing narrative the story
of his life. He was the second Archbishop of Baltimore, and one
of the pioneers of the Church in America. His career, from his
youthful days at St. Omer, through his adventurous missionary
experiences in pagan Guiana, and on to his taking up the burdens
of the young Church in America as the successor of the saintly
Carroll, is full of dramatic movement and lofty inspiration. The
verse musical and graceful, and at moments striking chords of
sonorous beauty, presents the theme with a good deal of power.
THE TENDER PILGRIMS. By Edgar Dewitt Jones, D.D. Chi-
cago : The Christian Century Press. 85 cents net.
A very real love for and understanding of children pervade this
little book, written by a Protestant minister who has evidently had
large experience in dealing with little ones. Taking as his text
the words of Jacob when he sent Esau and his train on ahead, him-
self following after: " The children are tender. . . .1 will lead on
836 NEW BOOKS [Mar.,
gently. . . .according to the pace of the children," he makes an effec-
tive plea for the more careful training of our youth, a more thought-
ful study of their needs and capacities by their parents and teachers.
Their tenderness of body, of mind, and of soul, are all touched
upon; and recognition is duly given the Catholic Church for its
system of educating the young in their earlier and most impression-
able years.
THE EXTERNALS OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. By Rev.
John E. Sullivan. New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons. $1.50.
This book " is an attempt to put into clear, convenient and
readable form an explanation of many practices of our Church."
The author is right in stating the general ignorance of our Catholic
people regarding the history and meaning of the practices which
have been embodied in the ritual of the Church. He sets forth
accurately and interestingly many things the Catholic should know
regarding the government of the Church, the administration of the
sacraments, the Mass, the ecclesiastical year, the sacramentals, the
liturgical books, our devotions, church music, our marriage laws,
indulgences and the like. It is a well-written volume, perfectly
arranged, provided with an excellent index and suitable
illustrations.
THE HEART OF THE GOSPEL. By Francis P. Donnelly, SJ.
THE HEART OF REVELATION. By Francis P. Donnelly, S.J.
New York : P. J. Kenedy & Sons. 75 cents each.
These two small volumes are most competent to fulfill the
intention of the author, which was " to popularize devotion to the
Sacred Heart of Jesus and to make the meaning and practice of that
devotion definite and effective." The marvelous traits of the Heart
of Christ are searchingly analyzed, and the human heart read in
Its light, in a manner that affords inspiration and practical aid in
its correction. The books are worthy of a place in every Catholic's
personal library of devotional works. Whether used for short daily
readings or as guides in meditation, they will be equally helpful.
HELL AND ITS PROBLEMS. By J. Godfrey Raupert. Buffalo:
Catholic Union Store. 25 cents.
The first edition of this excellent little treatise was published
anonymously in England some years ago. Mr. Raupert is well
advised in publishing it anew, as it answers in clear and effective
1918.] NEW BOOKS 837
fashion the chief difficulties brought forward by modern objectors
to the doctrine of hell. Some of the questions answered in the
volume are: Is hell compatible with the goodness of God? How
can a just God inflict eternal punishment for a temporal offence?
Why should probation end at death ? Why does not God annihiliate
the impenitent soul? Will not the thought of hell render impos-
sible the happiness of heaven ? Why does God create souls He fore-
knows will be eternally lost ? A final chapter deals with the dangers
of modern spiritism, a pagan cult which Mr. Raupert has denounced
so energetically for many years.
GOD AND MYSELF. By Martin J. Scott, SJ. New York: P. J.
Kenedy & Sons. Cloth, $1.00; paper, 25 cents.
It is well that there should be an edition sufficiently low priced
to bring within the reach of the majority this strong appeal to the
individual concerning his spiritual responsibilities. The first part
of the book deals with the various problems and considerations that,
to many, are obstacles to faith; the second treats of the true
religion, defining the Church's doctrines and explaining her teach-
ings and her sacraments. It is both succinct and comprehensive,
and gives the Catholic not only a word of reestablishment and
strengthening assurance, but also a handbook wherein his inquiring
acquaintances may find set forth, clearly and tersely, precisely what
he believes and the reasonable grounds upon which his belief is
founded.
IS THERE SALVATION OUTSIDE THE CATHOLIC CHURCH?
By Rev. J. Bainvel, S.J. Translated from the French by Rev.
J. L. Weidenhan. St. Louis : B. Herder. 50 cents net.
The axiom " outside the Church no salvation " has ever been
the bugbear of the non-Catholic controversialist. Its meaning has
been travestied by the dishonest, and its defenders in modern times
have been accused of minimizing its true sense. Father Bainvel
explains it in a brief but scholarly fashion. He first sets in con-
trast the two series of texts which are apparently contradictory, viz.,
those which declare that outside of the visible Church or the body
of the Church there is no salvation, and those which assure us that
every man can be saved, if he wills. He next discusses and rejects
as inadequate the solutions of good faith, the soul of the Church,
the invisible Church, and the necessity of precept. The true solu-
tion, he tells us, lies in the distinction " between desire and reality,
838 NEW BOOKS IMar.,
between the will and the fact, between internal affiliation with the
Church and affiliation by the external ties of life and communion."
In a word one must hold that communion with the Church is neces-
sary for salvation; one must be united to her either in fact (re), or
in desire (voto) , if the actual union is impossible.
This explanation safeguards the Church from the injustice of
condemning a man who is in invincible ignorance of her claims,
and at the same time condemns as un-Christian the modern dogma
of religious indifferentism.
THE MYSTICAL KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. By Savinien Louis-
met, O.S.B. New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons. 75 cents.
The author's summing up of this little book is this : that God is
Love. To the average lay reader, however, it will speak an even
more understandable message: that God is All; that with God it
must be all or nothing; that in the relationships between the soul
and God, there can be no half ways or hesitations. Father Louis-
met makes this plain. And then he goes still further and makes
plainer still the fact that, even with the common, everyday, hum-
drum Christian this measure of allness may be satisfied, and God
can be given all — not a half or a fraction of the soul's affection.
Father Louismet will enlighten many as to true mysticism.
There is no word in the language so abused: poets mumble an in-
cantation— and it is called mysticism ; novelists dabble in the esoteric
— and they are dubbed mystics. " A consciousness wider and
deeper than the normal " is the elastic definition given recently by
some English writers on the subject. But the one who reads Father
Louismet's clear and simple pages will have mysticism defined for
him in words that cannot confuse; to him will be given a knowledge
that will stay by him like a light through all the devious paths into
which up-to-date erudition may lead him.
RHODANTHE, OR THE ROSE IN THE GARDEN OF THE
SOUL'S DELIGHT. A Poetic fantasy by Charles Louis
Palms. Jamaica, New York : The Marion Press. $2.00.
It requires courage in these days of short lyrics and stressful
living to produce an allegorical poem of one hundred and sixty
pages, but the feat has been accomplished in this beautiful printed
volume. Rhodanthe is a dream poem of love and mythology, in
which an even standard of graceful if florid versification is main-
tained throughout.
1918.] NEW BOOKS 839
SOMEWHERE BEYOND. A Year Book of Francis Thompson.
Compiled by Mary Carmel Haley. New York : E. P. Button &
Co. $1.25.
The poems of Francis Thompson would be the last place one
would expect the year-book compiler to go to in search of material.
The mystic illusive muse of Thompson wholly lacks the obvious
and so-called " timely " quality necessary in the making of the ordi-
nary annual. While this little volume will appeal to' all lovers of
Francis Thompson, and may, perhaps, attract new readers to him,
it is not a noteworthy success as a " year-book." The very nature
of the material at the compiler's hand was against her, and the
straining and stretching to make a point is too apparent and too fre-
quent. The price of the book is double what it ought to be.
CHILD'S LIFE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN. By Mary Margaret
MacEachen. Wheeling, W. Va. : Catholic Book Co.
The author of this brief biography has done her work corn-
mendably. By judicious selection and careful handling of material
she has accomplished the difficult task of compressing into a form
easily comprehensible the condition of the country at the national
crisis, and how Lincoln became the saviour of the republic; and she
has done this to the exclusion of anything that tends to arouse
sectional bitterness. She uses many anecdotes to emphasize and
illustrate the noble and tender traits of Lincoln's personal character,
yet does not overlook any aspect of his public life. The book
through its short sentences and simple language, graphically and
adequately outlines the great American.
MOSETENO VOCABULARY AND TREATISES. By Benigno
Bibolotti. Chicago: Northwestern University.
The author of this manuscript, which has been edited by Dr.
Rudolph Schuller and published by the Northwestern University,
was an Italian priest belonging to the Franciscan Order, Benigno
Bibolotti by name. Little is known of his life, except that he was
appointed spiritual pastor of the Moseteno Indians in Bolivia and
arrived at the mission in October, 1857. In 1868, he finished and
signed the Spanish epilogue to the manuscript which is a study of
the language of the Mosetenos, an Indian tribe now rapidly van-
ishing, who speak a Bolivian aboriginal idiom of which little has
been known.
840 NEW BOOKS [Mar.,
Father Bibolotti's work was not written with a scientific pur-
pose, " but simply as a kind of guide for young missionaries, who
in the years to come should take the heroic decision of consecrating
their energies to the material and spiritual welfare of those poor
Indians." The manuscript is devoted to practical vocabularies,
grammatical processes, with observations on the system of nouns,
adjectives, verbs and other parts of speech, and concludes with gen-
eral remarks on affiliated languages and peoples.
Dr. Schuller in the preface to the manuscript feels sure that in
a few years the name of the Moseteno will be added to the alarm-
ingly long list of extinct South American tribes. Little is known of
the first missions founded among these Indians, although they were
probably established during the sixteenth century. From the known
original documents, we learn that in the second half of the eigh-
teenth century, the Franciscan missions in Northern Bolivia en-
joyed much prosperity. The Moseteno mission was founded in
1842, but was later destroyed by a fire in which were burned all
original accounts of explorers and settlers.
TOMORROW AND OTHER POEMS. By Innes Stitt and Leo
Ward. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. $1.00 net.
The trenches and the seas have been reddened by the blood of
poets in the present conflict; and the whole world has been braced
and strengthened by their virile singing. It is a remarkable fact
that the dominant note in the war poetry of the time is one of optim-
ism— optimism and joyous sacrifice, born of a new and thrilling
spiritual vision. This is the note sounding in the little volume just
published by Leo Ward (son of the late Wilfrid Ward) and his
chum Innes Stitt. Their songs are manly and brave. They see
beyond the agonizing horror through which they are now passing
as actual combatants, into a future built by God on the foundations
of sacrifice. No better expression of the high purpose to be found
by thinking men in the World War has been given us than this
small book of choice, clear-visioned soldier-poems.
BALLADS OF PEACE IN WAR. By Michael Earls, S.J. Worces-
ter, Mass. : The Harrigan Press. 50 cents.
Even the blithe and gentle muse of Father Earls would seem
to have been shaken by the march of Mars, for in this singularly
well-named little volume there is more than one poem which echoes
to the warrior's passing feet. But it is only an echo, after all. The
1918.] NEW BOOKS 841
essence of the verses is quite untouched by the gigantic conflict
which for so many of us has changed the face of life. For Father
Earls' chosen song is still " of children and of folk on wings," of
the quiet, open sweep of nature, of legendary Ireland, of friendship
and of holy Faith. The present volume garners only a slender sheaf
of new verses, but it will not be less welcome to those who have
been won by the priest-poet's earlier collections, Ballads of Child-
hood and The Road Beyond the Town.
THE MYSTERY OF GABRIEL. By Michael Wood. New York:
Longmans, Green & Co. $1.40 net.
This very interesting and unusual book will, however, appeal
only to such readers as are interested in problems of the interior
life. It treats of the mysterious case of Gabriel Forranner, an
adopted son and a foundling, who from childhood suffers mad-
dening temptations to sins so strange and appalling that, to him,
they seem to place him outside humanity. Worn out by the strug-
gle, in which he has not yielded, he conquers the extreme reticence
of his disposition, and confides in " Father " Anthony Standish, of
Brent, from whom he receives such help as enables him to cast out
the demon that has apparently possessed him.
Mr. Wood is a member of that section of the Anglican com-
munion that calls itself Catholic. In this work, as in its predeces-
sors, he reflects penetration and spirituality on a plane so purely
Catholic that one can but wonder what may be the nature of the
obstacles that impede his surrender to the Faith where such thoughts
flower in their native air.
CECILIA OF THE PINK ROSES. By Katharine Haviland Tay-
lor. New York: George H. Doran Co. $1.25 net.
In the case of such books as Cecilia of the Pink Roses, one can
only paraphrase Jane Austen and say that when, in the common cant
phrase, the book is called charming, the truth is outraged less than
usual. It is the old story of the little slum girl turned heiress,
and triumphing over the hard temptations of her new sphere. The
subtle vulgarities of snobbishness, the impulse to be ashamed of
humble origins, even the mistaken certainty that she will lose her
lover by cleaving to her brick-laying, brick-making father, leave
Cecilia unscathed, for she has the heart of a lady. Of course the
ending is happy. The romance is sweet and natural, except for the
rather artificial roughening of the course of true love; and not on
842 NEW BOOKS [Mar.,
any account would we spare the lover's dialect, with its final, " Oh,
Cecilia ! Gosh how I love you !" Father McGowan, who steers
Cecilia through her worst difficulties, is another satisfactory crea-
tion. There are one or two false touches, for example, the priest's
saying to Cecilia that her father had better leave things to " whoever
or whatever is running them," and the lover's pet-name of " Little
Saint " for his beloved ; but they are too slight to mar a very win-
ning story.
GONE TO EARTH. By Mary Webb. New York: E. P. Button
& Co. $1.50 net.
Of this singular novel it is necessary only to admit the ex-
ceptional ability displayed, and to regret that its wide scope and
fine quality should serve only to increase by that much the book's
potentialities for harm. With a freedom of speech not always un-
avoidable, Miss Webb tells a story of " the eternal triangle " which
is not in itself specially new nor entirely plausible. In the manner
of its telling there is originality of imagination, power, freshness of
humor, and a subtle charm, all unfortunately devoted to a repre-
sentation of life as a sombre conflict wherein all animate creation,
human and brute alike, struggles with inevitable yet penalized reac-
tions of inborn, resistless tendencies : a melancholy drama carried
on under an adamantine dome of blue that gives no sign of atten-
tion to the cry of faith, of anguish, or of defiance.
To what purpose and in response to what inspiration such a
book was written at such a time, are unanswerable questions. In
this day when the world's need is for courageous effort, any con-
tribution to the. gospel of surrender and despair, however great its
artistic merit, is not only uncalled-for, it is most unwelcome.
RED PEPPER'S PATIENTS. By Grace S. Richmond. Garden
City, New York: Doubleday, Page & Co. $1.35 net.
This is a continuation of the history of " Red Pepper " Burns,
Mrs. Richmond's medical hero. The centre of interest shifts here
from " Red Pepper " and his wife, to the romance of Anne Cool-
idge, one of Dr. Burns' patients. She is traveling about incognita
as a book-agent, in pursuance of a plan of expiation for an act of
careless cruelty, when she meets the hero, who falls in love with
her in spite of her supposed obscurity. There are several " side-
issues " to the main romance, but all minor and major difficulties
are perfectly adjusted in the end.
1918.] NEW BOOKS 843
THE CHURCH AND THE HOUR. Papers by a Socialist Church-
woman. By Vida D. Scudder. New York : E. P. Button &
Co. $1.00 net.
" Many Christians," says Miss Scudder, " find themselves on
the branches of a great tree, the tree of privilege. They do not
quite know how to climb down, but they have the axe of the law
in their hands, and they can apply themselves to saiving off the
branch they sit on "....and "the ground is a good place after
all." The second sentence might well serve as a figure for the
present work, for not only does the author misapprehend the
nature of the instrument whose use she advocates, but she looks on
the ensuing catastrophe with much more complacency than the
world at large is likely to adopt.
The aim of the book is, on the one hand, to induce the Church
(which in Miss Scudder's view is now the Church of the comfort-
able middle-class, " while those who first received the good tidings
and spread it over the civilized world would surprise us very much
if they appeared in the sanctuary ") to awake to the task of social
reconstruction; and on the other to make Socialists and radicals
realize the validity of such things as sacramentalism, mysticism,
the interior life, and even dogma.
The book is full of the vaguest thinking, and of all its prin-
cipal terms there is not a single one on which the author has clear
or definite ideas, from the Church, which " for the purposes of
the present discussion cannot be considered as one corporate being
endowed with independent life " to the soul, which in one place
she speaks of as an " organ !" Socialism with her seems to be
solely a humanitarian effort for social justice, better industrial
conditions, a living wage, etc. ; of its basic and characteristic tenets
she makes no mention and seems totally unaware.
UNMADE IN HEAVEN. By Gamaliel Bradford. New York :
Dodd, Mead & Co. $1.25 net.
Caught by the dramatic value of the clash between lovers who
differ in religious belief, the author of this play has made a cour-
ageous attempt at producing a drama of serious social interest.
That he has failed, is due not to lack of sincerity, but to an inability
to realize the opportunities of his theme. In a play of four acts we
have but one intense moment, and that at the end. The rest is talk,
all leading up to the crucial situation, but tiresome in its reiteration.
The story is of an American girl, a convert to the Faith, who brings
844 NEW BOOKS [Mar.,
about the conversion of the man she loves, only to lose him in the
end to the higher call of a religious vocation. Several characters
are invented to expound a diversity of views on this situation, some
pro, some con; but none very compelling or true to life. The por-
trait of Father Nelson is particularly feeble; and all the more so,
since he does not reveal himself in action, as the personage the
author describes on his first entrance. The play could never suc-
ceed on the stage — not because of its theme, but because it is poor
play writing. But it makes fair reading as a story; and for Cath-
olics will have a curious interest in that it shows us a non-Catholic
writer taking up a distinctively Catholic subject in all seri-
ousness and sincerity, and striving to handle it with fairness and
sympathetic insight.
LUCKY BOB. By Francis J. Finn, SJ. New York: Benziger
Brothers. $1.00.
Juvenile readers will find pleasure as well as benefit in Father
Finn's new book. It is the story of the boy, Bob Ryan, whom an
unnatural father casts out upon the world with no further provision
for making his way than fifty dollars. Bob has, however, been
blessed with an early Catholic training; he adheres to his Faith and
his principles throughout his experiences, and his magnetic person-
ality attracts the affection of the strangers whom he meets in his
wandering, so he may be rightly called " lucky." There is reserved
for him a yet higher and happier destiny than can be found in ties
of human love and friendship, and in response to that call he goes
to Campion, where we take leave of him. Thus the tale, which is told
with much spirit and humor, sounds the note of a deeper interest.
IN SPITE OF ALL. By Edith Staniforth. New York: Ben-
ziger Brothers. $1.25 net.
We have here a story of true love whose course ran with
unusual roughness, bringing unhappiness to her who cherished it,
Sissy Wharton. Sissy is steadfast in fidelity to her recreant lover,
whom an unscrupulous rival lures from her side, and is as constant
to duty as to love. Time brings to her the task of helping her lover
retrieve a life whose best days are over. Her history is not all
sacrifice, however; the young readers for whose enjoyment the
book was written, will be well pleased with the latter chapters
wherein Sissy, after her husband's death, finds awaiting her a worth-
ier love and a happiness such as she well deserves.
1918.] NEW BOOKS 845
THE JOURNAL OF SUBMARINE COMMANDER VON FORST-
NER. Translated by Mrs. Russell Codman. Boston : Hough-
ton Mifflin Co. $1.00.
This small volume, not half the size of the average " war
book," will quickly take its place ahead of many of its fellows, not
only in interest, but in value as a document ; for it presents to us a
side of the great conflict which has so far been almost shut away
from our view. It is, as the advertisement on the wrapper states,
" a book never intended for American eyes." In its pages we see
revealed the German mind engrossed in its prime business of war.
And the revelation, alas, is a sorry one.
It would be a good thing for us all if, in such intimate dis-
closures as this, we might find some redeeming traits of humanity;
something on which to build for the future; something on which,
indeed, to base a hope for an end of the War, initiated by the very
men who are making it. But we can find no such light in this
Journal of Submarine Von Forstner. True, he shows himself what
is called " a gallant officer," with an unfailing care for his men, and
even, at times, a certain proportional regard for the enemy officers
whom he meets in the struggle. But all this seems only superficial,
after all; civilization itself is but a veneer, the graces but a trick.
Under whatever polish of this kind the German character reveals,
as set forth in this unconscious self -revelation, there grins some-
thing of the primitive, the cave-man.
The book's description of life undersea and of the working
of a submersible are interesting and valuable, as are also its photo-
graphic illustrations. And Mr. Hammon's introduction on " The
Challenge of Naval Supremacy " is a document worth pondering.
The Government of which M. Clemenceau
France. is the head has been carrying out the object
for which it was formed, that is to say the
bringing to the bar of justice the enemies whom German intrigue
raised up within the borders of France. The secrecy which was
enforced by the censor, kept the world at large ignorant of the
gravity of the situation. Men who are now known to be Germany's
agents, have made every effort to undermine the confidence of the
country, to spread the impression that German arms were invincible,
and that it was for the best interest of France to negotiate a sepa-
rate peace. To such an extent was this infamous propaganda
pushed, that general distrust began to prevail and Frenchmen eyed
one another as potential traitors. The preceding governments hesi-
tated to take effective steps to crush these secret enemies for fear of
causing open divisions. To bring the traitors to punishment was
the task which M. Clemenceau undertook. As a first result, Bolo
Pasha was found guilty of treason, because he accepted from the
enemy monies which he used in promoting a public sentiment which
would lead to the acceptance of such a peace as Germanv desired.
Bolo Pasha was sentenced to death, but as there will be an appeal
tovthe Court of Cassation it is still doubtful whether he will suffer
the penalty of the court-martial.
Better than the condemnation of Bolo Pasha is the dispelling
of the illusion due to German statements, that France has been bled
white, which has gained such a large measure of belief in this coun-
try. According to M. Tardieu, the French have now almost twice
as many men on the fighting line as they had in 1914, and they
have been able to help Italy with strong forces, while at Saloniki
also there are French troops. The grouping of forces on the Allied
West front supports this statement of M. Tardieu, for the line from
the North Sea to Switzerland is seven hundred and fifty- five kilo-
metres long. The Belgians hold twenty-five kilometres of it, the
British hold one hundred and sixty-five kilometres, and the French
hold the remainder, with the exception of a small sector, the length
and the exact position of which are not known, and which has been
entrusted to the troops of our own country.
1918.] RECENT EVENTS 847
As to artillery, the French have today in the battle line fifteen
thousand guns of all calibres, and they have developed an ordnance
industry which is capable not only of supplying all the needs of
their own armies, but of furnishing a surplus to other Allied
armies. By July ist, France will be able to equip with artillery at
least twenty American divisions.
Since our notes of last month were written
Russia. the Lenine Government has pursued its
arbitrary course in a more undisguised way
than ever. The Constituent Assembly was promised to Russia from
the very beginning of the recent revolution. Its meeting was
repeatedly postponed. Finally on January iQth it met. At once it
elected a chairman by a large majority, and for thus expressing its
will it was dissolved on the following day by the Lenine Govern-
ment. Its will did not agree with the latter's. Lenine and his asso-
ciates at once declared that all power rested in the hands of the
Workmen's and Soldiers' Delegates. How far this usurpation has
been accepted by the country, it is impossible to say. The majority
of the Constituent Assembly who elected the chairman are said to
represent eighty-five per cent of the people of Russia. It has been
freely predicted that the Bolshevik Government would not last long.
So far the predictions are vain. The Bolsheviki are said to be
stronger now than ever before. It has done two things, however,
which point to its speedy overthrow. It has confiscated all Church
property and handed that property over to the state. As a conse-
quence all the members of the Lenine Government have been excom-
municated by the head of the Russian Church. If this excommuni-
cation is followed by an interdict against all church services and the
Christian burial of the dead, it will most probably result in the over-
throw of the government. The Russian peasant is religious and
will side with his Church unless the land, taken from his landlord,
which has been given him by the present government, may prove
an effective bribe.
The other act of the Lenine Government, the demobilization of
the army may bring upon it public discredit. It surely will if the
Civic Convention of this country really represents public opinion in
Russia. " The vast majority," they declare, " of the Russians in
the motherland and here in America belong to that political school
which recognizes in Russia only the Constituent Assembly as hav-
ing the right to work out the internal and foreign policies of a sov-
RECENT EVENTS [Mar.,
ereign people and, therefore, nobody has the authority in the name
of the independent Russian democracy to solve questions of war or
peace other than the Assembly."
At the present writing it is not accurate, therefore, to say that
the Lenine Government has made peace with the Central Powers.
The Foreign Secretary Trotzky has explicitly stated Russia has not
done this. She refused he said to make peace with a military and
capitalistic government. Russian troops were sent back from the
front, he maintained, in order that they might not fight with the
working classes of the Central Powers. The demobilization, it is
declared, is to be gradual. The Lenine Government therefore
refused to accept German claims with regard to the Baltic provinces
and to Poland, consequently Germany is by no means entirely satis-
fied at the turn of events. In fact, the latest reports state that so
great is the dissatisfaction on the part of Germany that the German
Government has decided to continue the war against the northern
part of Russia and to advance upon Petrograd.
The treaty with the Ukraine republic which in some quarters
was a reason for rejoicing is also of doubtful value. It is made
with a government which has been repudiated by a large majority
in the Ukraine, and the Bolsheviki are waging war against those
who made the treaty. The Poles also have strongly protested
against it because it demands the alienation of a Polish province.
Space would not permit us even to begin to enumerate the
tyrannical and anarchial acts of the Bolshevik Government. One
instance, however, may be mentioned. Through their incom-
petency and their anarchical tendencies the annual income of the
Government which ought to be twenty-five millions, has been;
reduced to five millions. They pretend that this enormous deficit
will be made up by notes on the property of the rich, for the pay-
ment of which said property is to be taken over. This, of course,
is ridiculous and national bankruptcy is imminent.
Bessarabia, it is announced, has declared its independence and
has sent an army of twenty thousand, under command of General
Alexieff, north to Petrograd with the object of cutting off the food
supply of that city.
One event has taken place in Turkey which
Turkey. cannot but give satisfaction to all the inhab-
itants of the world : the fact that it has been
relieved of the presence of one of the greatest monsters with which
1918.] RECENT EVENTS 849
this world has ever been inflicted, by the death of Abdul Hamid II.
To him and to his desire to have personal control of everything- in
his empire, the lives of more than a million persons were sacrificed.
When he was deposed, the world rejoiced, but with little rea-
son, for those by whom he was deposed have proved as murder-
ously tyrannical as was Abdul Hamid himself, and this was seen
in the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Armenians and Arabs.
In strange contrast to such devouring desire for power, we
may cite the recent words of the President of China who wrote
publicly of his unfitness for office :
" I offered easy terms in an effort to satisfy the popular desire,
so that I am lacking in foresight. My effort to save from misery
brought more misery; my hope to save the situation resulted in
more confusion.
" Toleration brings undesirable results, so that I cannot make
others believe in my sincerity. I am too weak for the burden and
cannot escape public blame and condemnation for being guilty in
many ways. I dare not hold my high position in opposition to
public censure, but the tenure of office is ordered by virtue of the
constitution and cannot be easily set aside. Moreover, hostilities
have been resumed in Hupeh, and it behooves me to continue help-
ing the cause.
" When order is restored and the populace relieved I shall
retire, full of gratitude, into the country."
The speech of Mr. Lloyd George of Jan-
Peace Talk and War uary 5th, and the address of President Wil-
Aims. son of January 8th, were answered on the
twenty- fourth of the same month by the
Chancellor of the German Empire, Count von Hertling, and by the
Austro-Hungarian Minister, Count Czernin. The difference of
tone between the two spokesmen for the Central Powers has been
recognized by all. The German Chancellor spoke as if he had
already won the dictatorship of the world. To President Wilson's
claim that the occupied provinces of Russia should be evacuated,
he replied that this was a matter in which the United States had
no concern, and that the discussion of the question must be left to
Germany and Russia. As to Alsace and Lorraine he declared that
France was the only country which was concerned in that question.
While with regard to the Balkan States and Mesopotamia and
Palestine, Austria-Hungary and Turkey were the only states inter-
VOL. cvi.— 54
850 RECENT EVENTS [Mar.,
ested. For the ruthless murder of thousands of civilians, men,
women and children on land and sea; the systematic sinking with-
out a trace of merchant ships, neutral and enemy; the executions
of women like Miss Cavell and of men like Captain Fryatt; the
bombardment of undefended watering-places and of crowded
cities; the deportation into slavery of populations already looted
and ransomed to the uttermost farthing, he expresses no word of
regret. The German Chancellor makes repentance or non-repentance
a matter of military victory or military defeat. "They" (Germany's
enemies), he said, " speak with respect of Germany's position, but
they constantly speak as if we were the guilty ones who must do
penance and promise improvement. But this is the way in which
a victor would talk to the vanquished." He added that the Ger-
man army is just as full as ever of the joy of battle; that its
strength was never greater, and thereby implied that the final
decision must be one of might which in turn would settle what is
• right.
The German Chancellor even added to the demands of Ger-
many, and asked that Great Britain be deprived of her naval bases,
such as Gibraltar, Malta and Aden. This proposal was looked upon
as a piece of irony even in Germany.
The German Chancellor disclaimed all purpose of annexation
with regard to Belgium and the northern part of France now in
German possession, but nevertheless referred a consideration of
these matters to the end of the War.
On the same day, Count Czernin, the Austro-Hungarian For-
eign Minister, made his reply to President Wilson and to Mr. Lloyd
George. The tone of the Austrian Premier's speech was much
more moderate and conciliatory than that of the German Chan-
cellor, but with regard to its substance opinions differ. Mr. Lloyd
George, for example, declared that in spite of its milder aspect it
was just as adamant as the answer of the German Chancellor. Mr.
Asquith, however, contended that there was a substantial difference
between the two speeches. This latter seems to be the view of our
President and to have shaped his address to both Houses of Con-
gress on February nth.
There are some indications that grave differences have arisen
between Germany and Austria-Hungary, and that Austria is much
more desirous of making peace than is the German Empire. As
matters stand at present, Austria-Hungary has won almost every
advantage which it is possible for her to win, even if the war be
1918.] h'HCENT EVENTS 851
indefinitely continued. These advantages have been won not by
herself alone, but by the assistance of Germany. Left to herself
Austria would not have been successful in her attack on Serbia.
Later, on the Russian front the Austrian army was driven back on
all points, and Germany lent, first a helping hand and then a domi-
nant one. Italy penetrated Austrian territory and only when Ger-
many came on the scene were the Italians driven back. Thus has
Austria-Hungary become secure on all of her frontiers and there-
fore peace is the one thing she desires.
The food situation in Austria-Hungary is far more serious
than it is in the German Empire. It may be accepted, therefore, that
Austria will make peace overtures in advance of Germany and also
make an effort to cast off the heavy yoke of her present Ally. The
few attempts made to achieve this latter purpose enraged the Pan-
German press.
Following hard upon the speeches of Count Czernin and the
German Chancellor came the address of President Wilson on the
eleventh of February. This address aroused much comment. Some
critics went so far as to say that it was a virtual retraction of the
former address of the President, in which he stated the fourteen
definite aims of the War. But certainly it is impossible to think that
the President would so change his mind within a few weeks. It is
a far more reasonable criticism to say that the object of the address
was to offer Count Czernin a reply as conciliatory as his own, and
to accentuate a difference which appears to President Wilson to
exist between the Minister of the Dual Monarchy and the Chan-
cellor of the German Empire.
On the other hand, the President found nothing to commend
in the speech of Count von Hertling, and declared his proposals to
be a departure from the treaties laid down last July in the Reichstag
Resolutions. " The German Chancellor," said President Wilson,
" wished to revert to proceedings similar to those of the Congress
of Vienna in which the destinies of nations were settled by secret
intrigue." The President declares that the settlement made as a
result of this war must be made in open day, in the presence of all
the world. He lays down four principles which must govern the
action of the United States.
First, that each part of the final settlement must be based upon
the essential justice of that particular case, and upon such adjust-
ments as are most likely to bring a peace that will be permanent;
Second, that peoples and provinces are not to be bartered about
852 RECENT EVENTS [Mar.,
from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were mere chattels and
pawns in a game, even the great game, now forever discredited, of
the balance of power; but that
Third, every territorial settlement involved in this war must
be made in the interest and for the benefit of the populations con-
cerned, and not as part of any mere adjustment or compromise of
claims amongst rival states;
Fourth, that all well-defined national aspirations shall be
accorded the utmost satisfaction that can be accorded them without
introducing new, or perpetuating old, elements of discord and antag-
onism that would be likely in time to break the peace of Europe,
and consequently of the world. For the maintenance of these, the
President declares, the United States will fight to the end.
Shortly before the President's address was delivered, the
Supreme War Council of the Allies met for the third time at Ver-
sailles. This Council considered most carefully the recent utter-
ances of the German Chancellor and the Austro-Hungarian Minis-
ter of Foreign Affairs, but was unable to find in them any real
approximation to the moderate conditions laid down by all the
Allied Governments. The Council, therefore, announced its
decision that the only way to secure permanent peace was to prose-
cute the War with utmost vigor.
In an address to the Italian Parliament, Sefior Orlando,
declared his country's determination to fight on, not only for
national integrity but also for the common aims of all the Entente
nations. In his interpretation of Count Czernin's speech, Sefior
Orlando took the view of Mr. Lloyd George rather than that of
President Wilson. He further declared that the terms which the
Central Powers wished to impose, were contrary to justice and that
no nation with any self-respect could possibly accept them.
"Two wars are being waged today, one
Labor and the War. between the Allies and the Central Powers,
the other between the masses and the ruling
classes, regardless of the battle fronts. The longer the war lasts
the clearer these points become." These words of a recent writer
present a true view which is being brought into clearer light by the
action of the Bolsheviki in Russia which is reducing that country to
a state of chaos and possibly of dissolution. At the commencement
of the War, even in Great Britain labor had to be consulted and
negotiated with by the Government, and its consent obtained for
1918.] RECENT EVENTS 853
the passing of measures which were indispensable to the carrying
on of the War. What took place in Russia has proved an even
clearer exemplification of the power which the proletariat has
obtained over the course of events. For it defeated the efforts of
the Allies to end the struggle in the year 1917. The power of the
Bolsheviki has not been confined to the Russian republic; but has
been extended to what has now become an independent state —
Finland.
As soon as that country declared its independence, its own
Bolsheviki arose, and were supported by the armed forces of Rus-
sia. M. Lenine declared this outbreak to be but the beginning of
the Bolshevik movement, and added that it would spread through-
out Europe and throughout the world. Before it thus sought to
control the destinies of Europe, this Bolshevik movement had
summoned a conference at Stockholm by which it sought to dictate
the attitude of labor, throughout the various European countries,
towards peace. The Bolsheviki broke all the conventions of diplo-
macy by publishing the secret treaties found in the archives of the
Imperial Government. This action forced the European govern-
ments to disclose in greater detail their war aims. And this may
be considered one good result of Bolshevik activity. But no word
of condemnation is too strong for their violation of their treaty
with the Allies and their negotiation for a separate peace with the
Central Powers. The extension of the war between labor and capi-
tal to other countries is not yet fully manifest: but signs of its
advance are found in all countries, in Great Britain and even in our
own. When the War first began there were found a few labor
agitators in Great Britain who publicly protested against the carry-
ing on of the War. Their deportation put an end to all disturbance.
Later came the strike of the South Wales miners, a protest against
the taking over by the Government of the coal mines. The labor
unions are claiming the right to have a special voice in the making
of peace, and expressed their views as to what that peace should
be at the recent Nottingham Conference.
These views agree in the main with the official aims of the
Government, but contain some modifications which would make the
terms of peace less stringent, and would have the War result in the
reformation of the world — an aim which many believe visionary.
For example, all countries are to be democratized : each nation is to
have the power of determining its own destiny : universal military
service is to be abolished, and an International High Court is to be
854 RECENT EVENTS [Mar.,
established. But with all their modifications, the trade unions
representing four millions of British workmen, emphatically
declare the acceptance of German peace terms impossible. The
same unions declare that there are not more than forty thousand
pacifists among the laboring men of Great Britain. Nevertheless,
there is social unrest in England, and it has caused Cardinal Bourne
to treat the question in a recent pastoral. " During the War," he
said, " the minds of the people have been profoundly altered. Dull
acquiescence in social injustice has given way to active discontent.
The very foundations of political and social life, of our economic
system, of morals and religion are being sharply scrutinized, and
this not only by a few writers and speakers, but by a very large
number of people in every class of life, especially among the
workers. Our institutions, it is felt, must justify themselves at the
bar of reason. They can no longer be taken for granted. The
army, for instance, is not only fighting, it is also thinking. The
soldiers have learned the characteristic army scorn for the self-
seeking politician and empty talker. They have learned the wide
difference between the facts as they see them and the daily press
reports of them, and they have learned to be suspicious of official
utterances and bureaucratic ways.
" The general effect of all this on the young men who are to
be leading citizens after the War is little short of revolutionary.
A similar change has taken place in the minds of our people at
home. The munition workers, hard working but over-strained by
long hours and heavy work, alternatively flattered and censured,
subjected sometimes to irritating mismanagement and anxious
about the future, tend to be resentful and suspicious of the public
authorities and the political leaders. They too are questioning the
whole system of society.
" The voluntary war workers also have had their experience
widened. Not only are many of them doing useful work for the
first time in their lives and doing it well, but they are working in
companionship with and sometimes under the direction of those
with whom they would not in normal times have dreamed of asso-
ciating. They are readjusting their views on social questions.
There is, in short, a general change and ferment in the mind of the
nation."
Cardinal Bourne then points out various lines of special Catho-
lic effort, but urges cordial cooperation with the work done by vari-
ous religious bodies to remedy all un-Christian social conditions.
1918.] RECENT EVENTS 855
" Without any sacrifice of religious principles," he continues,
" Catholics may welcome the support of all men of good will in this
great and patriotic task."
By such means, it is hoped, existing injustices will be remedied
in a constitutional and peaceful way, so that the few who in Great
Britain believe in war against capital by fair means or foul, will
have no opportunity to propagate their doctrines.
As for the progress of extreme revolutionary teachings in
France and Italy, it is not easy to obtain information. In the for-
mer country, however, the Socialists, because permission was
refused them to attend the Stockholm conference at the invitation
of the Russian Government, were strong enough to drive from
power M. Ribot who had denied their representatives passports.
That the Socialists wished to attend is no indication that they were
in full sympathy with Bolshevik principles.
As to the growth of extreme teachings in Germany and
Austria-Hungary we can speak with even less accuracy. Whether
the strikes which have recently occurred in these countries are due
to such teachings, is a matter of doubt. Coming to our own country
a quasi Bolshevik congress has met in New York. The recent
demobilization of the Russian armies along the front, or rather the
report of it, has turned the Russians in this country who admired
the Bolsheviki into avowed enemies, for they see that the latter have
betrayed Russia.
The growing warfare between labor and capital is a fact that
must be dealt with by every student of politics and sociology.
A feature which distinguishes this war from almost every
other war is that its continuance or discontinuance depends on the
attitude of the working classes, for they must both fight the battles
and make the munitions. So does all practically depend upon the
consent of the governed.
Owing to winter weather there has been
Progress of the War. very little activity. The chief scene of war-
fare has been upon the Italian front, where
the forces of that country aided by the French and British have not
only been able to hold their own, but have at two points driven the
enemy back from positions which would have made it easier for the
latter in the spring to advance into the plains of Venetia. The
Rumanian army still remains facing enemies on both sides, and the
new Premier promises perseverance until the end, on the side of the
856 RECENT EVENTS [Mar.,
Allies. No action of any importance has taken place in the neigh-
borhood of Saloniki. North of Jerusalem, the British have made
progress for some two miles. Nothing has been heard of any
movement by von Falkenhayn to recapture the city of Bagdad.
Public concern in the military situation is now directed rather to
what is to be expected in the future than to what has been done in
the recent past. It is generally recognized that the offensive at the
present time rests with the Germans. Against what point that offen-
sive, if it is launched, will be directed and how many troops Ger-
many can bring to its support are of course matters of uncertainty.
The fact that French and British troops repelled the great German
drive of 1914, when they numbered less than one-half the invading
army and were without adequate equipment of arms and munitions,
leads us to believe that the Allies need not fear the approaching
encounter.
At its latest meeting at Versailles, the Supreme War Council
of the Allies decided to increase its own powers. What this increase
definitely means cannot yet be ascertained. It undoubtedly deals
with the question as to whether the Council should have merely
advisory or also executive powers. President Wilson has wished
that it be a body with supreme power to execute as well as to advise.
It may be that the Council will appoint a generalissimo with
supreme command of all the Allied armies. The French have been
urging such a move, and it is believed that Mr. Lloyd George was
also in favor of it, but hesitated to give his approval because of the
serious opposition which the plan aroused in England. The resigna-
tion of General Robertson, as Chief of Staff of the British army,
indicates that Mr. Lloyd George has now given his full consent;
that the plan of a supreme commander for the Allied armies will
be carried out, and that General Robertson resigned rather than con-
tinue in his post with curtailed power.
February 18, 1918.
With Our Readers.
AN article by Hilaire Belloc in the Dublin Review was shortly after
its appearance reviewed in these pages as an important expose
of the unhistorical character of Gibbon's Decline and Fall. Belloc dis-
covered that he could not thus attack Gibbon without a protest from
even some Catholics and a Catholic organ — the Tablet of London. In
an article in the December Studies, Belloc records his astonishment
and how he thus fell upon the singular truth " that violently anti-
Catholic history, written with a wholly anti-Catholic motive, was
accepted by many English Catholics as the normal thing; the text to
which they would naturally refer in their search for historical truth."
* * * *
IN this same article Mr. Belloc proceeds to show in greater detail the
inaccuracies of this " bye-product of Voltaire/' in the hope that
the anger of his (Belloc's) opponents will grow less, and the submission
of further proof make of Gibbon a commonplace example of the way
in which history was miswritten by the enemies of the Church.
Belloc proceeds to show how Gibbon handles two fundamental
points in European history, the origin of the hierarchy and the tra-
ditional doctrine of the Eucharist.
All that Gibbon has to say on the first point is found in the for-
tieth and forty-first divisions of his fifteenth chapter. Gibbon shows
no originality. He never read originals. He does not weigh or even
pretend to weigh the evidence and arguments pro and con for the
establishment of the hierarchy; arguments known even to beginners
are utterly disregarded by him. Gibbon blindly follows Mosheim;
accepts from the latter the Protestant assertion of the early eigh-
teenth century — and passes on.
Now Gibbon's subject was the growth of the Catholic Church;
the backbone of the subject is the Catholic hierarchy. And yet upon
the dispute as to the origin of the hierarchy Gibbon does no original
reading and no original thinking. On the second point, the institution
of the Holy Eucharist, Mr. Belloc points out that Gibbon says noth-
ing about It. " You can read the whole of what Gibbon has to say on
the rise, origin and character of the Catholic Church without hearing
one word about the Eucharist."
* * * *
"T^MPHASIS," adds Belloc, "is vain in a catastrophe, and rhetoric
JLv is wasted in the presence of the stupendous." An historian might
deride, attack, deny the institution of the Eucharist, but no historian
who writes the history of the Catholic Church can treat It with silence
858 WITH OUR READERS [Mar.,
For the sacred mysteries were the test and the making of the fully
initiated Christian in the earliest times ; their celebration was the com-
mon function of each community; their character was that which
differentiated this particular society from the other religious organi-
zations around it. Yet Gibbon never mentions the Eucharist ! Never
was so gigantic an omission deliberately made by any man, pretending
to write the history of anything.
* * * *
DELLOC'S final summary is that Gibbon is a litterateur exceedingly
D entertaining, but a bad historian. It is opportune to place beside
this estimate by Belloc, another estimate by Newman of the same
historian Gibbon. Newman in his Idea of a University speaks of the
latter's " godless intellectualism." Many years previous, preaching
at Oxford, he spoke of those for whom pride has opened the door to
temptation and who " intoxicated by their experience of evil, think
they possess real wisdom and take a larger and more impartial view of
the nature and destinies of man than religion teaches." And after
developing the point, Newman adds, of Gibbon : " A more apposite
instance of this state of soul cannot be required than is given us in
the celebrated work of an historian of the last century, who, for his
great abilities, and, on the other hand, his cold heart, impure mind,
and scoffing spirit, may justly be accounted as, in this country at least,
one of the masters of a new school of error, which seems not yet to
have accomplished its destinies, and is framed more exactly after the
received type of the author of evil, than the other chief anti-Christs
who have, in these last times, occupied the scene of the world."
'THE necessity of immediate study of and preparation for after the
A War necessities, the vast problems of reconstruction bound to pre-
sent thmselves have been repeatedly brought before our readers. We
have emphasized how providential now are the writings of Leo XIII.,
and with what urgent devotion Catholics should apply themselves
not only to the understanding and application of Catholic social prin-
ciples, but also to active participation in public life. We should fit
ourselves not only to preach: to teach: but also to lead. History is
being re-written: society is being re-made and the day of Catholic
opportunity is at hand.
* * * *
"PHE social revolution is not distant : it is here. No more complete
* programme of social change and reconstruction was ever known in
history than that just put forth by the sub-committee of the British
Labor Party. The report as we have it is only a committee draft.
But even as a draft it is singularly significant evidence of that other
war which is growing in intensity every day, a war between capital
1918.] WITH OUR READERS 859
and labor. This manifesto shows the lines on which it must be fought
out. In a general way it voices the aims, not only of millions of work-
ingmen of Great Britain, but millions also of our own country. And
it will be profitable to review in some detail just what these aims are.
* * * *
T^HE present War, says this manifesto, has destroyed the capitalistic
1 system from which it sprang. That system produced a monstrous
inequality of circumstances, degradation and brutalization, both spirit-
ual and moral. With it must pass the political system and ideas in
which it naturally found expression. The Labor Party maintains
that " if we are to escape the decay of civilization we must ensure that
the new social order be built upon fraternity : on a systematic
approach toward a healthy equality of material circumstances for
every person born into the world — not one on enforced dominion over
subject nations, subject races, subject colonies, subject classes, or a
subject sex, but in industry as well as in government, on that equal
freedom, that general consciousness of consent, and that widest pos-
sible participation in power, both economic and political, which is
characteristic of democracy." The four pillars of the new social
house which the Labor Party proposes to erect are :
(a) The universal enforcement of the national minimum.
(b) The democratic control of industry.
(c) The revolution of national finance.
(d) The surplus wealth for the common good.
* * * *
IT claims that it has no class aims and no class warfare. It expressly
propounds the truth of human solidarity ; that we are dependent on
one another; that we affect one another, morally and physically. If
the neediest suffers, the whole community suffers. The minimum,
therefore, of leisure, health, education and subsistence, it demands for
all. The minimum is, of course, not stated for it varies. But the
Labor Party does insist on at least thirty shillings a week for unskilled
workers, and states that this demand shall be revised according to
the level of prices.
It is further insisted that definite plans be made now by the Gov-
ernment for the safeguarding of the eight million wage earners paid at
present from public funds. This is a national obligation ; the wage
earner, it is declared, is not an object of charity, nor should he be
handed over to committees of philanthropists.
The scramble for positions after the War must not lead to the
degradation of life and character. " We claim that it should be a
cardinal point of government policy to make it plain to every capitalist
employer that any attempt to reduce the customary rates of wages
when peace comes, or to take advantage of the dislocation of demobili-
860 WITH OUR READERS [Mar.,
zation to worsen the conditions of employment in any grade what-
soever, will certainly lead to embittered industrial strife, which will be
in the highest degree detrimental to the national interests; and that
the government of the day will not hesitate to take all necessary steps
to avert such a calamity."
* * * *
OF singular importance also is the further demand that governments
see to it that unemployment does not occur : rather than, as now,
trying to remedy it after it has occurred. The Government should see
to it that no man who is desirous of working should be unable to find
work. Moreover, the Government should at once undertake the solu-
tion of such problems as the re-housing of the poorer people both in
cities and rural districts: increasing school and college facilities, and
the opening up of access to land by cooperative small holdings. The
hours of labor should be reduced to forty-eight a week without reduc-
tion of the standard rate of wages.
When the Government fails to prevent unemployment, the Labor
Party holds that it should provide the willing worker, unable to obtain
a situation, with adequate maintenance. The best method of accom-
plishing this was exemplified by the Out of Work Benefit afforded by
a well-administered trade union. The members taxed themselves for
its maintenance. Now the Labor Party maintains that all such Out of
Work Benefits should have public subvention. The national minimum
policy must be universally applied and afford complete security
against destitution, in sickness and health, in good times and bad, to
every member of the community.
* * * *
THE second pillar of the new house is personal freedom, freedom
of speech, of publication, of travel, of residence, and complete free-
dom of political rights. The Labor Party insists on democracy in
industry as well as in government, " an equitable sharing of the pro-
ceeds among all who participate in any capacity and only among
these."
The Labor Party stands " for the principle of the common owner-
ship of the nation's land to be applied as suitable opportunity occur."
Whether this "common ownership" would exclude private ownership
in the mind of the Labor Party, the manifesto does not make clear.
But the Labor Party does demand the public ownership of all public
utilities, and threatens the speedy downfall of any government that
would after the War hand back the railways to private owners, or
private trusts that would presently become as ruthless "as the worst
American examples." It also asks for the immediate nationalization
of mines, for the fixing of coal prices. " There is no more reason for
coal fluctuating in price than for railway fares." The Labor Party
1918.] WITH OUR READERS 861
scorns prohibition. It demands a revolution in national finance. It
" stands for such a system of taxation as will yield all the necessary
revenue to the Government without encroaching on the prescribed
national minimum standard of life of any family whatsoever." Thus
it looks to the heavy taxation of all incomes above the " national
minimum : " particularly to direct taxation of private fortunes both
during life and at death. It would deny to the individual the right at
death to bequeath his money as he may please : such money " belongs
nominally to the national exchequer."
* * * *
HTHE fourth pillar of this house is that all surplus profits, as for
1 example, from the rental of mines, material outcome from scien-
tific discoveries, etc., shall go to the state, and through this constantly
arising surplus the state will be able to care for the great commercial
needs.
The manifesto ends with an expression of the hope that an in-
ternational court of arbitration shall be established as one result of the
present War: "We stand for the immediate establishment, actually
as a part of the treaty of peace with which the present War will end,
of a universal league or society of nations, a supernational authority,
with an international high court to try all justiciable issues between
nations; an international legislature to enact such common laws as
can be mutually agreed upon, and an international council of media-
tion to endeavor to settle without ultimate conflict even those dis-
putes which are not justiciable. We would have all the nations of
the world most solemnly undertake and promise to make common
cause against any one of them that broke away from this fundamental
agreement."
* * * *
WE print the synopsis without any comment save one — the appeal
for the poor and the needy always meets with a ready response
from every Christian heart. But the Christian heart will also note that
in this entire document there is not one word of the spiritual : not
one word of the higher nature of man, but simply a consideration
of his physical, material and mental welfare.
A PRONOUNCEMENT which bears upon this same subject is
Cardinal Bourne's Lenten Pastoral which treats of the radical
changes in the social structure and social philosophy as a result of
the War. The evidences of trouble and disturbance are graver, His
Eminence says, than the press reports would lead one to believe.
Cardinal Bourne traces the origins of the present dissatisfaction :
" The effect of competition uncontrolled by morals has been to segre-
gate more and more the capitalist from the wage-earning classes,"
862 WITH OUR READERS [Mar.,
he says, " and to form the latter into a proletariat, a people owning
nothing but their labor power and tending to shrink more and more
from the responsibilities of both ownership and freedom. Hence the
increasing lack of self-reliance and the tendency to look to the state
for the performance of the ordinary family duties. They are read-
justing their views on social questions. There is in short a general
change and ferment in the mind of the nation ....
" What is the future to be ? How is the social and political order
to be reconstructed among us? There are some, a small minority as
yet, but with increasing influence, who are proclaiming a policy of
despair. They have looked, they will tell us, in various directions for
a solution of the problem in vain. Those who in this country are the
official representatives of religious teaching have failed, so these des-
pairing voices assure us, to give any coherent answer to their ques-
tions. Thus they are driven — again it is their voice that speaks —
to the unwelcome conclusion that the existing relations of society are
incapable of being remedied and that things cannot be worse than
they are at the present time.
" They proclaim that the existing order should be overthrown
and destroyed in the hope that out of the chaos and destruction some
better arrangement of men's lives may grow up. It is a policy of
which we see the realization and first fruits at the present time in
Russia. The vast majority of our people are held back, if not by
religious motives at least by their inborn practical sense, from suicidal
projects of this kind."
Cardinal Bourne dwells upon special lines of Catholic effort, and
urges cooperation on the part of Catholics with other religious bodies
working on the right lines for the amelioration and guidance of
society. "Without any sacrifice of religious principles," he says,
" Catholics may welcome the support of all men of good will in this
great and patriotic task."
IN a powerful pastoral Cardinal O'Connell of Boston has brought
us face to face with the same need of Catholic principles in individ-
ual and social life.
" Throughout the world," says the Cardinal, " is a whole realm
of shifting and seething moral turmoil, partly cause, partly effect of
this war." The columns upon which much of modern society sought
to found prosperity and progress have crumbled. " Science, machin-
ery, efficiency, cold-blooded enforcement of a materialistic 'philosophy
to the exclusion of the ideals and principles upon which Christian
civilization rests, these were the columns of strength erected as the
bulwarks of the great millenium, the twentieth century. Who among
us now does not recall this cant and its false prophets?. . . .
I9i8.] BOOKS RECEIVED 863
" Even this war will not settle everything. The very first day of
peace will bring with it problems just as difficult, just as arduous
and just as clamorous for solution as this bitterest of all wars. It
will not be the demigods of finance nor the supermen of arms who
will settle these claims. With this war their supremacy will have
passed forever and let us hope, with them, all the misery and ruin they
have caused."
* * * *
LAW is founded upon justice and justice is founded upon God. " We
must, therefore, unless we are fighting for a myth, fight first of
all that God's eternal law shall be acknowledged. If God's law is
ignored, then brute force becomes the only arbiter of justice; and if
we are determined, as we must be, that never again shall an inter-
national contract be treated as a scrap of paper, then to be consistent
we must go back to the genesis of all rights and contracts and
acknowledge our own duties to the Eternal Lawgiver whence all
justice proceeds.
" The menace of anarchy is imminent and the only alternative
to predominance of mere numerical strength and brute force is the
religion which maintains the rights of ownership as a most
sacred corollary of the doctrine of Justice." The Catholic Church
is the enemy of tyranny and the bulwark against anarchy. To capi-
tal and labor alike she will teach the one eternal truth of justice.
" She is the one organization in the whole world which has never
recognized distinction of persons. Just for that very reason she is
heard by all, because she is and must ever be the same to all, the pil-
lar and ground of all truth. She is the fearless protector of prop-
erty against the greed of the lawless mob, just because she as fear-
lessly rebukes the selfish rich for being the chief cause of discon-
tent among the toilers."
WE wish to correct an error in the price of Mrs. Meynell's A Father
of Women and Other Poems, as quoted in our last issue. The
price is eighty cents, not thirty-five cents as stated.
BOOKS RECEIVED.
LONGMANS, GREEN & Co., New York :
Essentials in Modern European History. By D. C. Knowlton, Ph.D., and S. B.
Howe, A.M. $1.50. The Conversion of Europe. By C. H. Robinson.
$6.00 net. Divine Faith. By Rev. P. Fmlay, S.J. $1.50 net. The Com-
memorative Medal in the Service of Germany. By G. F. Hill, M.A. Pam-
phlet. The Economic History of the United States. By E. L. Bogart, Ph.D.
Catholic Education. By J. A. Burns. $1.50 net. A Russian Schoolboy. By
S. Aksakoff.
AMERICAN BOOK Co., New York :
Burke's Speeches at Bristol. By E. Bergin, S.J. Stories the Iroquois Tell Their
Children. By M. Powers. First and Second Books in English for Foreigners
in Evening Schools. By F. Houghton, Sc. M. .Rural Arithmetic. By A. D.
Thomas, Ph.D. Elementary Economic Geography. By C. R. Dryer,
F.R.G.S.
864 BOOKS RECEIVED [Mar., 1918.]
P. J. KENEDY & SONS, New York:
Irish Lyrics and Ballads. By Rev. James B. Dollard, Litt.D. $1.35. Jesus
Crucified, or the Science of the Cross. Edited by A. Cadras, S.J. 75 cents.
The Marvels of Divine Grace. By Alice Lady Lovat. 90 cents. With the
French Red Cross. By Alice Dease. 60 cents. Stories from the New Testa-
ment. Three series. 25 cents per set.
THE MACMILLAN Co., New York :
Priest of the Ideal. By S. Graham. $1.60. A Son of the Middle Border. By
H. Garland. $1.60. History of the Civil War. By J. F. Rhodes. $2.50.
The Life of Augustin Daly. By J. F. Daly. $4.00.
HENRY HOLT & Co., New York:
Over Japan Way. By A. M. Hitchcock. $2.00 net. Mrs. Humphry Ward. By
S. Gwynn. 60 cents net. On Contemporary Literature. By S. P. Sherman.
$1.50 net.
DODD, MEAD & Co., New York:
The Turkish Empire: Its Growth and Decay. By Lord Eversley. $3.00 net.
Finland and the Finns. By A. Reade. $2.00 net. A Hand-Book on Story Writ-
ing. By B. C. Williams. $1.50 net. Rambles in Old College Towns. By H.
Hawthorne. $2.50 net.
GEORGE H. DORAN Co., New York :
Old Man Curry. By C. E. van Loan. $1.35 net. The Oratory of the Bible.
By F. S. Schenck, LL.D. $1.25 net. The Tortoise. By E. F. Benson.
$1.50 net. Books and Persons. By A. Bennett. $2.00 net.
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, New York :
John Keats. By S. Colvin. $4.50 net. These Many Years. By B. Matthews.
Hearts of Controversy. By Alice Meynell.
D. APPLETON & Co., New York :
The Secret Witness. By George Gibbs. $1.50 net.
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS, New York:
In the Footsteps of St. Paul. By F. E. Clark, LL.D. $2.00 net.
PARISH HOUSE, 53 East Eighty-third Street, New York :
Fifty Years in Yorkville.
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, New York :
Old English Scholarship in England from 1566-1800. By E. N. Adams, Ph.D.
E. P. DUTTON & Co., New York.
Everyman's Library: J. V. Duruy's History of France. Two volumes; Ancient
Law, by Sir H. Maine. 60 cents net, each. Paul Jones. By D. C. Seitz. The
Hill-Towns of France. By E. M. Fryer. $2.50 net.
FREDERICK A. STOKES Co., New York :
Austria-Hungary: The Polyglot Empire. By W. von Schierbrand, LL.D. $3.00
net. The Brazilians and Their Country. By C. S. Cooper, $3.50 net. The
Heart of 0 Sono San. By E. Cooper. $1.75 net.
HARPER & BROTHERS, New York :
The Offender, and His Relations to Law and Society. By B. G. Lewis. $2.00 net.
THE BOBBS-MERRILL Co., New York :
Tennyson: How To Know Him. By R. M. Alden. $1.50 net.
B. W. HUEBSCH, New York :
The Insurgent Theatre. By J. H. Dickinson. $1.25 net.
THE CENTURY Co., New York :
American Adventures. By Julian Street. $3.50 net. Calvary Alley. By A. H.
Rice. $1.35 net.
THE AMERICAN PRESS, New York :
The Psychology of Medieval Persecution. Pamphlet. 5 cents.
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & Co., Garden City, New York :
Persian Miniatures. By H. G. Dwight. The Trust Problems. By J. W. Jenks.
$2.00 net.
LLOYD ADAMS NOBLE, New York :
Poems. Edited by Clifton Johnson.
THE DEVIN-ADAIR Co., New York :
Great Wives and Mothers. By Rev. H. F. Blunt. $2.00 net.
HODDER & STOUGHTON, New York :
The Great Crime and Its Moral. By J. \. Willmore.
THE TORCH PRESS, New York :
Collected Poems. By Charles V. H. Roberts. $1.25 net.
GINN & Co., Boston :
The Poems of Edgar Allen Poe. Edited by K. Campbell. The Beginnings of
Modern Europe, 1250-1450. By E. Emerton, Ph.D. Espanna Pintoresca.
By C. M. Dorado. 96 cents.
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, Princeton :
Value of the Classics.
GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE, Washington:
Analytical and Critical Bibliography of the Tribes of Tierra del Fuego and Adja-
cent Territory. By J. M. Cooper.
THE PENN PUBLISHING Co., Philadelphia:
The Book of New York. By Robert Shackleton. $2.50 net.
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